> Sadly for me, Microsoft broke up the IE team because it thought “we won.” (...) Years later, Internet Explorer would plummet in marketshare and become a sad joke among Web developers.
Looking back at the version history of IE, a lot of people forget how good earlier IE was compared to its competitors. "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" ultimately ended up being a punchline, but there really was something to it; IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support.
Abandoning it after they "won" was really a testament to the hubris of 90s-era Microsoft.
My understanding is that the consent decree that was the ultimate result of U.S. v. Microsoft added significant legal friction to the development of new IE capabilities.
You can imagine that a development culture like the one described in this Twitter thread would have a near-allergic reaction to working in an environment where the lawyers had to clear every major enhancement. Microsoft management wasn’t excited about pushing that rock up hill either, given their market dominance.
> My understanding is that the consent decree that was the ultimate result of U.S. v. Microsoft added significant legal friction to the development of new IE capabilities.
Not sure where you got this impression, but not the case. The IE team was largely retasked to work on OS features that actually did have DOJ oversight.
> IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support.
Faster may be, but certainly not more extensive CSS support.
I vividly remember that I desperately wanted to use plenty of CSS features that worked in Mozilla/Netscape and were part of the standard, but there was no hope at ever using them, because IE was the market leader and after IE 6 Microsoft didn't bother to implement anything for many years to come.
That was easily not true for the early days of CSS. I still have memories of writing CSS for Netscape Navigator and finding it didn't follow the CSS standards in certain areas IE did. One example that I recall was the text-align property. Even early versions of IE correctly only applied that to text only and not certain other elements. Whereas for quite some time Netscape Navigator would align everything (including tables and the like). The Netscape behavior was exactly the same as what the old <center>...</center> tag did so I have a suspicion that Netscape took the lazy route and just applied the same code for text-align: center as for the <center> tag despite the very different behavior specified by the HTML and CSS standards!
I acknowledge that Netscape did eventually fix this particular bug, although if my memory serves it took them in the order of years to fix. It was stuff like this which held back CSS adoption since CSS was a moving goal-post--browsers were fixing bugs and breaking layouts in the process! IE's incorrect box model big mistake for instance.
I would also point out what may be a surprising fact to young people today: IE for Mac was the first browser to have full support for CSS Level 1 [1]. Opera (which had their own engine back in the day) was also pretty good from what I read.
Netscape changed massively between 4 and 6 (which was the first version based on the Mozilla codebase). AFAIR in 4 CSS support was very preliminary, while in 6 it was best what you could get at the time.
That was several years later than what the GP was referring to. His point was accurate for IE3 and 4. While I would go on to loathe Internet Explorer, the early releases were actually pretty good. But this was Microsoft back when they had their “Embrace, Extend, Extinguish” strategy down as a finely honed art.
I was. But you had to do so many hacks because things like tables couldn’t be styled in CSS and tables were often the only way to style items on a page as div layers were still in their infancy.
"While CSS was still just a draft, Netscape had pressed on with presentational HTML elements like multicol, layer, and the dreaded blink tag. Internet Explorer, on the other hand, had taken to incorporating some of CSS piecemeal. But their support was spotty and, at times, incorrect. Which means that by the early aughts, after five years of CSS as an official recommendation, there were still no browsers with full CSS support.
That came from kind of a strange place.
When Tantek Çelik joined Internet Explorer for Macintosh in 1997, his team was pretty small. A year later, he was made the lead developer of the rendering engine at the same as his team was cut in half. Most of the focus for Microsoft (for obvious reasons) was on the Windows version of Internet Explorer, and the Macintosh team was mostly left to their own devices. So Starting with the development of version 5 in 2000, Çelik and his team decided to put their focus where no one else was, CSS support.
It would take the team two years to finish version 5. During this time, Çelik spoke frequently with members of the W3C and web designers using their browser. As each piece slid into place, the IE-for-Mac team verified on all fronts that they were getting things just right. Finally, in March of 2002, they shipped Internet Explorer 5 for Macintosh. The first browser with full CSS Level 1 support."
The IE effort was gargantuan - it was not NT in terms of sheer difficulty, but 1) we had built operating systems before NT, but never a web browser, and 2) Microsoft wanted to keep it under wraps as much as they could.
The IE team had a carte blanche to succeed by any means necessary. If they wanted a system call to work differently, you had to get it done or risk getting a meeting with your boss’ angry boss.
Interesting. I would have thought that the state of the web 25 years ago was such that a browser would be a rather simple endeavor. Especially with a company with products like MS Word.
Sure, the standards-based web was quite simple 25 years ago. But of course that's not the web that Netscape and Microsoft cared about.
Netscape and Microsoft were engaged in a land rush to extend the web into their proprietary platforms. If they could grab enough marketshare, they'd get to define the web's direction. Initially it was Netscape in the driver's seat, but by 1999 Microsoft had taken control.
It was an opportunity to invent everything from scratch. There was no standard styling, no standard DOM, no standard plug-in API, no standard programming language...
Solutions and answers that seem predetermined in hindsight were anything but. For example, Netscape was pushing their own scripting language initially called LiveScript but then rebranded into JavaScript as part of a Sun partnership. Meanwhile Microsoft's browser supported multiple programming languages that could access a common object model: you could program web pages in VBScript, or Microsoft's own JavaScript look-a-like "JScript", or other languages not yet defined.
Maybe a language-agnostic model would have been better for the web than JavaScript dominance? We might have had something like WebAssembly much sooner. We'll never know. But the answer to these design challenges certainly were not obvious in 1996 to engineers at either browser company.
> Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it.
Just curious if anyone has any idea what the financial reward was for these approx 100 folks? Presumably options worth a few millions today, but that's some price.
Best guess glory aka "exposure" aka nothing. As Hadi wrote
>Instead of hiring too fast, we kept a super-high bar for talent, betting that everybody would want to work for this new exclusive team at Microsoft that was so hard to get into. It worked.
>After exchanging a few pleasantries, and telling me how much the Macintosh mattered to Microsoft, he looked me in the eye and said, "You're a really good programmer, right? I think you must be a really good programmer."
>"I guess so," I responded, not understanding why he was attempting to flatter me.
>"Well, I think you are. How long do you think it will take to do this project? A month or two? I think a really good programmer like you could get it done in less than two months."
Playing on pride to exploit brilliant people for pennies. If you read whole thing you will learn Jobs was even worse.
> Playing on pride to exploit brilliant people for pennies. If you read whole thing you will learn Jobs was even worse.
Yeah indeed. Go look into cluster B personality disorders and look for the similarities between this behavior you mention and the behaviors of psychopaths or bad narcissists. It's an eye opener for good/naive people.
Microsoft minted thousands of multi-millionaires in the 1990s due to stock options. The Seattle Times wrote once that there were 10,000+ of them living in the Seattle area. Many were quite ordinary employees.
In some industries, people crunch, and everyone knows. It is very much considered to be a part of the job, and people that don't have their heads in sand are aware during hiring. Apple compensates very well but certainly knows how to push their engineers. The reward is to remain on a very rich boat during a fast-rising tide. Highly compensated software developers that have never had to crunch in their careers are lucky. And academics go through their own gauntlets...
This passage struck me as so sad. Was IE worth that? Would I break up my marriage for a product, for a company? For something 5 or 6 people remember and everyone just takes for granted later (best outcome if your product is highly successful)
Never. And it's told like something to be proud of. The american work memes are insane.
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Given it was 25 years ago this would have been the mid 90s. They are probably multi millionaires but more so for simply getting MS stock rather than being personally rewarded for their efforts. After all this was already a big company with a lot of structure. Your compensation was likely based mostly on your role and level rather than the personal contribution you made to the company, and a lot of the gain you realized would have been from the general growth of Microsoft share price.
This brings back memories of playing around with Visual Basic 6 as an 11 year old, trying to figure out how exactly Microsoft came up with the flat toolbars used in Internet Explorer and Microsoft Office 97 while the toolbar controls provided by Visual Basic were the standard Windows 95 rows of buttons (though VB 6 itself used flat toolbars). Today I have no issues making flat toolbars even from scratch, but my 11 year-old self had no idea how to come up with them. Still, sometimes I miss being a kid.
From a modern perspective they might. But that is because these days everyone designs flat toolbars. However in the early days of OS design each button on the toolbar looked like a distinct button. Microsoft then flattened the buttons while keeping a bevel on the toolbar itself (latter even that would disappear) — which is the effect being discussed here.
Back in the 90s there used to be a great discussion over the flat design (aka Microsoft) vs skeuomorphic design (aka Apple) in terms of usability with most designers vocally preferring skeuomorphic citing usability as their reasons. Albeit some did still think Apple took their use skeuomorphic design too far. It’s funny how flat design eventually won out across all platforms and not just at Microsoft and Apple; later Google with Cardboard (et al) too.
Noooo. I was a desktop software developer in the 90s and the conversation definitely started then. Remember we are talking about desktop software not web development (and by the late 90s bevels were seen as archaic as “under maintenance” GIFs).
To illustrate the timeline: Windows MSIs were often compared to Install Shield with regards to the difference between the newer flat design elements of Microsoft vs the older 3D objects of the previous iterations of Windows. By Windows 2000 Microsoft had already cemented that flat design was their way forward. Sure buttons were still 3D but a lot of other design elements had been flattened or removed entirely (panels, toolbars, image boarders, editable text areas in some cases too).
While you are right that Metro / Modern was another massive leap forward in terms of flat design, by that point Apple had already dropped much of their skeuomorphic design elements. So the discussions by that point were less about skeuomorphism vs flat design and more about accessibility concerns with regards to removing all hints of 3D in flat design. Basically by 2010 flat design had already largely won over skeuomorphic design. So while designers were still endlessly debating these things, it certainly wasn’t the start of the conversation.
The Wikipedia 'flat design' article might need updating with this information.
I see your point re. desktop UI elements, but I think 'flat design' became a zeitgeist term in the 2010s for the majority of creatives / graphic designers.
> In 2002, Microsoft released Windows Media Center
> Microsoft continued this style of design with the 2010 release of Windows Phone 7
(emphasis mine)
But you have to bare in mind that article is about more than just desktop application development. Maybe what’s needed is a separate article to talk about the history of software interfaces (maybe there already is an article?)
It was definitely the late '90s, everyone was trying to copy the IE3 flat toolbar look. There was even an article in the August 1997 issue of Microsoft Systems Journal about it:
IE 4 was better than Netscape, partly because Netscape dropped the ball around version 4. Someone can correct me, but I think after
ns3 they decided to re-implement a lot of the user interface code which caused a big delay and allowed IE to pull ahead.
In the 90s, I disliked Microsoft with the passion and irrationality you can only really drum up with teenagers. (I continued to somewhat dislike them, even through the mild good guys years, and feel somewhat vindicated by where Windows 10/11 has been going).
I think I must have been one of the last hold outs for Netscape, but around 2000 even I could not justify using it anymore. (It was also a dark period for the Linux Desktop since until Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox came around a good chunk of the internet was not usable there). In the end it was a terrible browser, and IE was clearly on a different planet in terms of just working better.
I feel these days I'm expected to make the same choice with Chromium based browsers vs Firefox, though the difference this time around is that I feel Firefox is genuinely a better product (for my needs).
There were a LOT of boneheaded decisions around "Communicator" 4, some of which had nothing to do with the user interface. Netscape management had lost its way after Navigator 3 was released.
I remember the news (think it was on Techcrunch) when MS disbanded the IE team. Even from far away it seemed like such a clear as day stupid decision. IE 6 was a buggy mess and everyone knew and hated it. And then they just ... walked away.
Thank you! This format should have been the first choice. I simply can't fathom why people post an article on twitter. Every sentence is a tweet, so that what, people can "like" each sentence? I wish people would stop using twitter for this type of data...
Many people might not know, but early version of IE was built on top of Mosaic, the first web browser, created by same people who built Netscape Navigator.
Also, IE didn't win because it was better than Navigator but it was shipped free with Windows OS.
IE was not better than navigator. Everybody i know would use netscape instead of IE. IE won because it was shipped with the OS and some people will not bother to download something else.
"The Internet Explorer team was the hardest-working team I’ve ever been on. And I’ve worked at multiple start-ups. It was a sprint, not a marathon. We ate every meal at the office. We often held foosball tournaments at 2 am, just to get the team energy back up to continue working!
"Sadly, there were divorces and broken families and bad things that came out of that. But I also learned that even at a 20,000-person company, you can get a team of 100 people to work like their lives depend on it."
Unfortunately these extreme work hours seems to be prevalent in our industry. Steve Jobs' "90 hours a week and loving it!" T-shirt from the early 1980's is a legend, and I remember reading about the history of the Apple Newton and how the very long work hours spent on that project broke up families and even led an engineer to suicide (https://www.nytimes.com/1993/12/12/business/marketer-s-dream...). When I was a graduate student, I've seen people boast about their 90-hour work weeks. Thankfully I've been fortunate to work at places where it's okay to work a normal 40-hour week, but I've heard of places where working long hours is not only the norm, it's encouraged. I understand being passionate; sometimes I stay up very late working on side projects. But when work conflicts with health and with family, something has to give.
I would love to hear stories of products that were successful and where the engineers and other people who contributed to that success were able to maintain a reasonable work-life balance.
ie quickly became revolutionarily better than the alternatives at the time.
My team at the time held contests to find the shortest html that would crash Netscape. There was a hallway at the office with over 100 Netscape crashers printed out and pinned to the wall.
By the time ie5 was released, almost 1/3 of the frontend code existed to work around netscape bugs. It was standard for us to fingerprint point releases of netscape to work around bugs.
Yep. IE took off not just because of Microsoft's position as the default browser, but because Netscape totally sucked on Windows. I'd switched to IE2 because the Netscape build my ISP offered was horrible and constantly crashed.
Yeah, I've literally spent months of my life hunting the html sequences causing netscape to crash. It was viscerally loathed by my team. Particularly the fragility around tables... good thing it was hilariously fragile with css too!
You can still see remnants of some of it online, eg this
You’re thinking mid-2000s IE. In the 90s, IE was far ahead of everything else. The gap between 2008 IE and Chrome was FAR smaller than the gap between 1997 IE and Netscape/Mosaic
I don't think people indoctrinated in tech culture can understand just how weird something like this reads. All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense to me. I can't imagine ruining my family for a paycheck so I could say I developed the 3rd version of MS' web browser.
I'll say one thing, and I know it will come off as cliche: If you weren't there, you may not understand.
In the early days of the consumer Internet (mid/late 90s) there was a real wild west / gold rush feeling to things and it did feel like we were changing the world (spoiler: most of us weren't).
I am not defending or excusing anything here, just saying that I'm sure it was a lot easier for some people, perhaps already predisposed to such behaviours, to become unhealthily obsessed with working on new Internet tech at the time because it was incredibly exciting to be working on what was genuinely a new frontier back then.
I was a teen but I remember watching my dad work on one of the first video codecs and playing a small video on an even smaller square frame inside a tiny computer monitor and him telling me how this would be the future… his codec wasn’t the main stream we use today but he was right and it was definitely a gold rush / change the world feel. Later in the 2000s for me I carried that same feeling we worked our asses off and yeah it didn’t amount to much but we learned so much… in the 2010 it’s how I was able to go on the build my own software business… It’s why I believe hard work , dedicated and consistent work does yield results that are worth it
I mean look at the Web today using TCP, IPv4, HTML/CSS/JavaScript, with companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon. If the internet was created with what we know now it would look much different. You will never be able to create a technology or company so flawed like that today.
I don't think most of us knew what the Internet would look like in 25 years. My guess back then was way more regulation, as opposed to the commercial monopolies we have today, but what did I know, I was barely in my 20s..
All the stuff you listed above (except for HTML/CSS/JS) already existed and was not invented in the 90s, and was already the foundation of the Internet at that point.
There was not much chance of changing or disrupting those things.
Also hindsight is 20/20 of course. Easy to look back two decades and say "what were they thinking?" etc..
People have pride in their work. The MegaCorp, the politics, the noise all fades away and you just want to X or achieve Y. It's not something to belittle, it's something to be celebrated.
Not everything has to come back down to a paycheck. You can be paid for work but you can absolutely love what you do and/or the challenge it brings to your life.
Agreed. As I read the lines on the long hours and resultant divorces, all I could think of was "...and for what? A better browser?". Certainly IE advanced the state of the art at the time, but if Microsoft hadn't won the browser wars and Netscape had remained dominant and inched along with incremental improvements, we still would have reached the point where we are today, but maybe a little later.
> we still would have reached the point where we are today, but maybe a little later.
or maybe a bit earlier if MS hadn't won but just been a credible competitor and then something like Opera came along - a 3 way race would probably have evolved things quicker.
Without making a value judgement, there's an aspect of the human psychology that revels in certain challenges simply because they are hard and impactful. This can be a good thing, and it can be a bad thing. It can separately be good or bad for the people involved, and for the world that they impact. But it is a normal and recurring part of human nature.
To give an example from another industry altogether, James Lapine just released a book detailing the process of creating the American musical Sunday in the Park with George.
The experience described in that book matches what you’re saying very closely, it sounds absolutely excruciating for all involved, but the director and composer’s belief that they were making something worthy carried them through.[0]
I'm not even sure I would call it a "good trait" (though I'm not sure I would call it a "bad trait" either), I just felt like the GP feigning a total lack of understanding and claiming that anybody who's experienced this feeling must be "indoctrinated" seemed disingenuous. For better or worse most of us have experienced it at one time or another, and all of us have at least witnessed it in other people. It's nothing mysterious or unimaginable.
It is a missing part of the human condition and, especially it seems to me, the male human condition to strive for something. Especially when that something is as a group. It's the feeling, I imagine, we got as hunting mammoth, or raiding others and defending our own community, or exploring a new land with dragons around the corner.
We don't have that anymore and we are poorer for it.
I envy, therefore, those that get glimpses of it through spacex achievements, or internet explorer 3.
I get mine from video games but it's probably lessor in degree. Yet still, when I felt it the strongest, it still holds one of the highest places in my memory.
It's not a bad thing that us men don't have to kill and die in large proportions just to keep the rest of the tribe going. Let's not overly romanticize an evolutionary trait useful for getting us throw ourselves into meat grinders. Let's enjoy our games and leave it at that. (Mine is tennis)
I didn't mean to imply that I'd trade modern life for it.
It's just that the drive is still there. And it's useful in understanding depression in men, and the will to make the best piece of software for your corporation.
Tennis cannot replace it or video games. We are stuck not wholly satisfied and must make the best of it.
Oh I agree with you there - let's recognize this vile impulse and do our best to prevent it from causing any more harm.
"
If in some smothering dreams, you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,—
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori."
Characterizing the want to "strive for something, especially when that something is as a group" as a "vile impulse" is a bad take. It's pretty hard to argue that that we would be better off just keeling over and accepting things as they are, lest we succumb to the awful human behavior of organizing to change something we don't like.
That very same vile impulse was, is, and always will be the way we manage to overcome humanity's greatest challenges. Trying to condition people to suppress it is not a good idea.
This subculture exists everywhere. I play basketball and the most revered player is Kobe Bryant. He isn’t the best, but his work ethic and competitiveness was beyond all others. He’d probably be a jerk to play with, but most people are never in a position to do hard work to deliver something that they consider valuable.
Now what is valuable differs to each person. Basketball is just a sport. Chess just a game. A surgeon saves just one life at time. He helped write a new version of a browser. But to all of them, it’s important to them.
The work I did at Microsoft helped build thousands of businesses, and later on I helped secure thousands more. I find it truly strange that I shouldn't feel proud of that.
Yes, but the Lakers are not. And the players have a union.
Competition within the NBA is zero-sum so it isn't like Kobe working really hard further entrenches the NBA anywhere close to the same degree as IE for MS.
Showstopper![1] covers Windows NT in a similar vein and Dealers of Lightning[2] is another good read that goes into some if the really interesting history of Xerox PARC.
The part you are missing is that at that time, it felt like the entire company's future was in jeopardy. It wasn't inconceivable, back then, that if Netscape dominated, every aspect of Microsoft's business would soon be rendered obsolete.
They were working hard to ensure the company continued to exist, a pretty noble cause. Your "3rd version of MS web browser" is a trivialization.
Funny how without these efforts the web and technologies pretty much the entire world used over the last two decades would probably have been very, very different - I'm not judging better or worse.
In fact Microsoft as a company might not even be relevant anymore without what these folks did. Sun, Netscape and Corel might rule the IT world today.
It's entirely possible that for some of those marriages, the additional strain of the project simple accelerated the divorce timing (versus causing it).
> All I could comprehend when I finished was "100 people work themselves to emotional exhaustion so American mega corp can retain monopoly status". I see nothing of valor, just a strange subculture that people are willing to sacrifice themselves to for reasons that make no sense to me.
Or so those people could work hard for 5-10 years instead of working hard for 40+ years like most people do. Microsoft employees have been paid very well for a long time and the stock compensation they received in the early to mid 1990s was exceptionally lucrative.
The most important part of what you said, is "make no sense to me." It's tremendously wonderful that we don't get to dictate what other people choose to do with their lives and time.
It's perfectly ok to be enamored with something like new Internet tech circa 1995, want to work in a segment that excites you, work exceptionally hard for three or five years, and then change out of that work to something more routine and less demanding.
Looking back at the version history of IE, a lot of people forget how good earlier IE was compared to its competitors. "Best viewed in Internet Explorer" ultimately ended up being a punchline, but there really was something to it; IE had a far better and faster rendering engine than anything else did at the time, with more extensive CSS and JS support.
Abandoning it after they "won" was really a testament to the hubris of 90s-era Microsoft.