Was IE 4 a rewrite

According to: http://www.quirksmode.org/index.html?/browsers/history.html
Microsoft rewrote IE in-between v3 and v4.

Interesting!

Anyone else know of another source to back this up.

Gary van der Merwe
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

I was there, but if I told you about it I'd have a Microsoft Death Squad(tm) after me before night fall.

Evil Knievel
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

I do remember that when IE4 was released it was a big step backwards and I went back to IE3 until IE5 was released. Maybe that's why.

JWA
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

>I'd have a Microsoft Death Squad(tm) after me before night fall
I can see them now, shuffling down the road.... "coooommmmme baaaack evil! come back, no one may leave!"

Peter
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

All I remember is that IE3 lowercased all links before requesting from the server, so it didn't work for some sites.  I remember doing a bunch of work to make sure my webapps still worked in this case.

The way I remember it, IE4 was really the first usable version.

schmoe
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

When I was at Spyglass, the IE team told us that IE4 was a complete rewrite and no longer contained any Spyglass code.

This claim turned out to be rather simple to disprove.  IE4's layout engine still contained a few arcane bugs that were extremely specific to our implementation.

IE4 may have been nearly a rewrite, but not entirely.

Eric Sink
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

Who was (is) Spyglass?

Gary van der Merwe
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

http://software.ericsink.com/Browser_Wars.html

google user
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

I would guess that most of the layout engine was preserved (why reinvent the wheel?), but the browser shell was probably rewritten.  IE4 was also the release that gave us that awful Win98 Active Desktop, and the first incarnation of the Quick Launch toolbar (which are clearly features you'd expect to get from your browser! *g*)

Joe
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

I think the "rewrite" part was all about the embeddability of IE that started with IE4. Once IE4 rolled around, then IEXPLORE.EXE was nothing more than an ActiveX container for the HTML control.

Total re-write? Definitely not.

Brad Wilson (dotnetguy.techieswithcats.com)
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

I think the "rewrite" part was all about the embeddability of IE that started with IE4.

IE3 has the embeddability -- IEXPLORE was nothing more than an ActiveX container even then.

"Total re-write? Definitely not."

I suspect the re-write of IE came entirely to support automatic page reflow.  That's a pretty serious change and one that Netscape never got away with until the total rewrite that is Mozilla.

Almost Anonymous
Wednesday, July 7, 2004

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