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A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about IE, one thing anyway, is that it's CSS support, box model, etc, was broken and non standard. So you would need to exploit CSS parser bugs to give IE a separate CSS, use DXImageTransformFilter to make png transparency work, etc. Maybe by WebKit you mean Blink and by Blink you mean V8, because when somebody does a "Show HN: something that doesn't work in Safari or FireFox" it's usually a javascript prob…

That DirectX filter hack for PNG transparency haunts me. What makes it so much worse is that Tasman, the engine used in IE for Mac, had awesome support for CSS, transparent PNGs, and more years earlier, but for some reason it got dumpstered when IE for Mac was discontinued while the inferior Trident lived on in Windows.

Microsoft did a lot of weird things like that - also with Outlook, which used to use Trident to render emails, when IE was finally getting a bit better the Office team decided to switch Outlook to use the far, far worse Word HTML rendering engine instead...

Even thinking of that makes me very happy I haven't had to worry about formatting email newsletters for more than 10 years now, brings back bad memories...

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#92
post #29

Related: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210439 - Nov 2023 (1 comment) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293 - Oct 2021 (80 comments) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 at YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655890 - Sept 2021 (2 comments) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 - May 2019 (363 comments)

https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=chriszacharias.com Even more :) this gets reposted here a lot... probably by people still traumatized by fixing IE6 stuff :)

Yup but most of them have no comments. I think I listed the ones that have meaningful comments.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#93
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about IE, one thing anyway, is that it's CSS support, box model, etc, was broken and non standard. So you would need to exploit CSS parser bugs to give IE a separate CSS, use DXImageTransformFilter to make png transparency work, etc. Maybe by WebKit you mean Blink and by Blink you mean V8, because when somebody does a "Show HN: something that doesn't work in Safari or FireFox" it's usually a javascript prob…

I came to hate IE with every fiber of my being, but let's call a spade a spade here: IE basically invented modern CSS. Netscape 3/4 and IE 3/4 had very different views on how web pages should be dynamic and how they should be styled. IE championed CSS and the DOM. Netscape was fixated on bgcolor, font tags, etc. Netscape introduced the tag. IE just made every tag a potential layer. Remember AJAX? Loading content from…

Yup. When it was released, IE6 was the thing. It was fast and worked very well. Speaking of bronze age, people forget how slow js was then. I remember writing server code that generated js code of pre-populated arrays to push down to the client to use for interactivity. Sending json and populating on the client was slow enough I could count in my head while watching the screen. Array look ups though were fast enough.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari has been a huge pain for me as a web dev for its nonstandard parsing/implementation of basic CSS and requiring special cases made for it for things like modal focus/scrolling, nothing to do with Google or privacy whatsoever.

Is it non-standard, or non-exactly-like-Chrome? There’s a difference.

It's definitely nonstandard, you can scroll below a full screen fixed div..

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Safari is the one and only browser I continue to need to write special extra CSS for.

This is a red flag that you are trying to use non standard CSS or you are trying to use things that are so bleeding edge that you are requiring even evergreen browsers to have been restarted and updated very recently. Set your target to any CSS that has been around for about a year or so and is based on standards and you shouldn't need to be writing anything different for specific browsers. I haven't had to target a…

That's not a red flag, that's the state of Safari in the real world.

I've experienced bugs in forms, SVG support, border-radius, z-index and indexDB, none of those are cutting edge.

The compatibility table tells you only half of the story with Safari.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#96
post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing about IE, one thing anyway, is that it's CSS support, box model, etc, was broken and non standard. So you would need to exploit CSS parser bugs to give IE a separate CSS, use DXImageTransformFilter to make png transparency work, etc. Maybe by WebKit you mean Blink and by Blink you mean V8, because when somebody does a "Show HN: something that doesn't work in Safari or FireFox" it's usually a javascript prob…

I came to hate IE with every fiber of my being, but let's call a spade a spade here: IE basically invented modern CSS. Netscape 3/4 and IE 3/4 had very different views on how web pages should be dynamic and how they should be styled. IE championed CSS and the DOM. Netscape was fixated on bgcolor, font tags, etc. Netscape introduced the tag. IE just made every tag a potential layer. Remember AJAX? Loading content from…

> IE championed CSS and the DOM. Netscape was fixated on bgcolor, font tags, etc.

Netscape championed its own alternate to CSS: JSSS. Javascript-based Style Sheets.[1] But the W3C went for CSS, so the CSS implementation in Netscape 4 (1997) was very rushed, and poor quality.

This is what led to the @import hack being possible, which used different style sheets for IE and Netscape.[2][3]

[1] https://www.w3.org/submissions/1996/1/WD-jsss-960822

[2] https://litux.nl/mirror/csscookbook/0596005768/cssckbk-CHP-9...

[3] https://tedium.co/2023/11/24/weird-html-hacks-history/

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#97
post #90
post #4

One of the best things that's happened to the web is all browsers moving over to an evergreen model of distribution. IE was such a cancer on the internet, everyone in the bad old days programmed to the lowest common denominator (IE6, 7, or 8). Even while brand new features and standards were widely adopted by everyone else. One of the worst things that's happened is nearly everyone converging on using webkit to rende…

Browser engine for me is like a Linux kernel for me. Everyone should be banding together to work on one. Not making a separate one each year. We have js libraries and frameworks for that. Of course some innovations that requires to be done in engine won’t happen as fast - but on the other hand amount of innovation in software that runs in browsers will be much higher. We saw that with IE “innovations” of Microsoft bl…

I thought that was happening years ago with WebKit, but then Google forked it into Blink.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#98

Great work! Now do Safari.

Killing Safari would hand control of the internet over to Google. This requires everyone trust that Google will do the right thing now and forever, and not work in their own self-interest. That’s not a bet I’m willing to make.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#99

The thing that gets me the most is how ancient 10 year-old YouTube looks. Which makes sense that this was the era before smartphones, when IE6 still had significant market share. But 10 years! Sounds like such a short time.

Actually, it was 15 years ago now. The article says "ten years ago" but it was posted in 2019, so 15. I freaked out too when looking at that really old UI and thinking "that was in 2014?" but nope
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