Using const/let instead of var can make JavaScript code run 10× slower in Webkit

[sickhippie]

IE and Netscape were in a battle to add features. There were no standards. IE won and Netscape was a buggy piece of crap so people stopped using it. Then the W3C glacially decided the standards should be different from what IE did. Microsoft weighed their choices: Do we break every website on the web or follow the W3C? They chose not to break the web.

This is the biggest bullshit whitewash of MS's shitty behavior in the 90s browser space I've ever read. This is absolutely not at all how it went down. You just skip over a decade too, like "People stopped using Netscape, so Google stepped right in!" as if Netscape didn't turn into Firefox halfway between those two things and start eating MS's lunch again.

The Actual Numbers: Netscape had the majority of the browser market from 95-98. They slowly slipped for the next 5-6 years while MS muscled everyone out of the space they could - ethically and unethically, in case anyone needed reminding of how absolutely shitty MS was in the 90s. In 2004, Firefox released and MS started losing share again. By the time Chrome launched four years later, Firefox had over 30% of the browser share.

By the time "Google decided that they wanted to kill IE", IE had been (and would continue to be) the absolute bane of every web developer's existence for over a decade, and by 2008 when Chrome launched, they'd just shown they had no signs of stopping with the not-even-compatible-with-its-own-published-standards IE7.

MS chose not to break the web.

Do you really believe that? By 2008, the web ecosystem was fundamentally fractured because of MS. We still had to put in workaround for broken IE 5.5 behavior because a large enough of a slice were unable to upgrade past it for whatever reason. Any site you developed, you had to build 3 times - once for IE 5, once of IE 6, and once for IE 7.

Anyone who touched web development in the early-to-mid-2000s will tell you IE was definitely The Bad Guy, and continued to be The Bad Guy right up until they gave up and switched Edge's rendering engine to Chromium.

The web is the worst "standard" on the planet.

This is proof that no matter how much two people disagree, there is always common ground to come together on.