The Internet's Explorer

And so, here we are. The final browser we will be discussing is Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

It is hard to imagine, now, but there was a time before "IE" owned the world. Back then it was difficult to get on the internet, and there wasn't much to recommend trying, to be honest. You had to install a host of plug-in's, add-on's and doo-dad's and then get yourself a program called a "browser" to see and do anything. When Netscape took off, and everyone saw the future, Microsoft went after Spyglass to get into the game.

Spyglass was quickly rewritten and re-released as Internet Explorer and… nobody cared. I was working for Microsoft at the time and many of us were using Netscape back then, a browser we had actually paid for. People bought software, back then. Nobody knew any different.

But just as in the Old Testament, IE begat IE2 and IE3 and things got better with each release. There were point-releases, too, to fix a few bugs and we all got used to the Browser Wars, just as we did the battles for tennis shoes, cola drinks and long distance service.

These last two paragraphs are, to me, the heart of the old, dead, Microsoft-as-monopoly lawsuit. Yeah, Microsoft gave away their Web browser back then, and they still do. But nobody gave a damn, until it became a good Web browser.

IE (almost nobody actually says Internet Explorer if they can avoid it) became the browser to have on both PCs and Macintosh computers about this time. They were there at the beginning of CSS support and ultimately got more right than Netscape had at the time. Along the way they were very ambitious with new versions. IE4 became IE5 and then IE5.5 (where things stopped, on the Mac) and IE6. Each one better than the last, with more features and more features that worked better than anyone else had at the time.

But when Netscape crumbled, things ground to a halt in IE development. This is where a lot of us lost the respect and goodwill that Microsoft had built-up during the Browser Wars. Okay, things didn't grind to a halt, but they sure as Hell slowed down a ton. If you look at development since Microsoft bought Spyglass, the release of Windows95 and subsequent releases, we should be on about Internet Explorer 23, by now. That we went so many years with Internet Explorer 6 did seem like there were tumbleweeds blowing through the IE part of the Microsoft campus.

And then came the big fix. Microsoft was shamed by Firefox, Safari, Opera and the Web standards community into resuming development of good browsers. But they were about to change the way the world's favorite browser worked and acted and that would mean some sites might break. A lot of sites. Hundreds of thousands of sites. The Microsoft answer at first was that we who had been doing things right all along would have to change our ways of working, to accommodate the great many lazy folks who had designed for a specific browser. For a time, it looked like the Good Guys would have to add a tricky meta tag to their pages saying, essentially, "Look, I know this tag isn't actually a part of any standard or any training that anyone has had in the fifteen years we've been doing this, but by my placing this here I am indicating that I want you to treat this page like one that's been correctly marked-up". The echoes from the Web development community are just now reaching what we used to know as the planet Pluto.

Microsoft relented, the Internet did not break, and we have all managed to get along. Their new IE8, again only for Windows PCs, is by all marks a terrific Web browser, seems to have none of the stink associated with IE7 and is much closer to worthy of its assumed market share. So, there's that.

The biggest advantage IE has in the marketplace today is that it is Good Enough for a huge percentage of people who choose Windows computers. It comes preinstalled on more laptop and desktop computers than anything else and for most people it works well enough that they are not interesting in jumping through the various hoops to get some other browser installed and start re-learning everything they know about the Web.

As they say in the government specification business, "If the minimum wasn't good enough, it wouldn't be the minimum!"