Microsoft terminates support for IE. As an ordinary user and developer, let’s talk about my love and hate for IE. The first time I came into contact with IE was in 2000. I was 20 years old that year. Think about it, 22 years have passed. The operating system in Internet cafes bac

Microsoft terminated the support of ie. As an ordinary user and developer, let’s talk about my love and hate for IE.

The first time I came into contact with IE was in 2000. I was 20 years old at that time. Think about it, it is already 22 years. It's over.
The operating system in Internet cafes back then was win98, and IE5 was the default browser for this operating system. The icon of
IE is a blue e character. It was also the software I used the most at that time. I used it to enter our local online chat room. There are various friends from the local area in the online chat room. It is also used to browse
, , Sina , NetEase, , Sohu, and other portal websites.
can even browse overseas websites such as Yahoo. I was pleasantly surprised by all these magical things. I later learned that
is what everyone calls surfing the Internet.
IE is definitely an important software for surfing the Internet.

Browser history

Here, we first briefly introduce the history of IE browser .
ie was not the only browser at that time. There were earlier browsers, but they were all defeated by it.

In 1993, Mosaic, the world's first true browser, was born.

In 1994, Netscape Communications Company of the United States released version 1.0 of Netscape browser , which quickly seized market dominance. With the release of subsequent versions, Netscape browser even reached 90% market share. The

javascript language was a computer language developed at that time for the interaction between users and browsers. It is said that the author Brendan Eich spent 10 days designing this language.
I guess he never thought that this casually designed language would eventually develop into one of the most popular languages ​​today.

Netscape was launched in 1995, and the stock price tripled on the first day, which aroused Microsoft's concern. Microsoft is getting involved in the browser wars.
Microsoft purchased the source code of Mosaic and developed its own browser Internet Explorer based on Mosaic. In this war of
, Microsoft took full advantage of its operating system monopoly, relying on the sales method of Windows 95 + IE to directly defeat Netscape's monopoly, and the subsequent , Windows 98, and bundling of IE4 directly affected Netscape's life. In the browser war of
, Microsoft finally defeated Netscape by using its own operating system advantages.

In January 1998, the Netscape browser became free and open source, and the Mozilla Foundation was established.
is worth mentioning: Firefox version 1.0 was officially released on November 9, 2004. This is a new generation browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation based on the source code of Netscape. This started the road to the demise of IE. Of course, this is something.
On November 24, 1998, AOL acquired Netscape in a tax-free stock exchange for US$4.2 billion.
In August 2001, IE6 was released.
In 2003, IE browser market share reached its peak: 95%

Because there was no rival, Microsoft had no motivation to update the browser. By the time the next version of the browser IE7 was released, it was already October 2006. After five years, no new version of the browser was released.
I once thought that Microsoft had disbanded the IE development team, but this is actually the case. When you have defeated all your opponents and waste time and money on improving the browser, it really didn't make sense to Microsoft at the time. big.
finally IE7, IE8, IE9, IE10, IE11, Edge were developed one after another. However,
can no longer restore Microsoft's decline in the browser market. Google and chrome are the best.
analysis agency StatCounter announced the data analysis results of the world's most popular browsers in May 2022.
data shows that Chrome continues to maintain an undisputed leading position in the mobile browser field with a market share of 64.87%. Google Chrome’s share of the entire
market (mobile + desktop) is 64.95%

IE11, released on July 29, 2015, is the last The IE version, and later the browser included in Windows, was Edge.

Microsoft's antitrust litigation episode

It is precisely because Microsoft bundled the browser that the US government began to conduct an antitrust investigation against Microsoft. Old netizens who have been using
for some years should still remember that the file manager and browser at that time could be converted into each other.
Enter the URL in the file manager, and the file browser will be changed into a browser. Enter the local file path in the browser address bar, and the browser will become a file manager. In other words, the browser and the operating system are integrated.
Bill Gates used this during his defense, saying that the browser was part of the operating system, not a separate software, and finally won the lawsuit.

Disadvantages of IE browser

The shortcomings of IE browser are really too numerous to describe. I will write down some of the most hated shortcomings here.

pop-up window

IE6 does not have a tab browsing function. To access a website, you need to open a window, and the javascript language can also pop up a new window.
has led to the abuse of this function. Basically, they are pop-up advertisements. In some cases, a website can have more than 10 small windows pop-up, all of which are advertisements. Is
an advertisement or a conscience? What's more, some content that is not suitable for children will pop up. If there are other people around at this time, it will be embarrassing. Some malicious
websites can even prevent users from closing the browser and keep them there. You can add code that pops up a new window in the event of closing the browser. In
, when the user just closes a browser window, another new window pops up. Hard to guard against.
Let me insert a short story here:

In the past, online chat rooms had the function of bringing people out of the chat room, and the function of popping up countless pop-up windows, causing the user's computer to freeze and requiring a hardware restart. In the chat room of
at that time, you could hang up in the chat room and get points, and then you could upgrade the user level based on the points. There is a buddy in
who hangs in the chat room in the middle of the night to earn points. Then I don’t know what the administrator got mad at, kicked this guy out of the chat room, and opened countless windows.
Finally, when this guy woke up in the morning, he found that his computer was burned out.

However, that was also the era when personal websites were the most profitable. You need to know about
. Every time an advertisement pops up, it is money.
Of course, current browsers cannot pop up windows through scripts. Pop-up windows are only allowed when the user is operating. This is already quite strict.

supports ActiveX control, which allows browsers to install extensions online, giving birth to 3721, the father of rogue software.

IE has such a function. Using the object tag, you can embed some other components (ActiveX), such as banks, which will replace the browser with their own controls. Input box to prevent keyboard input from being eavesdropped. The
browser can also run VBScript, and then create shell, fsobject, etc. through vbscript. As long as the user accidentally clicks OK, it means that the website can access and create local files at will. Therefore, it is no joke to be infected by a virus after visiting a web page. Although the above functions of
are very powerful, they are more often abused. This kind of security problem of

browser has also made some websites or companies successful.
is like the infamous 3721 Chinese Internet access. There was a time when
, whenever you open the browser and surf the Internet, a 3721 plug-in installation prompt will pop up. What is
3721? Old netizens should have memories. This is a Chinese Internet plug-in founded by Zhou Hongyi, the current chairman of 60 company , which provides the function of entering Chinese directly to the website. In
, for example, if you enter Sina in the address bar, you will be directed to Sina without having to enter the entire domain name.
makes money by selling the Chinese direct function. There is nothing wrong with
, but 3721’s promotion method is too rogue. In those days, a lot of websites promoted
. As long as you open the website, a pop-up window for installing 3721 will pop up. As long as you accidentally click OK, then, congratulations, you will have an extra message on your browser. toolbar.When
was at its most exaggerated, my browser had three or four inexplicable toolbars. After installation, I want to delete this toolbar. Sorry, it cannot be deleted.

It is precisely because of this rogue way to promote his own software that Zhou Hongyi is called the father of rogue software. The irony of
is that 3721 was later sold to Yahoo, and Zhou Hongyi founded the later 360 Antivirus. At this time, the amazing operation of
came. 60 will judge 3721 as rogue software. I also accepted this operation.

hao123 Modify the browser homepage without user consent

Some websites in the past also benefited from IE's security issues, such as the hao123 website with huge traffic, which was the URL navigation website acquired by Baidu . The rise of
was also inseparable from some rogue behaviors. For example, as long as
users entered the hao123 website, the website would automatically add itself to favorites and automatically set the browser's homepage without the user's consent. And it can’t be changed back. Although the operation of
is rogue, it is indeed effective. At that time, this humble website was the default homepage of computer browsers in various Internet cafes. It is said that its traffic is close to that of the three major portals of the year.

In current browsers, it is no longer possible to use scripts to add web pages to favorites, nor to set them as homepages.

Read the clipboard without prompting and upload to the website without prompting

I also wrote some personal projects in those years, inserted the code to read the clipboard into the web page, and uploaded the content to the website using ajax.
(Of course, the number of visits to my website is very small, just for curiosity and testing. The code was later removed, and it did not do any bad things.)
is a very scary function. Some users may save the clipboard Some important information was uploaded to the website in this way, and the consequences were really disastrous. In addition,
, IE can use a small notebook to directly simulate clicking on a file upload control, and then a file selection dialog box will pop up. At this time, if you select a file.
, then this file is likely to be uploaded directly to the server without your knowledge.
's current browsers cannot use scripts to simulate clicks on the file upload control.

is not friendly to developers

I will simply list some:

• For example, css needs to add '+ *' and other strange characters before the css class name to solve the behavior of some specific browsers. I was once confused about this approach to
  . Shouldn't software development be very rigorous? And how to use bugs as features to differentiate programming? In the early development of
• , there were no developer tools. In order to debug js programs, when variables need to be printed, alert is generally used to print out the values. Some script errors in
  do not locate that line of the program, making it extremely difficult to debug the program.
  , so I also admire that and Google at the time could write applications like gmail. At the time, it was really shocking.
  can write a web page to have the same experience as a local application. It was incredible at the time.
• Web pages still being rendered by IE sometimes have inexplicable elements missing, incorrect positions, and other strange situations. The main reason is that it is not clear under what specific circumstances it will occur. This problem can really drive people crazy. At the time of
  , I hoped that this damn IE could be eliminated for me, but looking at its market share of more than 90%, I had to lower my head.
• png pictures cannot be transparent. IE6 simply does not support such a simple requirement. It was not supported until IE7 came out.
• has poor support for w3c standards. Other browsers, chrome and firefox, basically support w3c standards. IE generally requires polyfill to more closely support the w3c standard.

declined

I mentioned above that five years passed between the release of IE6 and the release of IE7. There was no new version of the browser released (only two patch packages were released). Those were also black days for website developers. I Think about it, every website developer hates IE6.

Fortunately, with the birth of Firefox and the rise of Google Chrome, all this has changed. I clearly remember that in the early days of Firefox promotion, Google strongly supported it and even launched a promotion plan to allow major websites to provide downloads. Every time a Firefox browser was downloaded, the website owners were given advertising fees. I did it back then, which was huge. has promoted the popularity of Firefox.
Goole's promotion of Firefox did not gradually stop until Google's own Chrome was released.
With the continuous efforts of Google and Mozilla, IE later became A browser used to download other browsers: The first thing for
users to install a new system may be to open the IE browser and then download a Chrome browser .
So far, IE's browser market share has dropped to less than 1%. It really doesn't make much sense.

Now

modern browsers are basically Chromium's world
Microsoft's Edge browser , which uses the Chromium core, has replaced the IE browser. Even the niche browser Opera also uses the Chromium core.
currently has browsers with independent kernels, namely Firefox (Gecko kernel), Safari (webkit kernel), and those based on chromium series. The
era is constantly progressing, and IE, a product of this era, has also come to an end and completed its historical mission. Although I hate IE,
also carries my youth. Let us say goodbye to it properly.