this post was submitted on 11 Jun 2025
504 points (98.5% liked)
Firefox
5344 readers
33 users here now
A community for discussion about Mozilla Firefox.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
This weirdly took me back to a chance conversation I had in the late 90s with the development manager for Internet Explorer. I asked him a technical question about a new feature I thought IE might be getting. He had no idea what I was talking about, and said (almost verbatim), "Now that Netscape is essentially dead, we really have no motivation to innovate in the browser space." This was about at the end of the transition period when the money people took over MS from the geeks, and I remember thinking yeahhh, this is the end. The feature I was asking about was "back channel requests" - later known as AJAX. I believe it was first implemented natively by Firefox and then Microsoft (who could have done it like 5 years sooner) scrambled to play catch-up - which by then was their standard pattern.
Oh man, I had almost forgotten about when you had to write different ways to read the XHR response depending on which browser you were trying to support.
Right! The thing I asked him about was if XMLHttpRequest would be natively supported instead of having to use an ActiveX object. His reaction was oh, hmm, that sounds kinda cool but nah. At that time dynamic HTML still wasn't all that old, web pages were still mostly content that just sat there. And now we could eliminate page refreshes and server-side state maintenance, and have little apps run in the browser and interact with APIs. I was super psyched about this changing the whole face of the web, and that MS would lead the way. But sadly by then it had become all about getting people to re-buy Windows every few years.