Internet Explorer is Evil: The Story

People were happy with Windows 95 and Microsoft.


It was a happy time for PC users. Microsoft had just delivered Windows 95, an incredibly vast improvement over windows 3.1 and DOS. Windows 95 finally brought PC users a crisp, clean, well thought out, user interface comparable to that of the Apple Macintosh while also providing full backwards compatibility with previous versions of DOS and Windows. On the technical side Microsoft pulled off a near miracle by implementing a 32-bit API compatible with their NT operating system on top of "16-bit" Windows. Windows 95 was also heavily about choice. One could choose to use the Windows 3.1 Program Manager shell, networking was optional, and all accessories were optional via the new Add/Remove Programs control panel item. Compared to Windows 3.1, switching to Windows 95 was just a no-brainer. Files on the desktop, no more futzing around with the program manager, seamless networking, and a desktop like MacOS 1.0 or the Xerox Star of more than 10 years earlier.


Browsers were ordinary applications.


What is a web browser? A web browser is an application that retrieves documents from a network, and renders them on your screen.
Many people did not need a web browser. Internet access was still new, and a great many people got along fine without it.
Web browsers at the time were commercial products that people paid for. Like any other big name software package, you would go to the store, pick up a box, pay for it, bring it home, and install the application software on your computer. There was a twist: Netscape's primary consumer targets were companies and enterprises, so they made their software downloadable, and licensed it at no cost for personal use. Somewhere around this point, people began spewing mindless drivel about how browsers would somehow magically replace operating systems eventually, and how in the future all applications would be "web based". This, of course, got Microsoft's attention. Being a little late to the game, Microsoft licensed a copy of Mosaic, named it Microsoft Internet Explorer, and released it as an optional part of the Windows 95 "plus" pack. The floppy disk version of Windows 95 did not include Internet Explorer. But the alarm bells should have sounded when Microsoft added IE 1 to the CD-Rom version as a non-optional component.  Likely this went unnoticed because Windows 3.1 had no add/remove capability, so people were still used to manually deleting programs like this. Windows 95 OEM Service Release 2 included IE 3 also as a non-optional component, but still technically removable despite having more componetized DLLs.


Microsoft forced people to install their browser, and other tasteless things.


Then the browser war got really fierce. Microsoft released Internet Explorer 4 - a very buggy, bloated browser that encouraged the use of the highly insecure ActiveX. By itself, the release of yet another web browser would have been no big deal, but how Microsoft pushed it on to consumers was unacceptable. First, Installing IE 4 was a very invasive process. Other browsers, or indeed any normal application, would never touch system files or alter the way an operating system worked. IE 4, when installed on Windows 95 or NT 4, would replace or update many system files with its own special versions, which sometimes broke functionality of other applications, and made it almost impossible to re-install these OSes once IE 4 was installed.


IE 4 by default also replaced the Windows 95/NT 4 desktop with its "Desktop Update" that added the following:
• Used Internet Explorer to manage files instead of the standalone file manger.
• Displayed folders as "web pages".
• Added IE logos to every file browser window, and many other places.
• "Favorites" bookmark menu and location/URL bar that always launched IE instead of the default browser.
• Added the IE "Channel" bar with advertising links, right on the destkop!
• Made IE look like it launched faster because 99% of it was already loaded in to RAM.
• Slowed down other applications, and discouraged users from using other web browsers because IE was already loaded in to RAM.

IE 4 also began to replace Windows help files with "HyperHelp" help files that used IE to render the content.
And to add even more insult to injury, the IE 4 uninstaller would only "revert" to any previous version of IE instead of cleanly uninstalling, and even then it would leave behind a bunch of junk. It blows my mind that anyone would think that any of this was a good idea. But that did not matter to Microsoft, the intent was to push Netscape off of user's desktop and out of the marketplace. And as if forcing IE on all Windows users wasn't bad enough, Microsoft forced Apple to bundle IE for Mac as their default browser instead of Netscape. If Apple refused, Microsoft would discontinue MS-Office for Mac. Steve Jobs was loudly BOOED as he announced that IE would be the default browser.

Come on people! If a software product gets you booed at in front of thousands of your users, shouldn't that tell you there is something horribly, horribly, wrong with that product?