Internet Explorer is EVIL! (2002) (opens in new tab)

In the late 1990's I worked at a large bank's Online Retail Banking website running Netscape's iPlanet webserver on Unix (AIX). Being ~25 years ago, I'm a little foggy on the technical details but at a high level we started getting complaints from customers running IE having trouble connecting to our website. The reps from Microsoft blamed iPlanet, said it worked fine with Microsoft's IIS webservers, and had almost convinced the bank's senior management to simply replace iPlanet with IIS as it would be the trouble-free webserver for use with the most popular browser, IE.

Nobody on the tech team wanted that so we launched into a major tracing & debugging effort and eventually found that a change in IE caused it to start doing the SSL handshake slightly different if it thought it was connecting to a non-IIS webserver. Netscape provided a patch and we were able to keep iPlanet on our beefy Unix servers instead of migrating to a farm of IIS servers on tiny Windows servers (they weren't all that powerful in the 90'). This was about the time that the DoJ was going after Microsoft for non-competitive practices. I recall that someone on our team sent an email to DoJ telling them of our experience, but I don't think they ever got a reply.

People look at Netscape through rose colored glasses. Netscape was a buggy piece of shit at its height. It was so bad that nerd wars happened on comp.sys.*.advocacy groups where people judged the robustness of an operating system based on how well it handled Netscape crashes and memory leaks.

Microsoft was worried that the browser would become the operating system and negate the important of the Windows API.

Microsoft was surprisingly prescient in attempting to move to the walled garden and attempting to control the stack from top to bottom. Although it never panned out, the original vision for IE and MSN was that Microsoft would get a piece of all sales that took place on the platform, be it physical or digital. IE being the standard browser also pushed adoption of things like FrontPage, IIS, and BackOffice, and all of the proprietary vendor lock-in features they carried with them. I'm not sure to what extent Microsoft ever really feared that web browsers threatened their OS monopoly, but viewed it more as a chance to carry their dominance into a new lucrative market.

> Can someone with more of a sense of history elucidate me as to what Microsoft's motivation was around this, since IE itself was always free?

MS saw the web browser in general as a potential "platform" and direct competition to their OS monopoly and they wanted control of it by crushing competing browsers. It sounded a little crazy at the time, but years later, here we are with chromebooks and google apps and other examples that run everything in a browser.

IE successfully killed Netscape, then proceeded to do nothing for 10 years, not improving, not fixong bugs and vulnerabilities, showing that the only effective way of constructing applications would be desktop applications. I mean, windows-only desktop applications. Or maybe ActiveX windows-only webpages.

Then Firefox came from the ashes of Netscape.

Netscape 4.x was incredibly unstable, literally crashing every half hour. IE was the only usable browser for most of the early 2000's. Microsoft didn't drive Netscape to irrelevance for no reason... they absolutely had a better product. I briefly worked at a company run by former Netscape people, and even they used IE.

Tech companies want to commoditize their complements. This creates a profit-less dead zone around them to prevent disruption by adjacent technologies.

https://gwern.net/complement

It’s very simple: at the time, MS controlled the market for consumer and office computing. There was no such thing as Bing and Google was just getting started. Apple was not doing well, and mobile phones as we know them didn’t exist yet. They understood browsers to be a platform that could replace desktop software, potentially making Windows irrelevant, and they wanted to hold back and/or control the web platform.

I swear I read the Netscape guys went to Microsoft hq in Redmond and posted signs all over the campus mocking Microsoft for being stupid and missing the web.

Rumor was Gates saw one and thought they were right so pivoted to destroy them.

Don’t poke the bear I guess?

I can’t remember where I read this or how true it’s likely to be, but it came to mind.

On the "why", I'd look at it the other way round: there was absolutely no downside for MS for a very long time. Any money they'd "lose" on browser sales were largely compensated on OS sales (even as they also were pushing basically free OS distribution by letting piracy run rampant, also giving them an insane OS share).

With no penalizing cost and no consequences (the DOJ had a first anti-trust probe that led to nothing. If the US did nothing they assumed no one else could stop them), there's just no reason to not shoot for the moon and go for total market domination.

It's only after hitting the EU antitrust case and the later US cases that they changed course and factored the new costs in their strategy.

Because BillG missed the boat in the internet, and everyone knew that the web would crush fat client apps on the Microsoft platform. Java had a ton of traction and drained the Windows moat.

Microsoft’s strategy around identity, browser and Outlook was solid. Outlook cemented Office. AD made Windows Server a necessity. The dominance and stasis of Windows and management of Sun/Java litigation held webapps back for several key years.

That delay meant that Microsoft emerged from that era with .Net, SharePoint, Dynamics and the beginnings of what became O365.

Any platform is threatened by any app that becomes bigger and more important than the platform itself. They invested in ie for the same obvious reasons that Apple tightens control over apps on the AppStore. When you spend more time in an app like Netscape then windows is less relevant and you’d be more likely to use some other platform that could still run Netscape.

ChromeOS takes it a step further where the platform is the app you used most on from the PC.

IMO, 2 things:

1. They had internalized the Innovator’s Dilemma so much that everything was existential.

2. The browser was viewed as middleware that made the operating system irrelevant. They viewed lack of compatibility as an operational moat. To some extent this is/was true.

So, entirely defensive to protect Windows and Office.

A lot of comments regarding the browser as the platform, but I remember it differently.

I remember it as a push for IIS. Netscape didn't make money with the browser; the business model was giving away the browser to sell the server.

Netscape had some fairly crazy, ill-conceived ideas of basically turning the Navigator ecosystem into an OS replacement, at least for the shell.

Netscape itself was terrible, but MS saw danger here, since it would effectively commodotize the underlying OS.

They went after it just hard enough to get antitrust oversight. TBH, they didn't need to go that aggressively. The whole thing looks a little ridiculous in hindsight.

MSIE = ActiveX controls! ActiveX controls = dependent on Windows.

I remember the era (roughly 1998 to 2004) when IE was completely dominant. It sucked if you used an alternative web browser or a non-Windows operating system, which I believe was the point of Microsoft's behavior: protect and maintain the dominance of Windows and the Microsoft ecosystem in general at all costs. Many websites were written with just Internet Explorer for Windows in mind. If you used a different web browser, the web page often didn't render as intended. Even using Internet Explorer for Macintosh wasn't a workaround. Even worse were sites that used ActiveX controls (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ActiveX). While there are ActiveX controls that are not Windows-dependent (ActiveX did run on some non-Windows platforms), in practice many of these controls were Windows-dependent. I remember back in 2005 not being able to use my Linux desktop to fill out an online college financial aid application because the site demanded I use Internet Explorer; I had to use a Windows machine to fill out the application.

Based on what I remember, there were a few factors that eroded Internet Explorer's dominance starting around 2005:

1. Greater awareness of the security problems Windows had during the mid-2000s, especially surrounding Internet Explorer and ActiveX. This encouraged web users to use alternative web browsers, and this encouraged web developers to drop ActiveX for other technologies.

2. The release of Mozilla Firefox in 2004. The browser had an excellent reputation for its speed and its support for the latest web standards (something I'll get to later), and it had tabbed browsing, which Internet Explorer lacked at the time.

3. The Web kept evolving while Internet Explorer's development essentially halted after IE 6 was released. There were new standards that web developers wanted to take advantage of. Firefox took advantage of them, but because IE's development essentially halted, IE 6 didn't take advantage of them. By the time Microsoft finally started work on IE 7 (it was released in 2006), Firefox already received significant mindshare, especially among tech-savvy users.

The latter half of the 2000s and the early years of the 2010s were a golden age for the Web. There was competition in the browser market: Firefox kept advancing, Opera was still popular, IE became competitive again, Safari was a nice browser for the Mac (and even had a Windows port at some point, though I don't know if it was ever popular), and Google released a nice, fast browser named Chrome that started gaining momentum. Web developers generally respected web standards and didn't engage in "Best viewed in X browser" shenanigans like during the Bad Old Days. It was a wonderful time.

Of course, over the 2010s, Chrome became the dominant web browser, Firefox lost momentum, Internet Explorer was replaced by a Chromium fork called Edge, and unfortunately we're starting to see "Best viewed in Chrome" websites and Google having outsized influence over Web standards. There's a new 800 pound gorilla in the jungle.

Or, for one-off usage, you can activate IE via COM and make it visible (in two lines of PowerShell or VBS).

The question is: who still wants to use Internet Exploder?

> Those days G was heavily, almost totally, profiting from adwords/adsense.

Er, isn't that still the majority of their income?

Thanks, I couldn't find it on the page. And I was a bit tipsy yesterday too :)

I thought that for a second, until I actually went to the page. Lol

Added. Thanks!