It was the battle for "the web" and the sun+netscape partnership was an actual menace to microsoft's activex and vbscript things. There is an espisode the Lex Fridman podcast with Brendan Eich where he talks a little about that specific time.[1]
The "panic" was right imo (only in that specific area) i mean, there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today.
I mean, it is actually comprehensible but you know, California tech workers live in a monopoly money bubble and they think they know something about how the world works. Also they think that their own "culture" and leftist values are relevant to everywhere in the world even if they cant even point places on a map.
One thing i noticed is that most of the conversation here feels alien to me.
I think this is because most of the people here are living in California and they seem to have a very particular world view not always compatible or even undertandable for anyone from any other place.
I used to enjoy this website in like, 2015/16 i think, now the topics are not even tech related anymore.
I made this [1] little thing just to change a Commodor Amiga emulator opacity so i could copy some images in Deluxe Paint II or even Deluxe Paint in DOSBox.
Made it in like 20 minutes for that absolutely weird use case. Almost never used it again.
I work as a developer in a trade marketing company, our platform have dashboards with different type of charts for our clients to measure different metrics of their business.
The front end requests to the backend each chart on the current dashboad, then the backend, depending of the type of chart, gets the data from the database and passes it to the front who renders it, it could be a pie chart, a bar chart, a table, etc.
We hade 2 or 3 different types of table charts, al using different js based solutions, one of them using bootstrap, i don't remeber the others.
The javascript solutions had responsiveness issues, when you changed the size of the window, or used something that is not Chrome, column headers messed everything up.
One day i decided to end that and added a new type of chart, it expected one table resultset from the db, and once in the front it rendered a traditional <table> with it's content.
We have no more problems with table charts. It works in every browser and every screen resolution.
It was possible to fix the current js tables of course, but is it realy necessary? We have been using tables since forever, and they are just to correct way to display table data on the web.
When i read that i found it amazing and very clever, i honestly never thought if it was or not Notch's invention.
I am not really into javascript/frontend development, but following js13k on twitter showed me a lot of things you can do to gain KBs on the client side.
The last week i found this [1] thread by Notch. He is working in an entry to js13k [2] (a game jam about html5 games restricted to 13 KBs).
He bundled the whole source code and binary data used in the game/tech demo to use the in browser image decompression, avoiding to write a custom (de)compression code, saving KBs this way.
Then he just eval() the needed parts for each thing.
I found this extremely clever, game jam limitations, specially size ones, evolve into clever programming tricks that are interesting both to code and to look at.
The "panic" was right imo (only in that specific area) i mean, there is almost 0 microsoft on the web today.
[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=krB0enBeSiE