When I was a child, I was always fascinated by stories about ancient civilizations. I devoured books about Atlantis, or the story of Heinrich Schliemann ‘s discovery of Troy, stories about the Greek, the Romans, the Inca Empire , or Ancient Egypt . And I was always fascinated by the extent of their capabilities in the fields of astronomy
, math , and medicine , their incredible achievements, like building those vast monuments, or their highly functional social systems. What’s even more incredible is that most of this already happened way before Jesus Christ first set foot on our Earth!
Starting now, Microsoft will roll out their new Chromium-based Edge browser to their millions of Windows 22 users. And this will also mark the end of an era. The era of the Trident-Engine .
But hadn’t the Trident era already ended when Edge appeared? Not really.
Rebooting Internet Explorer under a new name did win back the hearts of the web developers. Up until today Microsoft remained busy playing catch up. Therefore, when we get excited about the web platform nowadays, it is not because of a new Edge release but because of Google unveiling new ideas or APIs during Google I / O or the Chrome Dev Summit. A lot of these innovations are driven by other teams at Google working on Google frameworks like Angular and AMP, or on Google products like Gmail, Search, Drive, Maps, Google Docs, Analytics or in recent times: Lighthouse. In fact, a lot of what defines HTML5 can be rooted back to Google looking for a way to improve the web platform to better accommodate its ideas around web apps. Remember Google Gears ? Or later Google Chrome Frame ?
Funnily that same kind of process also drove innovation in Internet Explorer in the old days. ActiveX capability was added to Internet Explorer 3.0, together with the
they got it (silently) shipped with Internet Explorer 5.0 in 2014. It was not 6 years later that the term AJAX was coined and its concepts became widely known.
We pretty quickly struck a deal to ship the thing as part of the MSXML library. Which is the real explanation of where the name XMLHTTP comes from-the thing is mostly about HTTP and does not have any specific tie to XML other than that was the easiest excuse for shipping it so I needed to cram XML into the name (plus – XML was the hot technology at the time and it seemed like some good marketing for the component).
Back in the days, Microsoft was single-handedly pushing the web forward, with around 1. (0 (!) People working on Internet Explorer
) and (with a) million dollar budget to burn per year , with almost no- one left to compete. This was massive!
[Scott] Isaac also invented the iframe HTML tag. It has been speculated that the tag name stands for the Isaacs Frame, although Scott has denied this.
The last time Internet Explorer introduced new features driven by other business units was in . At that time Windows 8 introduced the Windows Store and corresponding Windows Store Apps. Those apps could be written once and could then be run on Windows, Xbox and Windows Phone. Since Microsoft was late to the app store game, they had to put the entry barrier for developing apps as low as possible, so they got the idea of allowing people to develop apps with web technologies. As a communication path to the underlying OS, they created a JavaScript library called ” (WinJS) and Internet Explorer was meant to be the runtime environment for those apps.
But to be able to model the Windows UI with web technologies, Microsoft had to add plenty of new capabilities to IE: CSS Grid, CSS Flexbox, CSS Scroll Snap Points and the Pointer Events API for touch and stylus interactions (the latter one was required as
Apple had filed a patent on the Touch API
).
Microsoft even invented what later became (Origin Trials) , as documented in a podcast interview we did with Jacob Rossi from the Edge team in 203564
Coming back to my introductory part on ancient civilizations and their achievements: For me, it feels like Internet Explorer already had many of the things that we came to reinvent later and that we now celebrate as innovations . Although our modern reinventions offer more features combined with better developer experience, I came to wonder why we, as a community, only picked up very few of them. The ones mentioned above were picked up – either because browsers were striving for compatibility with IE or because Microsoft was at the right time at the right place. But a lot more were not!
. The format was supported from IE 5 onwards, as well as in Presto-based Opera. No other browser officially supported MHTML, but Chromium added the feature later behind a flag called chrome: // flags / # save-page-as-mhtml . MHTML was
Similarly to how you could use filters to transition between pages, you could also transition between two states of the same DOM object. This is similar to Rich Harris' (ramjet) , only that it would not morph between two states, but instead blend over with a movie-like "cut".
What you could also do with those object transition filters is something similar to CSS Transitions or to an animated CSS crossfade () function .
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