> IE only stagnated because they kind of wipedout the competition
Yeah, people forget that IE was a great browser. It was easily the most performant, I think driven by the Outlook web (I believe the first web app to make use of XMLHttpRequest) team demanding IE team make it so. The issue, like you said, is they won and then stopped updating.
Re:Helium Browser
by commakozzi on Thursday September 25, 2025 @09:17AM
(#45372316)
It was sad to me watching that battle unfold. Maybe i was ignorant (and maybe i still am), but I learned most of what i know about web dev on Netscape sitting in a mac lab at university viewing source code. I HATED when IE started to takeover and eventually won that first battle. I miss Netscape :-(
Maybe for a short period. Honestly Firefox(phoenix) was my browser of choice.
Internet explorer became the dominant browser for one reason only: it came by default.
> Internet explorer became the dominant browser for one reason only: it came by default.
Default helped, but IE was the far superior browser for a long time. People chose to use it.
I was also a FF user and it came out a few years later than IE6. When FF came out IE6 was still the superior browser, though it was eventually overtaken by both FF and Chrome.
What do you expect from browser itself? It loads html + js . It’s no longer center of innovation.
Support for PNG alpha channel
Tabs would have been a nice feature to add.
Re:Helium Browser
by dudeinjapan on Thursday September 25, 2025 @12:37PM
(#45375081)
To Google execs, a browser is a rectangle on your screen that you click on while it delivers you ads.
Revisionism? I was around then and I implemented plenty of sites in IE. It always had bugs that other browsers did not (and there were more than two engines back then). Maddening lack of support of features that other browsers had implemented, often requiring crazy workarounds. Transparent PNGs didn't even work! Not to mention all the proprietary crap like ActiveX.
WPF XAML was originally designed by ex IE team members, and they were the same that a few years later proposed XAML Grid concept as CSS Grid initial design.
Many JavaScript devs have to thank their abuse of JavaScript in the browser to XMLHttpRequest introduced by IE.