Just venturing a guess, I'd say it's a reference to early versions of Internet Explorer (particularly IE6, but also later) which combined a dominating position (thanks to Windows) with (1) an insistance on doing things their own way instead of following standards and (2) a very slow pace of innovation. This forced coding to a very low common denominator and/or duplication of effort for advanced features and different browsers. The impasse ended when other browsers became popular enough to make IE's dragging its feet counterproductive for MS, too.
Very slow pace of innovation? There was no innovation for a period of roughly 5 years until growing firefox adoption forced their hand. I seem to remember the internal team was disbanded and had to be reconstituted as well. Microsoft intentionally retarded the development of the browser as an application development target to protect their OS monopoly. And, indeed, exactly what microsoft feared came to pass: once apps targeted the browser, you have chromebooks, tablets, and phones displacing windows. It's not like you need a full desktop to browse facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest, youtube, or gmail.
This is oft-repeated but wrong. Sure, there was no innovation in IE, but innovation elsewhere on the web never slowed down. Even when IE dominated the browser market, browsers like Opera kept developing new features. Opera in the late 90s had features that I still don't see in most browsers today.
Now, those other browsers were less popular for a while, but let's not conflate "widespread use" with "innovation".
I worked on web apps in the early and mid 2000s. What we could do was defined by the capabilities of ie 5-6. Everything else, with it's whopping up to 10% market share, was irrelevant.
Plus, innovation on its own is worthless. If I can't use feature X in the browser that the vast majority of my customers use, it may as well not exist.
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Just venturing a guess, I'd say it's a reference to early versions of Internet Explorer (particularly IE6, but also later) which combined a dominating position (thanks to Windows) with (1) an insistance on doing things their own way instead of following standards and (2) a very slow pace of innovation. This forced coding to a very low common denominator and/or duplication of effort for advanced features and different browsers. The impasse ended when other browsers became popular enough to make IE's dragging its feet counterproductive for MS, too.
Very slow pace of innovation? There was no innovation for a period of roughly 5 years until growing firefox adoption forced their hand. I seem to remember the internal team was disbanded and had to be reconstituted as well. Microsoft intentionally retarded the development of the browser as an application development target to protect their OS monopoly. And, indeed, exactly what microsoft feared came to pass: once apps targeted the browser, you have chromebooks, tablets, and phones displacing windows. It's not like you need a full desktop to browse facebook, twitter, instagram, pinterest, youtube, or gmail.
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Net...
This is oft-repeated but wrong. Sure, there was no innovation in IE, but innovation elsewhere on the web never slowed down. Even when IE dominated the browser market, browsers like Opera kept developing new features. Opera in the late 90s had features that I still don't see in most browsers today.
Now, those other browsers were less popular for a while, but let's not conflate "widespread use" with "innovation".
No.
I worked on web apps in the early and mid 2000s. What we could do was defined by the capabilities of ie 5-6. Everything else, with it's whopping up to 10% market share, was irrelevant.
Plus, innovation on its own is worthless. If I can't use feature X in the browser that the vast majority of my customers use, it may as well not exist.