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A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#101

Post by ozim »

al_borland wrote: post #97
ozim wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If I go to its Wikipedia page Blink is backed by many more companies than just Google. Where WebKit is or was basically Apple and some companies. Not dropping links because anyone can check wiki pages.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#102

Post by Octoth0rpe »

politelemon wrote: post #22
Octoth0rpe wrote: post #17

I and every single other webdev I've known from the early aughts would immediately offer to buy this person a beer upon hearing this story in person. Those claiming that safari is the new chrome just don't understand how bad IE was at the time.

> Those claiming that safari is the new chrome just don't understand how bad IE was at the time. I suffered in the IE6 times, understood how bad it is, but still claim otherwise; when we're saying that Safari is the new IE/the new Chrome, it's with good reason. We've recognized that a piece of history is repeating itself, and it's pretty sad that it gets handwaved away or dismissed, just because people happen to have…

> just because people happen to have bought into its ecosystem.

I don't think that's a fair take. Plenty of us are developing webapps for safari/chrome/firefox, are barely ever consider browser differences. I think a lot of credit for this also goes to a wealth of high quality css/js frameworks that abstract what minor differences exist these days, rather than apple.

It's worth also considering what specifically was bad about the IE dominance era in order to understand how it maps to our current situation. IMO it wasn't just that IE was bad (of course it was), but that its usage share was _dominant_. That doesn't come close to reflecting the current state of mobile browser usage: https://gs.statcounter.com/browser-market-share/mobile/world...

Worldwide Safari is a minority player. In the US (probably the best case), safari holds a slight majority at 55%, and the other 45% are likely almost entirely blink. At one point (early NS6/pre-phoenix), IE had something like 95% usage, and closer to 99% for corporate usage.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#103

Post by Octoth0rpe »

jimmaswell wrote: post #83
tannerellen wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Here's one example, nothing bleeding edge or weird at all. https://dev.to/snowleo208/how-to-fix-popups-scrolling-on-saf...

tbf, that is 5 years old.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#104

Post by icedchai »

JadeNB wrote: post #68
icedchai wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember those days well. IE was really the only usable browser for a long time. Netscape was incredibly unstable, didn't support any modern standards. Mozilla (before Firefox) was too new, also unstable until roughly 2005.

> Mozilla (before Firefox) was too new, also unstable until roughly 2005. That doesn't match my memory at all, unless you include Phoenix under the Firefox umbrella. I switched … I don't remember exactly when, probably in late 2003, but certainly when it was called Phoenix, and it was such a breath of fresh air coming from IE. I'm sure there were breakages, because it was the early noughties and that's what the inter…

I was including all "Mozilla" browsers (Phoenix, Firebird, whatever) under that umbrella. I didn't start using Firefox seriously until roughly 1.5. Maybe it was just me!

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#105

Post by al_borland »

ozim wrote: post #101
al_borland wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If I go to its Wikipedia page Blink is backed by many more companies than just Google. Where WebKit is or was basically Apple and some companies. Not dropping links because anyone can check wiki pages.

Those companies listed on Wikipedia are ones which have contributed over time, they are far from exhaustive and lack a lot of context.

WebKit itself was a fork of KHTML by Apple, and Blink was a fork of WebKit by Google. Both initially started with the one company and then had others contribute to the open source projects.

In the WebKit wiki it is noted that WebKit had 50% market share at its peak. This is when IE and Firefox still had about 15-20% market share each. WebKit was well on its way to being where Blink is today. It was used by Apple, Google, Palm, Sony, Nokia, Nintendo, and more.

It wasn’t the industry banding together to create Blink. It was Google. Then one by one, various companies gave up the fight, Microsoft and Opera are two of the most notable.

Maybe if Apple was easier to work with Blink wouldn’t have happened, but I probably had more to do with Google having their own view of what the web should be, and their own engine lets them push that on everyone.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#106

Post by jimmaswell »

Octoth0rpe wrote: post #103
jimmaswell wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's one example, nothing bleeding edge or weird at all. https://dev.to/snowleo208/how-to-fix-popups-scrolling-on-saf...

tbf, that is 5 years old.

The behavior is still the same last I checked recently.

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#108

Post by tempestn »

arielcostas wrote: post #99
tempestn wrote: post #76

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

Ahh good point. I saw the 2009, but somehow my brain reconciled that with 10 years ago and didn't see any problem!

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#109

Post by [deleted] »

zx8080 wrote: post #33
jwells89 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There were substantial differences even from day one. As I recall one of the differences of opinion that was a driving cause of the fork was the multiprocess model; WebKit team wanted that to be part of the framework, letting any WebKit-embedding app get it for “free”, whereas the Blink team wanted it to be part of Chromium with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their own multiprocess.

> whereas the Blink team wanted it to be part of Chromium with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their own multiprocess. Is that why Electron basically means Chromium?

[deleted]

Re: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

#110

Post by geor9e »

pompino wrote: post #87
geor9e wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They targeted IE 6 or older by recommending folks install IE 8, Firefox 3, or Chrome 4, shown in random order. Since Firefox and Chrome were self-updating, they didn't have the problem of obsolete versions floating around.

Microsoft was already offering users to upgrade to IE8. Users chose IE6 for whatever reason. Most likely because non-technical users didn't give a shit, or maybe they were stuck on IE6 due to ActiveX or other compatibility issues. Google faked a "we will be phasing out support" screen to trick users into changing the browser. All this talk of open source and "open" this and "open" that, and yet they still want to man…

By your definition Hacker News would be anti-free because NCSA Mosaic 1.0 can't render it. Youtube didn't add anything to block IE6, they simply removed all the non-compliant hacks that barely kept IE6 working as long as it did. IE6 can't render a website of purely standards compliant code. They didn't fake anything. If you went to youtube.com on March 13 2010, the day they deleted the IE6 helper hacks, the videos wouldn't play.
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