• Álvaro González (github)

    I wonder what the Google equivalent mess will look like in a few years.

    Addendum 2024-06-17 07:09: I had already completed 8 captcha challenges when I realised I wasn't authenticated any more 🤬

  • NotAThingThatHappens (unregistered)

    Captcha is misbehaving, it auto triggers (and/or scrolls into view) on page load.

  • Registered (unregistered)

    All our security concerns about Internet Explorer's naïve trust of ActiveX components were dismissed by a simple hand wave: "It only runs signed components"

  • (nodebb)

    In theory, ActiveX was good. In practice, it was garbage. Kinda like Java Applets; great theory (rich application loaded from the browser) but terrible.

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    " In C++ land, you might be using Microsoft Foundation Classes" MFC is still around, you can even use it in C++/CLI applications so you can mix those classes with WinForms, WPF and the like....

  • NoLand (unregistered)

    Even worse was the lack of feature detection, forcing you to try the ActiveXObject constructor with various arguments.

  • (nodebb)

    ActiveX was developed in an era when developers (naively) only had eyes for the worlds it unlocked, security or abuse was not on the radar at all.

  • Co(opting)-pilot (unregistered)

    "Was" super evil? I think you need some biblical language for them. "Was, is, and forever shall be."

    Though, I suppose it's good to get in the habit of softening any language critical of the old M$. You know, before it becomes punishable by death.

  • Scragar (unregistered)

    RE: echo

    Echo is a PHP function because it was a Perl function first. Echo is a Perl function because it was a standard shell command first. Echo is a standard shell command because it spat back what you fed in so the name was apt.

    The writer of that JS code just saw a future when there was more copying of methods as everything approached a single set of keywords/built in functions to make polygots' lives easier.

  • (nodebb)

    The only issue I see with this code is that it isn't a factory method. Let's be honest, browsers are to this day a big mess and now that Chrome has basically become official instead of unofficial spyware, well, there's pretty much only one decent desktop browser left. Which is great, because boy have I never liked IE since they loaded on Windows 98 start a 16MB cache for it, no matter if you use it or not.

  • Maia Everett (github)

    As bad as Java applets were, ActiveX was way worse.

    Java applets were written in byte code, used a cross-platform API (and were thus themselves cross-platform), and ran in a sandbox.

    ActiveX controls were written in native code, locked to the Windows API, and had full access to the system. They were inherently a security nightmare and were impossible to secure.

  • Duke of New York (unregistered)

    People telling this story tend to omit that Netscape was just as eager to promote non-standard web features, and shipped an extension system (NPAPI) with similar security issues.

  • Klimax (unregistered)

    And today we have TWO TRWTFs. One, code with broken with idiotically written feature detection. And second, is Remy with his wilfull(?) ignorance and wrongness. Lets start: No such thing as "Embrace, extend,..." That was completely made up by fanboys of other browser (Despite their own favourite crap browser being guilty of same things - Browser Wars were started by Netscape, not Microsoft!). And as many other idiocies it lives on as one of great Internet Myths. Second, if he actually read up on AJAX and XML libraries, he'd know that they were OS independent.

    This article can be renamed to "Remy's wrongness". There's not much being correct...

    Reminder: ActiveX was not the only native code system for web pages.

  • Conradus (unregistered) in reply to Duke of New York

    That's probably because nobody used NPAPI, while everybody used ActiveX.

  • Officer Johnny Holzkopf (unregistered)

    "Something Wrong. Please try again later!" - Does it really help to try again (the same thing) later, or does "later" imply that you have updated your system a supported browser? As in, "two years later"? Oh, and... "[...] the peak of interactivity was the <marquee> tag and animated gif backgrounds." - No, that was <blink>, the thing you today need different variations of CSS and / or JS for.

  • (nodebb)

    The error might not really be that evil. I can see that as leftover debug stuff.

  • xtal256 (unregistered)

    "Easy Reader Version: The early days of the web were just a really bizarre time, nobody had any clue what they were doing or what they should be doing, so they just… did stuff. Better to do the wrong thing than nothing at all."

    Isn't that still the case today?

  • Duke of New York (unregistered)

    Imagine if Netscape had prevailed instead. Imagine Marc Andreessen with more money and power. (shudder)

  • LZ79LRU (unregistered)

    I miss ActiveX. The things you could do to people with that thing. Too bad it newer became mainstream for all browsers.

  • (nodebb) in reply to Duke of New York

    Indeed. I'm still annoyed at the syntax of the <img> element that Mr. Andreesen introduced, where fallback text is relegated to an attribute (alt) and there's no way to provide any other fallback mechanism.

  • (nodebb)

    Ah, IE 3. I think it was that version where I got a new PC that had IE 3 installed, and it was out of date - I think they were on 4 at the time. However, the Microsoft website wouldn't even display on IE 3, so in order to update it, I had to first use IE to download Netscape, and then use Netscape to download IE.

  • commenter (unregistered)

    In the past I flamed you guys as M$ shills for praising .NET (you called me a low-effort troll IIRC). But now you're keeping the memory (and the ongoing reality) of EEE alive. I just wanted to apologise and say keep it up. All tech corps are bad (electrons were a mistake) but MS is a clear example and so it's good to remind people of the many reasons why it was and is hated. (EEE, IE, the SCO/Novell/OpenSUSE thing...)

  • Duke of New York (unregistered) in reply to commenter

    The "memory of EEE" consists in forgetting that competition is a two-way street. The article states that EEE was "the reality." So then "allowing people to deliver richer, more polished looking web applications" was somehow not the reality?

    Both companies were extending the browser platform to support customer use cases, get customer buy-in and make money. Both prioritized time to market over caution and refinement. However, that telling of history doesn't have the sort of moral clarity that some people psychologically need.

    The main browser supplier of the time that pursued standard compliance as a selling point was Opera, to the deafening indifference of everyone except the European Commission.

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