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Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

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Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#31
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And yet you still have a "command prompt" so that you can run your DOS programs as well as "compatibility mode" so that older applications can run on the post-XP systems.

That's backwards, though. MS wants to enable new systems to run old software, and they do this very well. The case in hand is running old software against new content, which they don't care about. The relevant comparison would be running IE10 against a cached copy of some website from 1999. I suspect that test would work rather well.

Well ... I do agree that both the standards and best-practices for creating web content have changed, but I'm pretty sure the most recent version of Excel will open a document I created in the '90s. You could argue they have complete control of both the software and the document format in that instance, but the IE browsers never bothered to be standards compliant anyway ("older IE browsers" - I've been pleasantly surprised by IE9 and IE10).

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#34
post #18

Believe it or not, in my previous company people were happy with IE4/5/6. I mean really happy with the blue icon in the middle of their screen. They did not want to move to IE7 even because it was simply "enough" for them. Happy married life, complete in all respects. And this was year 2011, not very far back. Even in China, they say, a significant percentage of population lives happily with IE6 or below. Don't know…

Yes, I'd like to see some chinese sites on the list. For what I can test http://www.alibaba.com/ looks decent in IE6. One in four browsers in china are IE6. Source: http://www.ie6countdown.com/ (can someone check baidu.com, qq.com, sina.com.cn, csdn.net, alibaba.com in IE5?)

Just depends on the source. According to this, active users is less than 5%:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201203...

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#35
post #10
post #2

You've got to appreciate the irony of microsoft.com being among the worst of the ten (if not the very worst) to render.

And yet you still have a "command prompt" so that you can run your DOS programs as well as "compatibility mode" so that older applications can run on the post-XP systems.

"Command prompt", i.e. terminal, is what makes you toy a computer. If you don't have one, it's still a toy.

MS did a lot to turn their lame "DOS command prompt" into a command line terminal; not enough, but a lot.

So no, "command prompt" has nothing to do with DOS. You can run DOS programs from the GUI as well.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#38
post #31
post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's backwards, though. MS wants to enable new systems to run old software, and they do this very well. The case in hand is running old software against new content, which they don't care about. The relevant comparison would be running IE10 against a cached copy of some website from 1999. I suspect that test would work rather well.

Well ... I do agree that both the standards and best-practices for creating web content have changed, but I'm pretty sure the most recent version of Excel will open a document I created in the '90s. You could argue they have complete control of both the software and the document format in that instance, but the IE browsers never bothered to be standards compliant anyway ("older IE browsers" - I've been pleasantly sur…

But the point is that a '90s copy of Excel running would not remotely be able to consume and display a modern .XLSX data file. Going back to the original point, this is why it's impressive that Wikipedia are able to display their site to such an old browser, and ironic that MS doesn't.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#39

And for my next magic trick, popular modern video games rendered in 256 bit color.

20 or so years ago, I've got a Hercules card for my dear old 386 machine - Good resolution at the time, but just two colors. There are couple of good games - Star Control II, Trolls, etc. that I've liked and what I did was first to disable the VGA detection, second was to find where the back buffer was in the game, and if there was none (Star Control II), point to my allocated.

Then on the fly convert 320x200x256 colors to monochrome - I mean it was very silly - just pick one of the bits - and with some experiments it worked (no, it's not the way to go in general - but I was able to play).

That was dog slow, but it felt like smoking something, getting high - it didn't matter that the game was unplayable (10fps or less) - it was the fact that it worked!!!

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#40
post #15

It would be interesting to know how those pages function in IE5. Does anything they do rely on JS IE5 doesn't understand? CSS IE5 can't process? eBay, Amazon, and Facebook especially might become worthless even though it looks like they render in a usable fashion.

IE5 had XHR, but didn't have native JSON support and a number of other features. I think it was on ECMA 1 or 2 until IE5.5, which had 3. I wager no one uses JSON shims anymore. I don't really know what would happen when you try to use JSON in ECMA 1 or 2.

Native JSON support was only added in IE8.
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