As a web dev, I feel awkward reminiscing about the thin period of web history when IE was a solidly built, standards-compliant browser.
It was like the IE team saw their history was causing them to lose all market share, and committed to fixing misdeeds since they held an underdog position. But for most, it was too little too late.
For several years, I tested in IE, not Chrome, because it was most strictly standards-compliant, and I could be sure that if it worked there, it would work in other browsers. (Now, if you use Edge, it’s just a repaint of Chrome)
I didn’t start dev until after the chrome hegemony but I assume ie was only compliant because MS was the one writing the standards. Much like how chrome is essentially the defacto standard now.
At this point in time, Chrome was jumping bounds ahead of the others with standards, and most websites were specifically written for webkit, even beginning to disregard Firefox. Worse, Chrome was often going back and forth on how a certain new standard should implement, leading to, for instance, CSS files declaring 7 or 8 different ways of doing a linear-gradient.
Your sentiment on Microsoft isn’t unique, which is part of why the web consortium wasn’t actually keen on listening to them most of the time. Them having monetary/OS influence didn’t actually lead to a lot on the W3C - they went ahead of them for most ActiveX work.
As a web dev, I feel awkward reminiscing about the thin period of web history when IE was a solidly built, standards-compliant browser.
It was like the IE team saw their history was causing them to lose all market share, and committed to fixing misdeeds since they held an underdog position. But for most, it was too little too late.
For several years, I tested in IE, not Chrome, because it was most strictly standards-compliant, and I could be sure that if it worked there, it would work in other browsers. (Now, if you use Edge, it’s just a repaint of Chrome)
I miss presto and the old opera browser
I rather enjoyed 2002-2003 opera. It had tabs and mouse gestures.
I didn’t start dev until after the chrome hegemony but I assume ie was only compliant because MS was the one writing the standards. Much like how chrome is essentially the defacto standard now.
At this point in time, Chrome was jumping bounds ahead of the others with standards, and most websites were specifically written for webkit, even beginning to disregard Firefox. Worse, Chrome was often going back and forth on how a certain new standard should implement, leading to, for instance, CSS files declaring 7 or 8 different ways of doing a linear-gradient.
Your sentiment on Microsoft isn’t unique, which is part of why the web consortium wasn’t actually keen on listening to them most of the time. Them having monetary/OS influence didn’t actually lead to a lot on the W3C - they went ahead of them for most ActiveX work.