Maybe by WebKit you mean Blink and by Blink you mean V8, because when somebody does a "Show HN: something that doesn't work in Safari or FireFox" it's usually a javascript problem not a CSS or rendering problem. And every 6 months someone complains that Safari is literally worse than IE 5 because it doesn't support some non-standard privacy nightmare API that Google added last week.
IE championed CSS and the DOM. Netscape was fixated on bgcolor, font tags, etc. Netscape introduced the <layer> tag. IE just made every tag a potential layer. Remember AJAX? Loading content from a script and injecting it into a page? That was 100% IE.
The issue wasn't that IE 5, 5.5, and 6 were bad when they came out. They weren't. Not one bit. They were absolutely the cutting edge. Then Netscape died, Microsoft had no more competition in the field, and so they basically just stopped. For years.
Mozilla (and shortly after, Firefox) prompted an eventual response, which was IE7: I minor update to an otherwise abandoned codebase. Once it was clear folks were seriously looking at dumping IE, IE8 followed shortly after. The CSS Acid Test showed how far IE had fallen behind, so IE9 and IE10 moved to stop the bleeding. IE 11 was the final release before Microsoft finally dropped the legacy IE baggage, aka the Trident engine. By that time Chrome had stormed the field, and Edge's renderer just couldn't keep up relative to the amount of money Microsoft was willing to pay. So they dumped their own engine and moved to Blink. (If you can't beat em…)
But let's be clear, between 1998 and 2003, IE was at the forefront. Its CSS support wasn't broken. It was the best and only. Its box model wasn't broken. There were no other box models to compare it to. You didn't need to give it separate CSS, because it was the only one around really to parse it. It didn't have non-standard AJAX support. It WAS the standard since no XMLHttpRequest object existed at the time.
You could write VBScript on a web page instead of JavaScript and have a >90% chance that client could run it. Flash didn't have to be bundled or installed separately, ActiveX just took care of it in the middle of your browsing session.
It was the Bronze Age of the web. IE was the one that moved us beyond stone tools. Later supplanted by Firefox and Safari's Iron Age, but still an important and arguably necessary step toward the modern web we know today, including the box model.
This was particularly problematic because MS struggled MIGHTILY to get Vista out the door. It was a decade of really terrible IE which was pushed out longer due to Vista's poor performance and stability.
Meanwhile, you could install firefox and later chrome and get a relatively modern internet browsing experience.
Ironically, I think the thing that hurt firefox adoption was the switch to the evergreen model. The era of firefox 3->~33 was quiet painful, updating was simply far too intrusive. "You are out of date, click here to download the latest version!". Chrome from the get go was pretty good at making that seamless.
If nothing else it primed users for adopting Chrome, which originally had a less branded, more utilitarian feel not unlike early Firefox.
This cycle is somewhat repeating itself though as Chrome has become very branded and product-y. Would love to see something similarly functionally-minded as early FF/Chrome come out and take a big bite out of Chrome’s marketshare.
They should have done what Chrome does - write the standards to match what you've implemented.
That doesn't match my memory at all, unless you include Phoenix under the Firefox umbrella. I switched … I don't remember exactly when, probably in late 2003, but certainly when it was called Phoenix, and it was such a breath of fresh air coming from IE. I'm sure there were breakages, because it was the early noughties and that's what the internet was like, but I don't remember a single time wishing for something that IE provided that Phoenix didn't.
But I was just coming to it as a user, not as a dev—maybe you're referring to the dev perspective.
I (and presumably others) hated the notion of a Microsoft/Windows-only web. Younger folks just don't realize how close we came and the debt owed to those Mozilla devs.
Mac IE became its own albatross for web development for a while once Safari hit its stride and supplanted it.
Prior to somewhere between 2003 and 2005, "web standards" were aspirational rather than the reality on the ground. There was Internet Explorer for Windows at 85-90% and all the bit players scrambling for a percentage point or two.
For the bit players, the standards were their only bid for survival since no one would tolerate putting extra dev time into an extra 1%. Together, you could make a case for a 10-15% target.
For Microsoft's part, "IE is the standard" had an extremely long tail.
Opera could probably claim best CSS in the late 90s. And by 2003, Netscape 6.0 & 7.0 and Mozilla Suite 1.0 would have better CSS 2 support than IE 6.
Netscape championed its own alternate to CSS: JSSS. Javascript-based Style Sheets.[1] But the W3C went for CSS, so the CSS implementation in Netscape 4 (1997) was very rushed, and poor quality.
This is what led to the @import hack being possible, which used different style sheets for IE and Netscape.[2][3]
[1] https://www.w3.org/submissions/1996/1/WD-jsss-960822
[2] https://litux.nl/mirror/csscookbook/0596005768/cssckbk-CHP-9...
What makes it so much worse is that Tasman, the engine used in IE for Mac, had awesome support for CSS, transparent PNGs, and more years earlier, but for some reason it got dumpstered when IE for Mac was discontinued while the inferior Trident lived on in Windows.
Even thinking of that makes me very happy I haven't had to worry about formatting email newsletters for more than 10 years now, brings back bad memories...
Box model in particular was because they used the much saner border-box instead of the official spec's content-box, which was what everyone else used. You could make the other browsers act like IE by specifying it with box-sizing in the CSS, or from IE8 onwards you could make IE act like the others.
WebKit and Blink are separate engines.
Isn't that what happened anyway? The non-Chromium dists of Blink like Electron and WebView2 both employ the same multi-process approach as Chrome.exe (and my RAM availability is suffering for it...)
In fact I’m not aware of any major non-Chromium usages of Blink, except maybe in Qt (where it replaced WebKit a few years ago) but I’m not sure about that either.
Is that why Electron basically means Chromium?
Except Safari.
Everyone tests everything on iPhone and Chrome.
And I don't think the conspiracy in this article is something to boast about. It's literally using dishonesty with the higher-ups (no matter how much you might hate them) as a way to make your own job easier.
Plus, stuff like this is why we ended up in a Chrome monopoly, to the point that even Edge finally got Chromified.
No one was forced to use IE, but many people had the decision made for them. Sometimes it was because it shipped as the default on the dominant operating system. (I suspect people forget how dominant Windows was. While Windows remains the dominant operating system on desktop computers to this day, their share wasn't diluted by platforms like Android and iOS.) Other times it was because sites designed exclusively for IE were visibly broken in other browsers. (I suspect part of the reason why I am not bothered by incompatibilities with Firefox to this day is because the incompatibilities are minor compared to those we faced in the past.)
I do agree with your sentiment about conspiracy boasting, though from a different perspective. Their actions represent a group of people in a position of power making a decision for other people, even if it wasn't an officially sanctioned decision. (Though I have no doubt that many people cheered for their actions.)
Ehh, plenty of corporate IT decided to force employees to use IE. That's actually my main interaction with programming for it, clients that HAD to use IE due to corporate policy.
Everyone should be banding together to work on one. Not making a separate one each year. We have js libraries and frameworks for that. Of course some innovations that requires to be done in engine won’t happen as fast - but on the other hand amount of innovation in software that runs in browsers will be much higher.
We saw that with IE “innovations” of Microsoft blocked decades of innovations in web apps.
WebKit itself was a fork of KHTML by Apple, and Blink was a fork of WebKit by Google. Both initially started with the one company and then had others contribute to the open source projects.
In the WebKit wiki it is noted that WebKit had 50% market share at its peak. This is when IE and Firefox still had about 15-20% market share each. WebKit was well on its way to being where Blink is today. It was used by Apple, Google, Palm, Sony, Nokia, Nintendo, and more.
It wasn’t the industry banding together to create Blink. It was Google. Then one by one, various companies gave up the fight, Microsoft and Opera are two of the most notable.
Maybe if Apple was easier to work with Blink wouldn’t have happened, but I probably had more to do with Google having their own view of what the web should be, and their own engine lets them push that on everyone.
One of the worst things that's happened is nearly everyone converging on using webkit to render everything. Feels like slowly stepping backwards into the days when everyone writes for webkit rather than a more open internet.
That being said, there's so little difference between webkit and gecko now-a-days that it's really hardly a major issue.