Thanks, but No Thanks

Despite this power and flexibility, many users didn’t care for the Active Desktop.  Some felt that this feature was “code bloat,” that is, a feature that no one really wanted, but that Microsoft added anyway because they thought it was cool.  To a certain extent, they were right.  A lavishly customized Active Desktop can add quite a bit of resource overhead to a Windows PC.  Many Windows users were still running with 28.8Bps modem connections, 32MB of RAM or less in their systems, and, when turned on, the Active Desktop would slow the system to a crawl.  Today’s systems, however, are significantly more powerful that those in 1997, making the Active Desktop features useful and richly interactive.

Internet Explorer 4 also introduced a slew of new features, such as Channels, Subscriptions, Dynamic HTML, enhanced multimedia, and webcasting. Security was also beefed up with the addition of Authenticode 2.0, and Security Zones.  Channels, subscriptions and webcasting (aka “Push” technology) were Microsoft’s efforts to move from a technology company to a content company.  This only fueled the now prevalent fears that Microsoft’s intent was to dominate the Internet.  Some went so far as to claim that, by dumping its web browser into the market for free, Microsoft would control who got on the Internet, where they went, and what they would see.  The very nature of the Internet made this a technical impossibility, but nonetheless, people complained.

Despite Microsoft’s best attempts to add features, provide integration, and secure Internet Explorer, everything they did seemed to backfire.  Customers didn’t like Internet Explorer 4’s heavy footprint or the way Active Desktop performed.  Microsoft’s partners didn’t like having to license and distribute Internet Explorer 4 – unmodified – in order to retain their status as a Windows licensee.  And security experts worldwide, such as Carnegie-Mellon’s Computer Emergency Response Team (“CERT”), were reporting one serious security hole after another.