Ask HN: How did Microsoft hold back the Internet for 6-7 years?

The very short, oversimplified version:<p>Microsoft leveraged their dominance of desktop computing to gain dominance of browser installed base with IE. Having won the battle, they stopped improving the browser as an application platform.<p>During the first period, Microsoft developed and deployed a variety of browser technologies such as Dynamic HTML (aka the DOM) and XMLHTTPRequest that moved the browser toward being a viable application platform. During the second period, IE stagnated and it was left to Firefox and, later, Chrome to pick up the baton. But they had to fight for market share for several years before having enough influence to make significant progress. IE has recently caught up, but that still leaves several years before enterprise customers will deploy the improvements.<p>Thus in 2014 there are still major gaps in the browser platform that really should have been solved some years back, and a large portion of installed base still using the transitional IE 8 and 9.

The truth is more shaded than saying they held back the web. What I remember is that IE 5 came out in 1999, and was a significantly better browser than netscape 4, which was my favorite browser at the time. So, netscape had an inferior product. Meanwhile microsoft also decided to bundle IE with windows, for free, on all new PC&#x27;s. So netscape had a worse product <i>and</i> worse user acquisition. If you&#x27;re a startup in that position, what is the logical thing to do? Well, netscape decided the most logical thing was to start a multi-year rewrite of their entire product, with the goal of having an identical UI, but a fresh codebase. IMHO, it is fair to say microsoft helped netscape into the grave, but it is also fair to say netscape did much of the walking.<p>So, from about 2000 until about 2006 IE was the only game in town because there just weren&#x27;t any viable competitors (well, ok, there was opera, but...). Looking around and noticing they didn&#x27;t have competition, microsoft figured they didn&#x27;t need to iterate their product, so they didn&#x27;t.<p>Now, this will sound strange to say now, but IE 6 had the best standards support, in 2001. However, it also had a lot of proprietary features which made things easy to do that were hard to do using W3C standards, which as standards tend to be weren&#x27;t as developer-friendly as they could have been (I still think CSS&#x27;s layout model is a big mistake). Web developers being web developers they couldn&#x27;t resist those features to build stuff quicker, and they ended up building a lot of IE-only sites, which created the legacy which we are still battling today. And that made it very hard for upstart browsers like firefox to gain marketshare.<p>Now, again IMHO, it is fair to say microsoft did nothing to discourage people from using those proprietary features and getting locked into a dead-end platform. However, it is also fair to say you could and can build a standards-compliant codebase which is IE 6 compatible so developers were helping the jailer put on the chains.<p>I think blaming it all on MS is easy but inaccurate. It was a shared blame across netscape, microsoft and the web development community of the early 2000&#x27;s, which ended up in a stagnated browser market from 2000 to 2005&#x2F;2006.

The very short answer is that they of course didn&#x27;t. It&#x27;s utter nonsense. I was around in those days, worked on Mozilla and Nutscrape etc. Back in the day there were many browsers, all spun off the Spyglass original code, the internet was pre javascript and it was a very different place. Then the browser wars started, there was Netscape and IE and others, back then it was viable for individuals to actually make a competitive browser, but over time they got to be big complex pieces of code, basically a VM. Security became a big deal and the open source movement built the best browsers, Mozilla, Phoenix and Firefox ten years ago. Microsoft tried to get the Internet to come to it rather than the other way round, just as companies like AOL did. They tried to add proprietary technology to lock in the internet to their Windows platform. Can&#x27;t really blame them for that, but meanwhile every user on the planet was free to install any other browser they wanted. Just because they didn&#x27;t isn&#x27;t Microsoft&#x27;s fault. They didn&#x27;t prevent you doing so.<p>These days the internet has shifted from the desktop to laptops to mobile phones and tablets where Apple and Google have the lock in as Microsoft did. Apple allow other browsers provided they don&#x27;t want fast javascript. Yet nobody&#x27;s accusing Apple of holding up the internet.<p>The main things that really did hold back the internet was bandwidth, it was&#x2F;is the phone and cable companies because they really do have a stranglehold on their customers.<p>Others here have suggested microsoft tried to stop others from innovating. Again, total bullshit, they forced exactly nobody to use their software.<p>I am no fan of MSFT, I haven&#x27;t used their products in years, but someone who was around then really needs to set the story straight.

I hate to give just a wikipedia link but I really have nothing more to add than what is there:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish</a><p>While this might not explain &quot;6-7 years of holding back the internet&quot; it definitely was not beneficial.

Short summary: there was a time when people paid for browsers. Microsoft started bundling IE for free along with the OS. This killed the paid browser market completely (bringing down companies like Netscape) as everyone started using IE since everyone was using windows. Once their position was established, Microsoft stopped developing IE. The IE team was mostly disbanded and there was no updated in IE for many many years.<p>Not progressing the internet was in MS&#x27; best interest. They wanted a world where desktop apps running in their OS was the future.

&quot;Microsoft cast a shadow over the software world for almost 20 years starting in the late 80s.&quot; It was not only the internet. In some way it was an evil monopoly that did everything to prevent others from innovate and forced usage of it&#x27;s own crappy software. The citation come&#x27;s from PG&#x27;s essay from 2007 &quot;Microsoft is dead&quot; [0].<p>[0] <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/microsoft.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.paulgraham.com&#x2F;microsoft.html</a>

They didn&#x27;t hold back the Internet 6-7 years. IE was far, far beyond whatever competitors offered, it might be more fair to say that Microsoft released IE6 years too early. AJAX, CSS, JS, all the cool technologies that make the web today were part of IE 6 (but not quite at the level they are today of course), and in addition to that there were some DirectX accelerated graphics, an advanced plugin system while other browsers only supported NSAPI, etc.<p>After that there was little innovation from Microsoft, but there was little need for innovation either, most developers looking for advanced capabilities used Flash instead of addressing the web browser natively, because that was the trend back then and Flash works on other brands of browsers as well, and for a while because a lot of people still used older browsers. For those reasons there was no developer demand for more advanced features, the features that were offered were hardly used for a long time<p>For example AJAX was publicly introduced in IE5 in 1999, while other non-beta versions of competitors appeared from 2002 to 2005. Websites using AJAX thus were rare until about 2004-2005. There was no need for Microsoft to add more technology until the competitors caught up. Unfortunately for Microsoft, the competitors didn&#x27;t just catch up, they overtook them and implemented some features differently than in IE, those missing and different features in IE have caused plenty of grief for web developers ever since.

I think it is more than a fair statement to say Microsoft held back the web[1] for 6-7 years, but we settled on the web browser as the delivery for internet services and are still trying to shoehorn everything into it.<p>Microsoft had a monopoly in the OS market, gave IE away free, and provided tools and incentives to develop for IE and nothing else.<p>From a company&#x27;s point of view, it makes a lot of sense. Cost and 90% of customers don&#x27;t have any problems. The company has a standard development and testing platform. Cost is an amazing motivator and having that OS monopoly was an easy leverage point.<p>1) there are still issues with using educational &#x2F; testing sites in any browser but an outdated version of IE. The college textbook with integrated websites could really use some disruption

Just venturing a guess, I&#x27;d say it&#x27;s a reference to early versions of Internet Explorer (particularly IE6, but also later) which combined a dominating position (thanks to Windows) with (1) an insistance on doing things their own way instead of following standards and (2) a very slow pace of innovation. This forced coding to a very low common denominator and&#x2F;or duplication of effort for advanced features and different browsers. The impasse ended when other browsers became popular enough to make IE&#x27;s dragging its feet counterproductive for MS, too.

<a href="http://www.hanselman.com/blog/microsoftkilledmypappy.aspx" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.hanselman.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;microsoftkilledmypappy.aspx</a>

I think it interesting that no one here has brought up the fallout from the dot.com bust and 9&#x2F;11. Both of these had far more effects on the pace of innovation than anything Microsoft did or didn&#x27;t do.

It terms of how (from memory + fact checks on Wikipedia): Microsoft and Netscape battled over browsers throughout the late 90s with Netscape starting in the position of the dominant&#x2F;only browser and IE was seen as a joke, that quickly, by the time IE5 (1999) was released Netscape seemed completely in technical debt with it&#x27;s product when they couldn&#x27;t support even the most basic CSS support in Netscape 4.x. IE5 was also the release that added support for what is now called AJAX.<p>IE6 was released August 2001, at which point it had most of the market, IE also existed for the Mac and most people I knew at the time thought of Mozilla&#x2F;Netscape as completely irrelevant as a development target. Opera has basically always been irrelevant in my view. This started an era of IE-only sites which further damaged the competition.<p>Microsoft disbanded it&#x27;s IE development team and it wasn&#x27;t until a few years later that people realized that this happened (It wasn&#x27;t announced till 2003) - people seemed to assume Microsoft was working on new version of IE, which was natural since it was pretty much the only browser in town.<p>WHATWG was formed in 2004 so everyone else (except Microsoft) could work on web standard because this had basically stopped at that point.<p>Firefox wasn&#x27;t released till November 2004, which was the first time it looked like there would be a credible threat to IE (though it had been pretty good for a year before with Mozilla, but still unknown to most).<p>Acid2 test was created 2005 which further highlighted the problems with IE6&#x27;s rendering: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid2" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Acid2</a>.<p>IE7 was released in October 2006, by which point web developers who had been trying to more and more with the web were thoroughly frustrated with IE and it&#x27;s rendering bugs. IE7 was a big disappointment because it whilst it fixed some long standing problems like it&#x27;s box model, it was still a long way off the standards that had been produced since IE6 and it didn&#x27;t pass that Acid2 test.<p>In terms of why: I&#x27;ve wondered why for a long time now. Mostly, I think IE6 was already too good at being web application platform and Microsoft was worried (as they had been with Java) that this would make Windows irrelevant. Given that IE was effectively free the probably assumed there would be no viable competition due to the lack of business model. Microsoft stopping work on IE they could allow websites to work, but continue to make web apps that were too clunky to use so people would write native Win32 apps.

Now it seems ISPs have been holding back the Internet (in the US). There&#x27;s almost no competition on price, bandwidth, latency, etc. Nobody is pushing the envelope.

If it is actually referring to IE6, in some ways IE&#x27;s stagnation was helpful. Prior to IE6 was an arms race-like flurry of different browser vendors haphazardly slapping on features to their products, and the IE6 code freeze we saw thereafter gave standards-writers like the W3C and WHATWG time to catch up writing specifications for the web.