This is a good story. You can take away several things from it. Here's mine: it demonstrates the value of reputation and trust and how easily they're lost and how hard they are to recover.
IE4 came out at a time when Microsoft considered Netscape an existential threat. IE4 was really the last nail in the coffin. It was actually way better/faster than NS. By the time IE6 came around, there was no imminent threat to Windows in the form of the Web being a platform replacement. So IE6 stagnated and became the bane of the Internet. IE-specific hacks (and IE6 in particular) became the norm for Web developers. It was pervasive too. For example, IE had a completely different interpretation of the CSS box model to everyone else (specifically, how padding, margin and width should interoperate).
Fast forward some years and Microsoft is not the same place it was under Gates or, more importantly, Ballmer (he had the longer tenure in the modern Internet era). Nadella really does seem to represent a different approach and MS has produced some great tech (eg Typescript).
But IE died because of the reputation it earned and all the existing hacks around it. It got renamed to Edge specifically to avoid the if-IE blocks and to more cleanly cast off IE-legacy behaviour.
But the fact is, no one really trusts MS anymore when it comes to the Web (Typescript notwithstanding). So Edge just became rebranded Webkit much like Safari/Chrome.
To be fair, some other stuff contributed to the death of IE and some of it was pretty dodgy (eg little things Google did that crippled non-Chrome browsers such as hardware video decoding on Youtube).
Anyway, you see this too with Google and what's now a meme about chat applications (Meet, Talk, Hangouts, Duo, allo, anyone?). Google is also now a meme for dropping support for things people use. Reader is the posterchild for this even though my opinion is this wasn't as big of a deal as people make out.
But the cost in all that is now no one trusts anything Google launches to be there in 3 years. Reputation matters. Apple gets this even though they've also killed some things (eg Safari for Windows). Google really doesn't.
Lastly, as far as Youtubers having an identity of not being Googlers, this was certainly still the case 5 years ago and may still be the case today. They have a separate campus (in San Bruno) and generally eschew anything Google3-related. They also still called themselves Youtubers.
> For example, IE had a completely different interpretation of the CSS box model to everyone else (specifically, how padding, margin and width should interoperate).
One interesting outcome of this is we now have the `box-sizing` CSS rule to choose between the original, default box model (content-box) and the IE box model (border-box). Basically every project I've looked into opts into the IE box model.
The IE box model was correct, but different from all other browsers, and in addition to all the other bugs and IE6-isms (which were wrong), was pretty annoying to deal with.
I suppose it's kind of humorous then that YouTube has hardly been integrated into the Google ecosystem sofar as a redirect to auth.youtube.com is done on other Google products to propagate the auth information. This has caused issues with teachers wanting to block YouTube yet still have Google Classroom [1]
> IE4 came out at a time when Microsoft considered Netscape an existential threat. IE4 was really the last nail in the coffin. It was actually way better/faster than NS. By the time IE6 came around, there was no imminent threat to Windows in the form of the Web being a platform replacement. So IE6 stagnated and became the bane of the Internet. IE-specific hacks (and IE6 in particular) became the norm for Web developers. It was pervasive too. For example, IE had a completely different interpretation of the CSS box model to everyone else (specifically, how padding, margin and width should interoperate).
Well, let's also remember that the governments of the the United States and the European Union came in and intervened with Microsoft's use of Internet Explorer. With the benefit of hindsight, we can see this is an aberration -- every other major consumer OS (macOS, iOS, Android) has a bundled web browser that has significant market share among that OS's user base. No government seems to have gotten involved in these operating systems.
Microsoft's decision to stop investing so much in IE can be contextualized by noting that major world governments intervened to insist that Microsoft's marketshare in web browsers was reduced. It's not a shocker that organizations respond to their incentives, and Microsoft's incentives to spend a lot of money on IE were reduced by government involvement.
> ... every other major consumer OS (macOS, iOS, Android) has a bundled web browser
At the time Windows had a >90% market share and there weren't mobile Internet devices so it should be held to a different standard.
That being said, I do think governments rush to action on tech issues where it's completely unnecessary.
I do agree the agree the government suit did play a role in browser tech languishing at MS. I honestly believe they didn't think they were doing anything wrong. After all, this was part of MS's "embrace, extend, extinguish" MO. They tried the same thing with Java. So after that it felt to me (as an observer) that MS didn't really know what to do.
From the outside it appeared very strongly that Microsoft deliberately allowed IE to stagnate with the end goal that the web should mean IE and IE only.
That wasn’t a response to government but a strategy to tie the web to Windows as the only platform which could run real IE6.
They could bundle a browser with macOS or Linux but it was much use if it wouldn’t work with your bank, corporate or government sites.
They used the same strategy to have Office files be memory dumps of the programs that created them and formidably hard to support by 3rd parties.
In the UK, for a while at least, IE was pre-installed in desktop versions but would give you a browser choice on first run. I haven't installed Windows for a while. I don't think the server versions ever had that choice screen.
IE4 came out at a time when Microsoft considered Netscape an existential threat. IE4 was really the last nail in the coffin. It was actually way better/faster than NS. By the time IE6 came around, there was no imminent threat to Windows in the form of the Web being a platform replacement. So IE6 stagnated and became the bane of the Internet. IE-specific hacks (and IE6 in particular) became the norm for Web developers. It was pervasive too. For example, IE had a completely different interpretation of the CSS box model to everyone else (specifically, how padding, margin and width should interoperate).
Fast forward some years and Microsoft is not the same place it was under Gates or, more importantly, Ballmer (he had the longer tenure in the modern Internet era). Nadella really does seem to represent a different approach and MS has produced some great tech (eg Typescript).
But IE died because of the reputation it earned and all the existing hacks around it. It got renamed to Edge specifically to avoid the if-IE blocks and to more cleanly cast off IE-legacy behaviour.
But the fact is, no one really trusts MS anymore when it comes to the Web (Typescript notwithstanding). So Edge just became rebranded Webkit much like Safari/Chrome.
To be fair, some other stuff contributed to the death of IE and some of it was pretty dodgy (eg little things Google did that crippled non-Chrome browsers such as hardware video decoding on Youtube).
Anyway, you see this too with Google and what's now a meme about chat applications (Meet, Talk, Hangouts, Duo, allo, anyone?). Google is also now a meme for dropping support for things people use. Reader is the posterchild for this even though my opinion is this wasn't as big of a deal as people make out.
But the cost in all that is now no one trusts anything Google launches to be there in 3 years. Reputation matters. Apple gets this even though they've also killed some things (eg Safari for Windows). Google really doesn't.
Lastly, as far as Youtubers having an identity of not being Googlers, this was certainly still the case 5 years ago and may still be the case today. They have a separate campus (in San Bruno) and generally eschew anything Google3-related. They also still called themselves Youtubers.