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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#101

Post by TimTheTinker »

tclancy wrote: post #74
TimTheTinker wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IE6 wasn't always terrible For web apps, IE6 and anything that came before was always terrible. It used to be hard to build a decent web app, even if most of your code ran on the server. There is a huge qualitative difference between building for an ad-hoc platform and one that is rigorously built and tested against some externally defined standard. Sure, Chrome may be lagging in some areas, but--like all modern br…

I would disagree. IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in. Once we got to IE6/ Netscape 6/ Phoenix, it felt too easy.

> IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in

My point is that in the IE6 era (and previously), doing so was categorically hard -- I didn't say impossible. Also, that changed with FF 3.5, IE8, Chrome, etc.

Admittedly, IE6 and FF 1.5 were the first browsers I had to develop apps for from scratch. (And FF was already far more robust.)

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#102

Post by everdev »

> Between YouTube, Google Docs, and several other Google properties posting IE6 banners, Google had given permission to every other site on the web to add their own.

This was one of the happiest days off my web development career when I could finally tell clients to drop IE6 support because "even Google is doing it."

Amazing to hear how the tail wagged the dog to achieve this :)

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#103

Post by baybal2 »

It is 2019 and Chinese dotcoms still design for IE6. Reason? XP is still the "default OS" with megatons of hardware for things like POS terminals, fapiao printers, biometric systems, passport/rfid scanners not shipping with drivers for anything other than XP.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#104

Post by msvan »

mpol wrote: post #32
dTal wrote: post #26

Interestingly, according to the graph at the end, IE6 was already well on its way out and they only accelerated its death by a few months. The real effect seems to have been stopping IE7 dead in its tracks, and almost single-handedly catapulting IE8 to the top. A most peculiar effect, despite the banner's promotion of IE8, since only IE6 users should have seen it! I smell an untold story... maybe one of the other tea…

IE7 was only for a short time the newest Microsoft browser. IE8 lived for a long time, untill eventualy IE9 came about. IE7 didn't have tabs, IE8 did.

IE7 had tabs.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#105

Post by ChrisSD »

UncleMeat wrote: post #90
partiallypro wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has coincidentally made their products not work on Microsoft's Chromium based browser...and it's not even out of beta.

"Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result. Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?

Considering it uses the same rendering engine as the most popular browser in the world?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#106

Post by nicoburns »

mpol wrote: post #32
dTal wrote: post #26

Interestingly, according to the graph at the end, IE6 was already well on its way out and they only accelerated its death by a few months. The real effect seems to have been stopping IE7 dead in its tracks, and almost single-handedly catapulting IE8 to the top. A most peculiar effect, despite the banner's promotion of IE8, since only IE6 users should have seen it! I smell an untold story... maybe one of the other tea…

IE7 was only for a short time the newest Microsoft browser. IE8 lived for a long time, untill eventualy IE9 came about. IE7 didn't have tabs, IE8 did.

IE7 did have tabs. In fact, it was one of the main features. They didn't make significant standards compatibility improvements until IE8, and only really in IE9. IE10 was the first one (since 6) to actually be comparable to other modern browsers.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#107

Post by soulofmischief »

ljm wrote: post #39
jrochkind1 wrote: post #2

Oh my, this is amazing. I'm not sure the engineers realized despite their secrecy, it would be noticed by the press immediately after deploy. But the best part is how Google engineers immediately on seeing it figured "oh yeah, we should do that too" (although they apparently got the necessary approvals however that was done at Google, it was easier to do because they figured "well, youtube must have done due dillegen…

It's a fascinating tech story, but it would easily turn into a horror if we weren't talking about something like a video hosting platform. Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive 'old timer' permissions that basically backdoored the company's engineering processes. Even if the engineers saw a good reason to do so. I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right ? It turned out to…

They weren't working at a medical or financial company so your argument is pointless.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#108

Post by 8ytecoder »

UncleMeat wrote: post #90
partiallypro wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has coincidentally made their products not work on Microsoft's Chromium based browser...and it's not even out of beta.

"Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result. Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?

Microsoft Chrome is essentially Chrome slapped with a new, pardon the pun, chrome. If a website works on Chrome it should work on the MS version as well - assuming they haven't made many breaking changes - and from what I have read so far they have only replaced auxiliary services and haven't altered the rendering engine.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#109

Post by derefr »

saagarjha wrote: post #85
darawk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the sort of riskless sentiment that causes something like IE6 to persist forever. > I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right? It turned out to be beneficial but there are thousands of ways that this could explode in your face if you tried it yourself. How would this explode in your face, exactly? What was the risk here?

From what it looks like, this is quite literally the ability to get code into the main codebase with no oversight. Even without malicious intentions, it seems very easy to do something awful by accident.

The main codebase... of a video sharing site. With no SLAs, and (at the time) no partner video-hosting agreements.

The most awful thing that could happen to 2006-era YouTube: they could stop delivering ad impressions for an hour or two. Oh wait, no; 2006-era YouTube didn't even have ads yet.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#110

Post by maxxxxx »

stestagg wrote: post #71
maxxxxx wrote: post #12

There is another thread about a Code of Ethics for developers. This is an interesting case study. In many ways what they did was unethical but the result was probably positive overall. How do you deal with that? Ethics is hard and very dependent on the details of the situation.

What was unethical about what they did? Risky? Sure. But I don't think adherence to corporate policy is an ethical goal

Doing things behind others’ backs is generally unethical. This decision should have been made in the open.
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