Posted on 10/20/2010 8:28:50 AM PDT by ShadowAce
It’s common knowledge that almost every single geek hates Internet Explorer with a passion, but have you ever wondered why? Let’s take a fair look at the history and where it all began… for posterity, if nothing else.
Contrary to what you might think, this article is not meant to be a hate-fest on Internet Explorer—in fact, we’re pretty impressed with the hardware acceleration and new features in Internet Explorer 9—but keep reading for the whole story.
We’ve all been so used to thinking of Internet Explorer as that slow, buggy browser that is behind the times, but it wasn’t always that way—in fact, way back when, Internet Explorer pioneered many innovations that made the web what it is today.
Here’s a quick tour through the easily forgotten history of the infamous browser:
1996: Internet Explorer 3
This version of the browser, introduced in 1997, was the first browser to implement CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). Yes, you’re reading that correctly—in fact, it introduced many new features like Java applets and sadly, ActiveX controls.
1997: Internet Explorer 4
IE4 introduced a blazing fast (at the time) rendering engine as an embeddable component that could be used in other applications—this was a lot more important than people realize. This version also introduced Dynamic HTML, which allows web pages to dynamically change the page using JavaScript, and added Active Desktop integration.
Even more weird? Seems like nobody remembers this anymore, but IE4 was actually cross-platform—you could install it on Mac OS, Solaris, and HP-UX—and by the time IE5 was released, IE4 had reached a 60% market share.
1999: Internet Explorer 5.x
Microsoft invented Ajax. Wait… what? That’s right, it was this version of IE that introduced the XMLHttpRequest feature in JavaScript, which forms the underlying technology behind every web application you’re using today—you know, like Gmail. Of course, the term “Ajax” wasn’t actually coined until years later by somebody other than Microsoft, but this release supported everything required to make it work.
So Yes, Microsoft Innovated
From IE3 until IE6, Microsoft used all their resources to simply out-innovate the competition, releasing new features and better browsers faster than Netscape. In fact, Netscape 3 Gold was a buggy piece of junk that crashed all the time, and Netscape 4 was extremely slow and could barely render tables—much less CSS, which would often cause the browser to crash.
To put it in context: web developers used to complain about Netscape the same way they complain about IE6 now.
The trouble all started when Microsoft integrated IE into Windows as a required component, and made it difficult to uninstall and use an alternate browser. Then there was the whole business with them exploiting their monopoly to try and push Netscape out of the market, and a lot of people started to view Microsoft as the evil empire.
Microsoft Stopped Trying
By the time Microsoft released Internet Explorer 6 in 2001, complete with lots of new features for web developers, since there was no competition and they had a 95% market share, Microsoft just stopped trying—seriously, they did nothing for 5 years even after Firefox was released and geeks started migrating left and right.
Microsoft-Specific Features
The whole problem with Microsoft’s innovation is that much of it was done in ways that didn’t follow the web standards—this wasn’t as big of a problem when Internet Explorer was the only game in town, but once Firefox and Webkit came around and started following the standards correctly, suddenly it became a huge problem for web developers.
Security Holes and Crashing
Since Microsoft decided they didn’t need to try anymore, and they didn’t keep up with the competition from Firefox and other browsers, bugs and security holes just cropped up left and right—really terrible ones, too. For instance, this code is all that is required to crash IE6:
<script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}</script>
In fact, the screenshot at the beginning of this section was a live example of testing out this particular bug.
IE7 and IE8 Were Too Little, Too Late
It took 5 years after IE6 for Microsoft to finally get around to releasing IE7, which added tabs and made the browser slightly more tolerable, but for web designers it was still a nightmare to deal with, and only complicated the issue since now you had to make pages render correctly in two lousy browsers instead of just one.
It took another 2.5 years for Microsoft to finally release Internet Explorer 8, which greatly improved CSS support for web developers, and added new features like Private browsing, tab isolation to prevent one bad page from taking down the whole browser, and phishing protection. By this point, most geeks had already moved on to Firefox, and then some of us to Google Chrome.
![image[21]](http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/image2110.png "image[21]")
Just because we’re geeks doesn’t mean we hate everything that’s inferior and outdated—in fact, we often love retro computing—that’s why we love Atari, NES, Commodore 64, etc. We take pride in our geek knowledge. So why’s Internet Explorer a different story?
Here’s a couple of reasons that fueled our hatred of the buggy browser, and finally put us all over the edge:
Supporting IE is Like a Fork in the Eye for Web Devs
Here’s a sample of a day in the life of a web designer: You spend hours making sure that your page looks great, and you test it out in Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and even Opera. It looks great, awesome!
Now you open up IE and the page looks like somebody put it into a blender and hit the Whip button. Then you spend double the amount of time trying to fix it to look tolerable in IE6 and IE7, cursing loudly the entire time.
Geeks Forced to Use Internet Explorer
And here’s where we come to the real issue—the whole reason that geeks can’t stand Internet Explorer:
Geeks everywhere were forced to use Internet Explorer at work even when there are better browsers, forced to support it for corporate applications, forced to make sure web sites still work in IE, and we couldn’t convince everybody to switch to a better browser.
Geeks don’t hate something that’s inferior—but they do hate it when it’s forced on them.
Thankfully it seems like Microsoft has finally learned from their many, many mistakes in the browser world. They are below 50% in the market share wars, and they’ve finally learned to focus on using web standards.
Internet Explorer 9 is about to be released, it’s got a shiny new interface that looks a lot like Google Chrome, blazing fast hardware acceleration, and supports HTML5 surprisingly well—in fact, it’s so much better that 34% of our readers said they will switch to IE9.
Microsoft is billing Internet Explorer 9 as the browser that’s going to change the world, and they aren’t wrong—they just aren’t mentioning that they were the only ones holding the web back with their anemic browsers. And now that mess is finally over.
Yes, I love how many MS multiple choice dialogs are like:
Do the wrong thingDo the right thing
Always do the wrong thing
If the wrong option gets an "always" why doesn't the good one? It's like someone at MS said "If those rubes are going to defy us, we'll make sure they have to go to the trouble to do it EVERY SINGLE TIME!" You'd think they were Democrats or something.
Geeks are logical. Being asked to support inferior crap is illogical.
As stated above, American geeks in particular; are a recalcitrant lot, and we won’t stand for illogical direction for very long.
We’ll always find another way.
MS popups were of course brought to their ultimate in Windows Vista, where what was missing was a radio button that said “NEVER BOTHER ME ABOUT THIS F*****G THING AGAIN, OK????”
“It’s common knowledge that almost every single geek hates Internet Explorer with a passion”
Maybe geeks do, but professionals don’t.
IE is a bloated piece of crap and it loads way to slow with all the overhead it uses.
I quit using Bill’s POS years ago and ain’t looked back.
There are ads on the internet?
Been using firefox for so long I forgot.
Interestingly, I’ve never, EVER installed an ad-on for any brouser, other than the Flash player. But then I pretty much only use the internet to read news stories and connect via email.
What do you use a video downloader for, other than what the name implies? Why do people have a need to do that. Is it a niche thing?
I just remember the main reason I loved Firefox: Before using it I had to run Adaware constantly. Six months after switching to Firefox, I removed Adaware from my computer and haven’t had to worry since.
I was using Vista for a long time and had problems with Firefox going RAM-ivore, but since I’ve gone to Win7, I’ve been very happy with FF’s performance. Of course, 12 GB of RAM might be part of the reason.
Good combination!
Active-friggn’-X
nuff said.
They hate because it’s l33t to hate M$, because it’s l33t.
Well, no IE9 for me. XP is still on my machine.
MS popups were of course brought to their ultimate in Windows Vista, where what was missing was a radio button that said “NEVER BOTHER ME ABOUT THIS F*****G THING AGAIN, OK????”That's a good one.
Another one -- and I've thought of this a long time ago -- regarding how MS always challenges you when you want to do something (and sometimes just ignores you):
I would like a registry setting in HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet, a DWORD value that I can set to 1, with the name:
DoWhateverTheF*ITellYouToDoWheneverTheF*ITellYouToDoIt
They are democrats. Gates is a progressive.
Another general windows beef that maybe somebody can help me with:
Situation: I try to go to a network share on my LAN on a server that is temporarily unavailable.
Result: It takes freaking FOREVER for the attempt to time out, during which it sometimes even freezes my entire computer (not just the windows explorer window where I made the connection attempt).
Is there a registry setting that shortens that time-out time?
Thanks.
exactly I use both. i have started having issues with ie8 so run back to firefox.
Why then do the geeks [especially the programming ones] not hate C, C++, and Unix?
C is fairly obvious, the lack of index-checking on arrays is the reason for most all of the stack-overwrite error/security vulnerabilities.
The typing system is horrible, characters in particular ARE NOT SIGNED! (And even if you were to define the "sign-bit" as a case-indicator that utterly falls apart for languages with more than 2-cases, like German which has a Title-Case).
The Syntax makes it easy to make errors, one of my 'favorites' is the assignment-in-condition-checks e.g. if (user = administrator) { ... };
Another is the the non-regularity of the operator-assignment shorthands; "!=" should apply 'not' and then assign the result.
The lack of strings is annoying and, in reality, the natural result of the lack of "real arrays" in C, that is they lack information on the valid indecies.
The OpenGL API is a good example of how nasty things the become in the C world; in particular because of the lack of procedure-overloading AND the lack of strong-typing, AND the lack of arrays.
As for OSes, Unix and its derivatives inherit a lot of the mentalities of C, simply because that language is so "close" to the OS.
The storage of everything, config-file wise, as [unstructured] text is fairly annoying. There are no guarantees on the structure of the text, as there would be in .INI files which retain the readability of plain-text while giving the advantage of grouping together 'attribute/value' pairs in its 'sections'.
Having said all that, it's odd that so many geeks embrace things like C/C++ after having been forced in academia to use C/C++, I would think that once in the "real-world" they would use better tools. Like Delphi (or even VB) for deving GUIs, LISP for lots of scripting tasks (EASY to write a parser), and so forth. The .NET ability to use multiple languages is probably underused with the MS pushing for everything/examples to be in C#; but I'm of the opinion that different languages for different domains is a good idea. Now, in order to avoid being wholly negative I should offer what I perceive as superior alternative to the C/C++ paradigm (imperative/procedural).
Ada:
“1996: Internet Explorer 3... introduced in 1997, was the first browser to implement CSS (Cascading Style Sheets).”
That would be a good reason to hate it for the past 14 years.
this was outstanding, btw:
http://www.howtogeek.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/10/sshot201010181040747.jpg
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