Non standard features like... XMLHttpRequest?

The entire AJAX industry, they invented. What were you saying again?

Seems to me there has, for a long time, been a double standard when MS is involved.

The response I often see is:

Something non-standard but cool in IE? "Screw MS, they're trying to embrace and extend the web!"

Something non-standard but cool in another browser? "I don't understand why people are complaining! Good ideas like these eventually become standards, and this is how innovation happens!"

The difference is that Microsoft intentionally uses incompatibilities to marginalize the competition (a fact well-documented by the DOJ trial). "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is a phrase that Microsoft itself used internally to describe this strategy.

When you're trying to use your extensions against your competitors, you do things like file patents on the technology, keep the internals undocumented, and tightly couple it to the rest of your platform. When you're trying to innovate in a way that others could adopt, you do things like release open-source implementations, publish lots of technical detail, and grant patent licenses.

There is no double standard. If any single browser had the marketshare that IE had in its heyday, it would be irresponsible and anticompetitive for them to implement nonstandard features. But marketshare is spread much more evenly among the players today, so it's pretty much understood that a production site cannot rely on a browser-specific feature. Hell, most people don't even rely on modern standard features because they still want their stuff to work in IE6. Comparing experimental features today with the IE-flavored-web of 2002 is comparing apples to geese.

Weren't <img>, <li>, <ul>, and <ol> experimental, non-standard features added by Netscape? Due to Netscape's dominance, everyone ended up implementing them.

I'm not saying non-standard features are always a good idea...but is everyone always waited around for standards bodies to come up with new things, we'd never see any new features.

Nope, <img> was invented with Mosaic, and <li>, <ul> and <ol> was in Mosaic too.

Which doesn't detract much from the point: it was a proprietary extension by a specific browser, later adopted by all others.

OK, NCSA was wrong to add those tags to Mosaic without going through standards channels or making them "experimental" and accessible through explicitly temporary syntax. However, I have not seen any evidence (much less the hard proof we have as Microsoft is concerned) that they added those tags with anticompetitive motivation, especially considering that Mosaic predated the browser war.

You might have a fair point regarding things like ActiveX which only work on Microsoft's own platform and serve to further lock-in to Windows. However, as was pointed out above, XMLHttpRequest is one such nonstandard feature that Microsoft introduced. How is that feature irresponsible and anticompetitive?

The feature is anticompetitive because it was part of a large-scale and well-documented effort within the company to coopt and/or destroy technologies not controlled by themselves. A handful of innovations (which would have happened anyway) that happened along the way do not justify that kind of behavior.

Either you're changing your argument or you failed to articulate your position initially. Nothing justifies Microsoft's abusive practices; that's a non sequitur.

If we take your original statement and change "browser" to "search engine" and "IE" to "Google", we end up with this: "If any single search engine had the marketshare that Google had in its heyday, it would be irresponsible and anticompetitive for them to implement nonstandard features."

If your initial argument was that an illegal monopolist should be unable to introduce any new features, that's an entirely different statement than saying that having a large marketshare means that any new features are irresponsible and anticompetitive.

>If we take your original statement and change "browser" to "search engine" and "IE" to "Google", we end up with this: "If any single search engine had the marketshare that Google had in its heyday, it would be irresponsible and anticompetitive for them to implement nonstandard features."

If Google made non-standard extensions to robots.txt, that would be an equivalently anticompetitive situation. To my knowledge Google hasn't done anything like that. We are not talking about just any features here, but features that make websites incompatible with other browsers. Search engines, by and large, are not concerned with interoperability in the first place, so your analogy is nonsensical.

...which delayed web socket development if you think about it. The need of real time applications would've forced the correct solution-websockets, but we already had a shaky solution... AJAX..

There was no demand for anything like websockets until everyone had years of experience with exploring the capabilities of AJAX.

If the features hadn't been useful, it wouldn't have worked. Are you seriously going to argue that their strategy – their explicit strategy – was not incredibly harmful to innovation and competition?

Also saying they "invented" XMLHttpRequest is a stretch. If I make a browser with a nonstandard rot-13 function, did I "invent" JSRot13?

How on earth is implementing a new feature harmful to innovation? This blatantly contradictory.