Re: your first paragraph, this is exactly what Google does now. They maintain such an incredible pace of development and such a unilateral attitude that nobody can stop them from developing web standards even if they want to. When was the last time anyone said no to a Chrome feature and expected it everywhere else? Developers treat it as the go to to the extent that some don't even bother testing in other browsers. Google are showing Microsoft how it is done.
It makes you wonder if Microsoft had given developers what they wanted, i.e. modern CSS and Javascript support, more browser features, etc., would they have actually moved off of Internet Explorer?
No, we wouldn’t have moved. The two main reasons back during IE6 times were tabs, and as a web developer: debugging. Firebug was something which was way ahead of everything else.
AJAX of jQuery fame, is extremely similar to ActiveX XmlHttpRequest.
The problem isn't XmlHttpRequest, but everything else they added/removed. Same with Google. The problem isn't they made request more secure, they made ad blocking impossible.
My custom user scripts from Tampermonkey that I used to make my life as a developer easier are just gone. I can’t even access the extension to grab them, some of them are complicated workflow stuff that made my life easier in some pages that are poorly designed. Like I’m often looking at the contents of JWTs so I added a global function into my global scope to parse JWTs. There wasn’t even a “hey we’re getting rid of this extension back stuff up”, it’s just disabled.
What do you mean? I have the new version of Tampermonkey installed and after turning on developer mode in the extensions section all my scripts work perfectly.
https://www.tampermonkey.net/faq.php?locale=en#Q209
I don't see how that affects my argument. The point is, Active X had an XML HTTP Request way before it was standardized. Same with iframe, and other features.
Microsoft is known for treating developers pretty good. Much unlike Apple.
It wasn't supposed to be a rebuttal, I could just see the statement being really confusing for anyone not around back then who didn't realize terms had been mixed up.
