Current Events > Why has Internet Explorer failed so consistently

(+) Yeah! (+)

How did they never get it right?

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Because Internet Explorer sounds like a Nikelodeon show that would get cancelled midway through its first season.

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it used to be fine. like 20 years ago I think it was popular

Because it doesn't get community support. The only thing that makes Firefox and other browsers work is the massive amount of free labor that hobbyists throw at it to build tools and add-ons. Since Microsoft is "the bad guy" , people don't want to put in that work so it ends up behind the other browsers in terms of features.

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s0nicfan posted...

Because it doesn't get community support. The only thing that makes Firefox and other browsers work is the massive amount of free labor that hobbyists throw at it to build tools and add-ons. Since Microsoft is "the bad guy" , people don't want to put in that work so it ends up behind the other browsers in terms of features.

It's rather hard to put in work for a browser that isn't open source.

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BatmanWTtP posted...

How did they never get it right?

That's a very long story. Edge is apparently quite good however, but I have no reason to use it tbh. Felt like too little too late.

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CommunismFTW posted...

BatmanWTtP posted...

How did they never get it right?

That's a very long story. Edge is apparently quite good however, but I have no reason to use it tbh. Felt like too little too late.

Edge has actually taken up a good chunk of market share recently. Rebuilding it with a chromium base helps a lot.
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The new Edge is pretty good.

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I like to compare it to Elder Scrolls. The base game is alright, but it really becomes something special when it has the support of fans to keep it updated. Sadly Internet Explorer doesn't have that option, so people like me flock to Chrome or Firefox, or the dozen variations of said games.

Edge is a Chrome reskin these days it used the same web rendering agent.

To answer the question....

BatmanWTtP posted...

How did they never get it right?

Internet Explorer never adopted proper standards set by the W3C. This means if you were a web developer and built a website the way you were taught to build a website properly according to guidelines by people who created the fucking HTML in the first place, there's a pretty good chance it just wouldn't work on Internet Explorer.

Various tricks were employed to weasel around this like trying to render different webpages to different browsers but it was functionally impossible for web developers to maintain such a thing at the same speed that browser updates were breaking those tricks.

So at the end of the day most people just settled on "this only works in ie" or "don't use ie"

However, "this only works in ie" ended up being by far the more popular solution at first. This resulted in ie, which was never standards compliant at any point, the standard, and most popular browser. If your head is spinning by now that's basically what the ring around the e was supposed to represent. This resulted in ie being targeted by hackers the most so people who were forced to use it suddenly found their systems or browser compromised because they were forced into a standard that wasn't a standard.

Why did anyone ever use ie in the first place though? Active Directory and windows group policy let businesses place robust restrictions and monitoring on ie but not other browsers. These days there's ways to do that without AD or group policies so there's no reason any longer to keep using ie.

Now we're in a situation where Chrome is the most popular so even Microsoft stopped using ie and is now just using Edge which is Microsoft branded chromium browser.

tl;dr fuck the internet.

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Zikten posted...

it used to be fine. like 20 years ago I think it was popular

20 years ago there were like three main browsers on the market and IE was so predominant because it came installed with every version of Windows.

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I remember in high school the cool kids (read the not cool kids, including me), all carried either a flash drive with pocket Firefox or had pocket Firefox in our student network folder so we could use that instead of IE. We felt like renegades.

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Ivany2008 posted...

I like to compare it to Elder Scrolls. The base game is alright, but it really becomes something special when it has the support of fans to keep it updated. Sadly Internet Explorer doesn't have that option, so people like me flock to Chrome or Firefox, or the dozen variations of said games.

This makes a lot of sense

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and I realized now that I typed games instead of browsers :(. Anyways, IE doesn't really update properly and doesn't have access to the mods supporting Chrome or Firefox.