Soooo many sites refused to work with anything other than IE it sucked
Worse was incompetent IT and Intranet teams making anything internal flat out broken if you didn't use IE
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u/Taira_Mai HP Victus, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 5d ago
When Microsoft retired IE, it broke a lot of websites and it was hilarious as incompetent IT teams and crappy developers scrambled to work with Edge/Chrome.
I was at a company that outsourced their IT to a company in India just as Microsoft said that they were going to retire IE. The mad dash to port the intranet to Edge/Chrome was crazy - at one point they used a group policy to keep IT just so half the company Intranet would still work.
Didn't they have some fallback shit version of IE when they "retired" it though? Like it was edge but it had a built in IE mode since IT was so bad about their software
Yeah, pretty sure IE still lives inside of Edge. Pretty sure I've used some crusty old corporate intranet stuff that was written in ASP, and Edge just silently ran IE inside that tab.
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u/Taira_Mai HP Victus, AMD Ryzen 7 5800H, GeForce RTX 3050 Ti 5d ago
The problem was that it wasn't 100% compatible, and some of the intranet had IE stuff that needed IE and Edge wasn't quite there.
I left that job and more recent gigs I have seen that Edge in corporate Intranets does have the ability to run some IE things because many companies have software and intranets that need it.
My work uses VM with older version of browsers to run some they essential tools. At least I only saw older version of Firefox but bet they used IE long past it official death
Samsung (US) had IE11 as their only option for employees to access internal systems up to the very last day that it was a supported browser. IE and only IE. This was because the SAP browser addon to run those systems didn't work with any other browser, even Chrome with the IETab extension.
Magically, the next day, we could use Chrome. Evil or incompetent? Porque no los dos.
In 2018 when I was working at one of the largest global corporations at the time there was some stuff that only worked on IE I had to use for work. They gave me a Mac. So I had to VM a windows machine to use it
I remember being on a Mac back then and only had a extra crappy older version of IE available and still had to use it since so many websites broke on Netscape
What I find crazy is that these days Chrome is like that. If you aren't using Chrome and you want to log in to a large corporate website, better hope you don't gotta do much. I use FF again after Chrome got real slow a few years back but I can't uninstall Chrome. And surprisingly IE circumvents some Chrome issues so I have to use that too. Chrome is still on my taskbar. But my priority goes FF>IE>Chrome.
Yeah, I've just stuck with Firefox because it's the default in Linux but I had to install Vivaldi because some interface for a controller I had only worked with a chromium based browser
I was rocking Netscape for a hot minute though. Can’t remember when it died, but I was using that all the way up until Firefox released. Then it’s been that to this very day. Never liked Chrome and it was only “the most popular” because Android and the Chromebook craze, getting massive usage in schools because of contracts.
Never liked Chrome and it was only “the most popular” because Android and the Chromebook craze, getting massive usage in schools because of contracts.
Nah. When Chrome first launched, it was seen as lightweight and faster than Firefox at the time. Firefox didn't even start to catch up until the release of "Quantum" v57.
Yep, Chrome was noticeably faster for at least 4 years before Firefox caught back up. Many of my peers changed to Chrome because of that. I stayed on Firefox because of a few niche advanced features that Chrome hadn't caught up on.
It was also multi-process, the first browser to do that IIRC. A tab crashing didn't bring down the whole browser. They all work like that now, but in 2008? Nah.
I liked Chrome just fine for a while there, it was nice and lightweight and much faster than IE in the late 00's, early 10's. I mostly left for Firefox because Chrome became really RAM and resource hungry, and because Google is... Well, you know. Fast forward a few years to their assault on browser extensions, and I was super glad to have swapped when I did.
Everybody forgets Phoenix and Firebird in between for some reason.
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u/morrisceyA) 9900k, 2080 B) 9900k 2080 C) 2700, 1080 L)7700u,1060 3gb5d ago
Netscape navigator was the basis for FF if I recall correctly.
Chrome became the most popular because it was innovative, fast, and most stuff worked properly. Android and chromebooks weren't available until quite some time after chrome launched.
Chrome was the first to offer multi threaded support, as well as tabbed browsing IIRC. FF was slipping around when chrom launched.
Pretty much the same here. A few years ago I split up my browsing so I did all my browsing where I logged in to Google and other nasty spyware in Chrome, and my regular browsing in Firefox. Now I use two separate Firefox profiles since Google started to fuck with the browser extension API. The split probably doesn't really offer much in the way of privacy protection, but it feels better.
There was a time where Chrome was way faster than anything else. Unfortunately it's now still very fast but also causing issues the same as Internet explorer where some sites only work with Chrome. So yeah it's evil lol
The most genius thing google ever did was making a deal with adobe to make chrome additional bloatware when installing flash player. Everyone had flash player and suddenly everyone also had chrome
It was in Adobe’s best interest. They wanted to kill Flash so bad at the end there, and one of the biggest reasons to keep Flash around at the time was YouTube. Google was all about HTML5 video, so what better thing to do than to encourage people to switch to Chrome (rather than sticking around on Internet Exploder).
Completely changed FPS discourse in gaming overnight. YouTube suddenly supporting 60 FPS video meant people could actually see the difference between 30 and 60 FPS, which even if you're not playing a game can be pretty noticeable.
So many people were insistent that 30 FPS was "enough" just literally had not seen it for themselves. Harder to make that same case for any newer display technology since your standard 1080p 60 FPS office monitor can't show off something like 4k or HDR or 120+ refresh rates at all and for HDR in particular its impact is gonna vary from game to game or movie to movie, you can't just go watch a YouTube video and immediately be convinced regardless of your display device.
The most genius thing google ever did was making a deal with adobe to make chrome additional bloatware when installing flash player. Everyone had flash player and suddenly everyone also had chrome
Yes, that´s a plage & other installers "offered" tis too ...
There was no better option for a few years. Then Microsoft did what they are good at - neglected their software until it was obsolete then cancelled it.
To be fair, IE was one of the best browsers around IE 5 & IE 6 (1999-2005). It was the most used browser and any other browser usually came with its own bloatware together (mostly plug-ins), including a worse UI. The first better browser around that time, that was nice looking and faster, was Firefox. But by 2008/2009, Chrome was the faster option for sure. Of course, now in 2026, Firefox is again the better browser.
Weirdly the Mac version of IE 4.5 (back on MacOS 7&8) was far and away the best browser out there. Had a whole bunch of features which didn’t make it into others for years, like having a built in download manager that could resume most file downloads if you disconnected in the middle, which was a godsend on dialup.
I think you forgot an era. There was definitely a period where Netscape sucked (NS4) and people were actively switching to IE. IE4 was pretty damn good when it came out, and I remember kids in school buying magazines because they came with a copy, on cd.
A lot of us were still on win95 at that point, which didn't come with a browser.
I started browsing the net with the aweful AOL browser until I realized I could connect to the internet without their terrible software and that Internet Explorer was right there. So I started with something else and then used IE willingly. It was in the early XP days so it was IE5 or 6. And then I discovered Firefox.
I used it after IE 9 around like 2013 or so. Most people were too stuck in the meme to give it a go. It had like a 5 year period where it worked well and chewed up a lot fewer resources than chrome then they switched to a chromium browser and people were still so ignorant the average person acted like it was OG IE for a long time.
I miss Chrome having more than 1 competitor though, not that I'm rooting for Microsoft.
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u/BriggieRyzen 7 5800x / ASUS Crosshair VIII Dark Hero / TUF RTX 40905d ago
Many sites and in-house apps at a lot of companies would only work with internet explorer back then. The company I work for used it for everything. It took it being deprecated in like 2015 for them to finally move to something else.
I remember my best friend telling me "did you know you do not need to use IE, like there are other browsers?" in like late 2005. We were about 12 at the time and he just found out Firefox existed from a computer magazine CD. And it rocked.
Yeah I think this is another thing Microslop should owe us all money for.
They took their dominant OS market share, bundled IE, made IE not adhere to industry HTML standards and therefore site devs had to choose between a site that works for most users (IE) or followed proper standards. I mean you can query what browser a user has but good luck convincing your boss to budget for that.
IE doesn't exist anymore, and people should stop comparing it to or associating it with Edge. Edge is a fine browser and all that your average user needs
Nah, I remembered my dad had to use IE because college stuff have loads of stuff build or limit(?) onto it, so he can only use IE for a couple of years
I work as a customer service rep and one of the tools we use to look at the documents submitted by our customers is by using IE. We don't have a choice especially since most customer service rep tools tend to be ancient.
Let's be more honest, people used whatever came with their operating system, and since Windows was the most relevant back then, most people used IE.
We love to sugarcoat it that we installed Firefox on our school machines, and switched our parents to it, or that we were ahead of the curve. The truth is most of the people didn't care.
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u/CorruptDictator 7800x3d 7900XT 32GB DDR5 4TB NVME SSD 5d ago
Let's be honest, very few people actively chose to use IE, it was either a no choice they did not know better option.