Microsoft IE, everybody’s favorite software punching bag, takes its final bow today. Here’s how it pushed the interactive web forward.
Web 2.0 might have never happened without what was possibly the most reviled piece of software in history. Today, Microsoft Internet Explorer—which at one point accounted for more than 90% of web browsers in use and was the first web browser included with Apple Macs—bids farewell to the world. And the world has not been kind. People have not appreciated IE and even made a sport of denigrating it. True, much of the criticism was merited, especially in its last few years once Google’s Chrome browser took over to become the dominant player. Chrome left IE in the dust in terms of speed, and it sticks to open web standards whereas IE used proprietary technologies. The Wellspring of Web 2.0
Web 2.0, in which web pages were no longer static entities but could update themselves without contacting the web server for every page update, relied at first on Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). It found its first manifestation in Internet Explorer 5.0, thanks to its support for XMLHttpRequest in 1999. Even before that, Microsoft’s ActiveX technology, based on COM (component object model) software framework, gave programmers a way to do program-like things in the browser. As a result, we got online word processors, streaming media sites, and other marvels. IE brought other innovations to the web browser, too, several of which became part of the HTML standards. The DOM (document object model) allowed any part of a web page to be manipulated by JavaScript, as well as the ubiquitous innerHTML DOM extension. Iframe was another innovation that offered a way to show a web page within a window inside another web page. Then came IE’s support for events and event bubblingevent bubbling. Some of the events the IE developers pioneered include stuff we do every day in the browser: right-clicking to get context menus, spinning the mouse wheel, and cursor hovering.
