No, I didn't forget. But you forgot to say that MS did all that with draft specifications or even no spec at all (XMLHttpRequest), just to beat everyone to market, then refused to correct their implementation once the standard was revised and agreed by others. And they sprinkled ActiveX on top, for good measure.
> developers (and their managers) lapped it up
Disagree. Developers were the ones that pushed Mozilla and then Firefox (and then Chrome) as soon as they could.
> Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat
Microsoft did the right thing for their own bank account: they smashed the competition with bundling then left IE to flounder, even obliterating their dedicated team, because they had reached their objective, which was to dominate the web so that they could sell what they really cared about: ActiveX and other Windows-only technologies.
> the problem is that everyone likes the boss.
No, the problem is that people are lazy. IE won with OEM bundling on Windows. Chrome is winning with OEM bundling on Android. As long as the default is good enough, people won't switch, especially 15 years ago when downloads took a degree of effort (waiting several minutes, restarting after failure etc etc) and now on mobile where it is awkward and/or completely forbidden to switch browser. This is basically what the article says as well: they couldn't push a browser, they had to push an OS with a browser bundled. If people don't switch, developers can't build for alternative browsers, because their managers won't allow the additional time and effort.
No, the DOM put into IE was legitimately better than that in the old NN. MS won that war because their browser was BETTER, period.
They then sat on their laurels and the rest of the world passed them by, so now they're still trying to play catchup.
But at the time? No, anyone who had any experience in the DOM of IE vs NN would hands down push IE. It was just better in every way.
Where did I mention Netscape? I didn't.
IE5 is from 1999, IE6 from 2001, and they were undoubtedly better than Navigator; but the first 0.x releases of Mozilla with the new Gecko engine are from late 2000/early 2001, and were better than IE (although the suite was slow and bloated). Firefox was branched out in 2002 and took off very quickly because it was a great engine without the bloat of full Mozilla. That's why people pushed it (or rather Phoenix) right off the bat.
If you were pushing IE6 over Mozilla or Firefox in 2001/2002, you weren't paying attention. Navigator all but died in 1999.
When developers were pushing IE was when it was IE vs NN.
"Microsoft has lost over 300 million browser users in 2016, mostly to Chrome, tracking site shows"
No. Microsoft had a non-standard box model which was an utter pain in the ass, regardless of their box model being more sensible than everybody else's in theory[0] (and ultimately standardised as an option circa 2010) having to code for a single standard documented box-model is way the fuck easier than coding for two different box models.
Also it's box-sizing not box-model.
[0] because in practice MSIE's layout engine was a buggy pile of shit
The sane way of doing boxes pre-dated the "standard", which in hindsight appears as though it was specifically crafted to spite Microsoft.
It was a silly time to be a developer.
Are you suggesting that Chrome gathers data about you? Because unless you tick that box (which they show pretty prominently) it doesn't. It doesn't by default in most linux distribution packages.
> Unlike IE
I don't know if you've been following, but Microsoft is now the king of knowing everything about you. They record things about their customers' computer activity which should horrify anyone. Sometimes they don't respect user selections either, even all the way up to Enterprise editions (where it is often mission-critical not to send competitive information to Microsoft by accident in a core dump), which is infuriating.
> In my opinion chrome isn't doing a good job either. It's a massive energy hog and waste more CPU than it needs to.
My impression is that at this point, most unique performance problems in Chrome are either an inherent cost of multi-process, a mediocre implementation choice in that model, or a performance tradeoff toward better application latency at the cost of heavy initialization. Chrome could display many pages more quickly if they ignored the GPU, but they use it across the board so that they don't have to restart into "GPU mode" when they realize there is a lot of compositing on the page. Chrome has converged toward other browsers recently, they'll now run multiple tabs on the same process as long as they share a FQDN (sites that host together, crash together), I suspect they do this to save memory.
If we're talking about runtime speed of real web apps and sites, Chrome has everyone matched or beat.
> The time to celebrate victory was a few years ago. Now it's starting to look like the new boss is the same as the old, maybe worse.
The problem with IE6 was not Microsoft, or IE6 itself. Microsoft did not win by literally forcing people to use IE6. The problem was, and probably always will be, greedy unscrupulous web developers (and their managers) who want all the cool new toys at any cost. Microsoft was doing the cool, "html5, bro!" type browser innovation that google is doing now, and developers (and their managers) lapped it up. People forget that Microsoft made box-model: border-box, XMLHttpRequest, favicons, <ruby>, and bi-directional text on the web. They did this all in IE5, this put IE6 ahead, and people loved it too. Microsoft did the right thing and didn't break compat for honest customers who just wanted their webpage to work, so IE5 quirks are the way of the web.
The problem is not that nobody likes the boss, the problem is that everyone likes the boss.