Internet browser question

[mito]

During the ie-netscape war in the 90s, it was alleged that ie had the lead because its programmers from ms had direct access to windows libraries and secrets.

Was that true? What about current browsers, for example, fire fox?

 

[silence]

let's see what IE 7 brings to the table. currentlly IE is missing some key features. and in 90's M$ won when they bundled IE with Windows. Netscape was doomed the second M$ did that.... why would you pay for something you already have?

remember that back then there wasnt all the garbage like now, so noone was really concerened about it and since they had browser with OS... simple.

 

[Varg Vikernes]

@mito: That's the first time I heard that one. Netscape died because it became bloated and unusable - was very slow and crashed very often (e.g you had re-download and re-render the page if you resized the browser). Back then, no one really cared about standards - the more features the browser had, the better. And since IE v3, Netscape was playing catch-up (i.e. IE v3 had CSS support).

What about the libraries? You don't need any windows libraries to render a web page (apart from showing the window). And what about Firefox? FF is based on the gecko engine which should replace the old Netscape engine (that never happened AFAIK).

 

[arjan de lumens]

The 'Gecko' engine did get used in Netscape 6,7,8, but at the time of Netscape 6's release, the Netscape brand was little more than a faint, unpleasant memory in most people's minds, and so the new Netscape releases didn't really attract all that much attention. It didn't help that at the release of Netscape 6, Gecko was really immature and slow and buggy and broke a bunch of websites designed to handle the quirks of Netscape 4.x.

 

[DemoCoder]

IE had the advantage because Microsoft had the good sense to go for a rewrite of the HTML rendering engine that they acquired from Spyglass. This eventually panned out, and IE4 used this as a basis for many key improvements in rendering, CSS, DHTML, etc

Netscape originally tryed to stick to hacking their Mosaic-age Netscape 1.0 era layout engine, but it was not possible to update this to support faster layout, incremental reflow, real DHTML, etc. So Netscape started their own rewrite: NGLayout/Raptor (later became Gecko) But they started too late, almost 18 months after MS had started rewriting the IE rendering engine.


Getting an HTML rendering engine working bug-for-bug feature-for-feature compatible is a huge undertaking. Mozilla/Gecko/Netscape5 started back in 1998, and you can see that only in the last 2 years has it really become useful.

So to answer your question: Netscape had shitty management, waited too long to commt developer resources to a total rewrite of their core HTML component, whereas Microsoft started alot earlier and got the leg up on them.

It had nothing to do with "Windows APIs". To disprove that theory, just look at IE on the Mac OS, which is superior to IE on Windows in terms of standards compliance.

Simply put, Netscape4 was like the NV30. They tried to take an old architecture, layer a few new features, and send it up against a totally new architecture, and the result was a diaster (for Netscape)


(I am friends with several engineers at Netscape and MS)

 

[Diplo]

To disprove that theory, just look at IE on the Mac OS, which is superior to IE on Windows in terms of standards compliance.

Ever see IE on HPUX (HP Unix) platform? Yes, they did do a version. Tried it out at work once. Truly the worst browser version ever. I'm not sure if it was just a bad port or was made deliberately crippled but it was a complete joke to use.

 

[mito]

Interesting comments.