Web Performance News for the Week of March 10, 2014 – LoadStorm

In the early 2000s, IE 6 was the dominant web browsers that reigned supreme due to the lack of competition. This gave them the power to set the standard. Unfortunately, the standard was set all the way down to Satan’s feet. Because there wasn’t any competition at the time, the standard didn’t matter. Web developers had to make their websites compatible with IE. It was never the other way around. The lack of debugging tools, performance optimizations, and upgrades were little to none. IE 6 was released in 2000. For five staggering years, there was hardly an update. We didn’t see IE 7 until 2006. And here we are in 2014 with 22.2% of China still using Internet Explorer 6. Why?

Enforcing piracy laws in China wasn’t (still isn’t) a priority and XP was easy to pirate. The catch was that people had difficulty upgrading IE on a pirated version because Windows was checking to see if the copy was genuine. If pirates got anything newer, they would have to register their copy of Windows and pay for it.

XP for the Win

The release of IE 6 was supposed to be the be-all and end-all. When Windows XP was released in 2001, Microsoft required third party hardware manufacturers like Dell, HP, and Gateway to include IE 6 in all copies of XP. If these companies didn’t want IE 6 on their PCs and laptops, Microsoft would not agree to sell them copies of Windows. This move is what also killed Netscape. By removing Netscape off the map, Microsoft increased their browser market share. So, what did the number one web browser do when they were at the top spot? Nothing. Most members on the IE team were reorganized into the MSN division to build MSN Explorer. Since IE 6 had the biggest slice of pie, Microsoft believed that the browser war was over, innovation hit its peak, and the new nemesis to focus on was AOL.

Because Netscape was crushed and IE 6 achieved dominate market share, Microsoft disassembled their IE team and placed everyone on different projects. The belief was that the future of applications would be desktop based. That was one reason why there was a five-year gap between IE 6 and IE 7. The lack of continuous improvement for IE was frustrating for developers. The absence of updating IE lead to bugs and flaws in the browser security which turned IE 6 into an attack vector for hackers. 

Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish

Microsoft has been successful because of their their closed solutions which gave them a competitive advantage in the marketplace. They took the word processor and excel market away from WordPerfect and Lotus. Microsoft did this by making their product incompatible with the competition. Word Perfect could not read Word files, and the architecture of Lotus was incompatible with Excel. This strategy from Microsoft was called well EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish). Microsoft would implement a product and eventually enact incompatibilities on it. Finally, Microsoft would have enough power to push any potential competitor out of the market. This business culture that Microsoft was built on would not work for IE.

Originally Titled Phoenix

Firefox was introduced in 2005, one year before IE 7 was introduced. Firefox’s layout engine (Gecko) was heavily dependent on open source libraries. This was an advantage because developers using open source leveraged a passionate community that made a difference in development.  Microsoft’s layout engine (Trident) did not fit well with W3C standards, JavaScript implementation, or Java implementation. As a matter of fact, Microsoft originally intended to remove Java off the grid which resulted in a lawsuit.

Firefox first came along by reintroducing tabbed browsing from Opera. They did what IE was failing to do correctly, which was following  W3C standards and consistently updated their browser for their users. Once Web developers were able to make pages that followed web standards,  IE’s reputation became worse. Microsoft eventually rolled out IE 8, which seemed to compete well against Firefox at the time but they didn’t introduce IE 9 until two years later. This gave Firefox the time to continue gaining more users while consistently patching and send updates to users. IE was simply falling behind the times. With each new update from their competitors, It seemed like IE failed  to stay up-to-date against Firefox’s and eventually Chrome’s web standards.

The release of IE 9 was a turn around for IE. Microsoft paid attention to their users and worked better with W3C on following web standards. Their latest IE 11 proved to meet the standards of the web. Is it the best? That’s debatable. Reputation wise, IE still has a long way to go before they can be considered a serious browser.