One of the developers of IE 5.0 told how they beat Netscape.

People with great life experience and good memory will surely remember Internet Explorer 5.0. This is an outstanding browser that literally “buried” a Netscape competitor, because it was much better and faster than it. Whoever remembers IE5 is surely wondering: why hasn't any version of the IE browser been as revolutionary since it surpasses all competitors? Why IE in the perception of some geeks and web developers, to put it mildly, lost an innovative image?

This question is answered by Hadi Partovi, who worked at Microsoft in the “golden 90s” and participated in the development of Internet Explorer 5.0.

Hadi Partovi says that in the mid-90s, Microsoft hired the best and most talented programmers to solve the "Internet problem", that is, in the development team of the browser (IE) and server (IIS). Brad Silverberg, one of the best managers in the history of Microsoft, who was involved in market launch of the incredibly successful Windows 95 project, was assigned to lead the two development teams of vice-president Brad Silverberg.
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The entire Internet Explorer development team consisted of superstars: “Our work was more than just work. It was a passion and a matter of life. We had breakfast, lunch and dinner in the workplace, we worked until late / late night, ”recalls Partovi. - I often fell asleep under my desk at 6 in the morning, only to wake up at 8 in the morning, and again at work. We had the feeling that a multi-billion dollar company would lose its future if we did not jump on the Internet wave and make browser No. 1 on the planet. ”

The release of Internet Explorer 5 took place on March 18, 1999. This browser has implemented many innovative features that later became the standard for the entire web. For example, the first version of XMLHttpRequest (MSXML), on which all interactive interactive interfaces are now built. In IE5, for the first time among all browsers, auto-completion of the address bar, XML ancestor RSS, and so on have been implemented. “And we made the browser twice as fast and 100 times more stable than the buggy Netscape Navigator,” writes Hadi Partovi. He is confident that due to the high quality of the program, the market share of Internet Explorer 5.0 has begun to grow, and the browser has won 100% of the benchmarks in the media.

What happened next is not entirely clear. The developer says that the project has switched to the “support mode”, many of the key team members have been thrown into other “hot” directions. Part of it remained to work on the release of versions 5.5 and 6.0, which were, by and large, fixes bugs and a device for the interface of Windows XP. The main developers were sent to the MSN department for the development of MSN Explorer. At that time, management decided that the browser war was over, Netscape was defeated, and the new enemy was AOL.

“For all the time I worked at Microsoft, I was sad to see that the Internet direction always needed an enemy with which it began to compete (Netscape, AOL, Yahoo and Google), instead of deciding on its own development vision,” writes a former employee Microsoft. Many years passed before management recognized the threat in Firefox and again formed a team of talented Internet Explorer developers. But that's another story.