Starting now, Microsoft will roll out their new Chromium-based Edge browser to their millions of Windows 10 users. And this will also mark the end of an era. The era of the Trident-Engine.
But hadn’t the Trident era already ended when Edge appeared? Not really.
This is a very deep look at the Trident engine. Goodness.
No, it’s still available: https://winaero.com/blog/enable-legacy-edge-mode-in-microsoft-edge-chromium/
This is a really good deep dive into IE’s history, and it shows that up til and including IE6 it was a really good browser – lots of web technologies we take for granted first showed up in some form in IE.
Often they weren’t directly adopted – half of them seem to have been too specific to proprietary, or not based on existing open tech enough (One example is the embedded web fonts format they came up with, the first browser to do so, wasn’t adopted mainly because it didn’t use gzip and instead was based on their own proprietary compression)
I have a new respect for the work Microsoft did with IE, before it’s more recent history colored everybody’s perception on it.
Yeah, it’s sometimes hard to remember that back in the days leading up to IE6, Using IE, Netscape, or something something else was all pretty viable. IE actually was fine, as good as Netscape (although certainly you needed both to browse all websites). I mean, the web as an even bigger hot mess and browsers might have had smaller executables, but to have any chance of actually rendering most web pages they still had to be rather complex…
Who would have thought 20 years ago that KHTML would dominate the web?
(disclaimer, I work for Mozilla): The implication that Microsoft was the driving force behind css-grid and css-flexbox is…presumptuous, at least. At best they were participants in the standard.
The author sounds very young to me. While he makes plenty of good points and this is a very interesting read, twice he speaks as though javascript was some niche thing during IE’s peak, but this wasn’t really the case in my experience, javascript was prominent even when netscape was on top prior to IE.
IE had some unique features, the article lists many I had forgotten about. Some things IE did better. However IMHO the main reason that we shunned them as web developers was that we needed cross browser portability over browser specific methods and IE was extremely guilty of not playing well with others. It was “microsoft versus the standards”, and for a while microsoft was winning because of windows bundling and threatened manufacturers who broke ranks to install netscape. Obviously this was the subject of microsoft’s second antitrust case. As a web developer I always chose portability first and non-standard IE features fell by the wayside when they lost control of the browser market.
When Netscape was on top prior to IE (so from 1995-1998) JavaScript was barely used at all. You could probably run just fine with javascript turned off. Only elite-webdevelopers could use both HTML, make it look good and work properly AND at code on both the serverside and clientside. There was almost no “full stack” developer, you were either a backend (code) or a frontend (html) guy at that time.* DreamWeaver and FrontPage had a couple of snippets for opening a popup window with fixed sizing and some validation controls and that was about it
* not just my personal memory and experience, https://medium.com/@benastontweet/lesson-1a-the-history-of-javascript-8c1ce3bffb17 has a pretty decent write-up.
avgalen,
I would not have called myself an “elite webdeveloper” at the time though, it was just my first job. Still, I was learning quickly and by the time IE became dominant javascript was already in widespread use. There were plenty of caveats with browsers of the time, but I don’t see a case to be made that it was more difficult or obscure then than today. Seriously that really doesn’t reflect my experience. Also remember that microsoft was pushing for vbscript on the server in the form of active serve pages and vbscript in the browser too. How differently things could have turned out…
ASP did become a regular staple of windows hosting. On the unix side we used CGI/perl before PHP took over. Many early websites relied on static HTML with javascripts for interaction (menus, moving/toggling DOM elements&images, form validation, etc). Server side CGI was mostly used for handling HTTP posts. In highschool I had a geocities site with insane javascripts and multifrime navigation. You had to be there to appreciate it, haha. I remember first trying IE and it breaking my scripts. Ah memories 🙂
Maybe we are having different definitions of widespread, or you got the timeframe different from me. We are talking about a time where internet came through dialup so you got your knowledge from books (always a year or 2 behind the state-of-the-art) or you read/printed the official specs (slow/limited/expensive)
Last night I took a trip down memory lane and created a timeline:
(unofficialy)
JavaScript Beta in May 1995
JavaScript included in Netscape in December 1995
IE overtook Netscape mid to end of 1998 (https://miro.medium.com/max/1425/1*iKA8K3wZIzKWAA-nNGujUg.png)
So that leaves us with a timeperiod of 3 years (dec 1995-jan 1999) at the utmost where JavaScript is possible in a browser and IE not having overtaken NetScape.
(officialy there was only a timeperiod of 1.5 years source: “A Brief History of JavaScript by the Creator of JavaScript” https://youtu.be/3-9fnjzmXWA?t=367)
* 1997 (june): EcmaScript 1, based on JavaScript 1
* 1998: EcmaScript 2 (just the ISO version of ES1)
* 1999: EcmaScript 3, based on JavaScript 1.2
There is no way that a new and complicated technology like cliendside programming would be in widespread use so quickly given the slow propagation of tooling and information at that time.
Just have a look at how complicated opening a new window was: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/Window/open. And that documentations is much better than what I had available at that time. screenX/Y vs screenLeft/Top 🙁
Another thing that was completely unclear to me back then was https://www.w3schools.com/jsref/obj_history.asp. Was it supported? Was it script? Why was there a back() and forward() when you could just use go(-1) and go(1). Why was length limited to 50?
A few examples of what sites looked by the time IE was taking over (basically all script is inserted by the WayBack machine)
view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/19980625180147/http://www.osnews.com/
view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/19990508052402/http://www.nu.nl/
A few years later this really started to change and JavaScript indeed became more common. Broadband started to become commonplace, WYSIWYG-Editors had split-screen codewindows and built-in JavaScript “snippets”, etc.
view-source:https://web.archive.org/web/20010720133213/http://www.moviemax.nl/
You
? I already mentioned the difficulty/cost of obtaining information and quality of tooling. Also, jQuery solving the browserdifferences, finally having standards. etc
DOM manipulation was extremely limited in the beginning of JavaScript. Before IE4/NS4 (1997) you could basically only do a bit of form validation and image-swapping. These were unreliable (browsersupport, slow/unreliable internetconnections) and complicated so mostly used through tooling or just ignored (https://www.dummies.com/software/adobe/dreamweaver/how-to-create-swaps-with-multiple-images-in-dreamweaver/)
Then came a few years of browser initiated (incompatible) Intermediate DOM through DHTML
DOM Level 1, W3C “Recommendation” became available when IE overtook NetScape and wasn’t widely supported by browsers for a few years. I would say that IE6 (2001) would be the baseline for proper JavaScript DOM manipulation. Even at that time Flash/Java-Applets were far more common than JavaScript DOM manipulation
So by the time we finally had a standardized DOM and EcmaScript, Netscape was basically dead and IE ruled the browserworld
Then IE stopped developing for many years and ES4 bombed (the dark ages)
Then jQuery solved the browserdifferences, javascript compilers like v8 started to make javascript fast, json and ES5 happened in 2009 and javascript has since ruled the browserworld with many more great improvements and toolkits)
aah, memories indeed 😉
avgalen,
I can agree with your timeline, The source of disagreement is in the statement that I emphasized above. It was neither complicated nor slow to propagate. Maybe my circumstances were unique I guess, but there was really very little obfuscation and we could learn a lot just by viewing the source of other pages. Personally I learned how to do html & javascript using online sources without books. Just now I tried doing a search, but everything from then is long gone. I did find javascript books from 1996 though!
https://www.amazon.com/Programming-Javascript-Netscape-2-0-Ritchey/dp/1562055852
https://www.amazon.com/Official-Netscape-Javascript-Book-Nonprogrammers/dp/1566044650
Meh, we survived, haha 🙂 You can say anything’s complicated, but compared with other programming technologies back then, I would argue that HTML & javascript were relatively easy and more discoverable than most other things I was doing.
A shame EdgeHTML(Trident’s fork) wasn’t opened up after Microsoft decided to go Chromium.
Yeah, I think that would be very useful, however.. I’m sure if enough eyes were interested enough they could probably find some security issues in it.
Who would that be useful to? Microsoft has started to include the parts of EdgeHTML that are better back into Chromium so the things that are worthwile from EdgeHTML are going to show up as Open Source in Chromium. the other parts are going to die out really quickly.
To projects like ReactOS, and or anyone that needs to replicate how Trident/EdgeHTML did things. I know there are corporate intranet web apps out there that only work or look ok on edgeHTML or IE. Not sure how the new chromium based version deals with them.
Besides, old Edge was pretty fast, and great at battery life.
Besides, lopsided duopolies are horrible in a market.
avgalen,
Do you know this for sure? I recently looked at microsoft’s source as mentioned in this thread ( http://www.osnews.com/story/131207/the-new-microsoft-edge-is-out-of-preview-and-now-available-for-download/#comments ) since I was genuinely curious to see microsoft’s changes. But a whole lot seemed to be missing from the source. I would like someone else to independently confirm this, but when I compared the sources expecting to see all of edge’s modifications, I was surprised to see the “source” include so many precompiled object files and by far most of the changes were just file deletions. What the heck does that mean?
Do I know this for sure? Yeah, pretty much:
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/01/27/microsoft-is-giving-some-edge-features-back-to-chrome/
https://www.techradar.com/news/chrome-may-soon-be-less-of-a-battery-guzzler-in-windows-10-thanks-to-microsoft
https://chromium-review.googlesource.com/q/author:*.microsoft.com+AND+status:merged
I haven’t done any code revisions, but as far as I understand Chromium isn’t “pure” but it includes a lot of links to “Google services”. Many of those links would be removed and/or replaced with Microsofts versions. If those are the precompiled object files you mentioned…I don’t know. It might also be that those precompiled object files are the references that make IE-mode possible
avgalen,
That’s solid evidence, I concede your point.
Agreed, I downloaded the source specifically to see what changed, only to be left with questions.
For example, chromium’s source has 41k .cc files whereas edge only has 6k. The files that are there do correspond to chromium source as expected, but why did microsoft omit the rest? I don’t know.
Actually the object files have descriptive filenames, they just lack source. There are 28k obj files all together totalling 13GB. Here’s just a random sampling for illustration:
Just now I went back and took a closer look at Z_God’s link.
https://thirdpartysource.microsoft.com/
You know, I made the assumption that microsoft would release usable source for the edge browser, which set my expectations of what to find. However maybe I was wrong and microsoft doesn’t intent to publish the edge source, in which case everything here makes more sense. These files could just be for 3rd party obligations as the blurb suggests. Only upstream sources.
Edge Chromium still has IE mode: https://pureinfotech.com/enable-ie-mode-microsoft-edge-chromium/
I haven’t had a chance to dive in – but I imagine the dev tools still allow developers to test EdgeHTML? I know the market was small of EdgeHTML users, but it’d be nice to at least still be able to test on that, and make sure everything is still working.
IE is still installable on Windows, so it’s still completely possible to test on old IE (as painful an experience as it is).
It was really that 5 year stagnation that did IE in (as the article pointed out in the end). IE was superior to Netscape 4, especially in the realm of crashes – and that’s saying a lot!
I definitely remember preferring IE6 to Netscape back when XP first launched… and then going back to Firefox 2 a few years later. I forget why I decided to try it, but discovering tabbed browsing was a revelation. That’s actually what started me down the journey of appreciating open source – Firefox, OpenOffice, and PuTTY, all running on XP, not out of any ideology, but because they were better.
It’s funny that tabbed browsing was first shipped with Opera, who were able to make a faster, more stable browser than IE, with a fraction of the development cost.
Too bad nobody cares about Opera. If a browser includes a paid version or has ad banners, it’s dead in the water since Windows 95 with Internet Explorer launched and even dead-er when Firefox became a thing.
And I like it that way. It’s time basic software is free of ads and monetary cost.
Totes! I had actually forgotten about the ads in Opera 5! I think they were gone by Opera 6, but it was too late by then.
90s kids remember that up to IE5.5, Internet Explorer was at the cutting edge of browser technology. Then Microsoft kind of forgot they had a browser project and didn’t give IE any knew features up until IE7 with the Vista release.
I remember when they released IE7 an intern asked Balmer why they didn’t just use webkit. He called her “cheeky.” Who’s cheeky now Balmer? Who’s cheeky now!?