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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#111

Post by sethammons »

> To cement their authority over the YouTube codebase during the integration into Google, the early engineers created a specialized permission set called “OldTuber”. OldTuber granted you the ability to completely bypass the new Google-oriented code enforcement policies, enabling anyone holding it to commit code directly to the YouTube codebase, with only the most glancing of code reviews from anyone. No need for code readability. No need for exhaustive tests. No need for maintaining code coverage. If you broke the site by improperly wielding OldTuber status, it was on your head and you would lose the privilege immediately, if not your job. So you just had to be a good citizen and never break the site.

Oh man. At our org, we called this "being a cowboy." We have a lot of process to prevent cowboys now. Oh, the good ol' days haha.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#112

Post by user17843 »

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…

This is not comparable imho.

No medical or financial company has this vibrant engineering IT culture like the web startups 20 years ago had.

Everything was new and exciting, and things moved foreward exactly due to the flexibility of all involved, the uncertainty, the flat hierarchies, and the fact that many rules either didn't exist, or only existed on paper.

This is what happens everytime a new market emerges, where structures need some time to settle.

Once they have settled down, procedures become standardized, but they also become so boring that all innovation is lost.

What happend at Youtube 12 years ago is exactly what happens right now at some Cryptocurrency start ups. The start ups that are succesful are exactly those start ups where people like this Youtube engineer do not get fired. If YT had such an authoritarian attitude in 2009, they would never have become succesful.

It's easy for the blog author to say "I have no idea why we weren't fired" but I bet back then it was all fun and games. (Getting fired isn't even that bad, what really harms people is when everyone around them starts to tell them things like "You could have ruined everything!")

And something similar to the excitement and fluidity within the Youtube of 12 years ago happened 80 years ago in pharmaceutical companies, or 200 years ago within a Bank, when such structures were still freshly formed.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#113

Post by user17843 »

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.

of course there was oversight. Those with experience had privileged access. Basically meritocracy. Today innovation and movement is stiffled by large corprate and legal structures where engineers only recieve commands.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#114

Post by alanh »

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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_7

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#115

Post by derefr »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #42
ljm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Yes. I love the story, and if I had been in charge I don't see how I could do anything but fire the whole lot of them. Although... the number of people involved in the "OldTubers" backdoor seems to have been pretty substantial, I don't know if they could really have fired all of them... But who is anyone to say if doing anything is "right"? We're all equally qualified to have a moral compass.

I mean, Google just paid a ton of money to acquihire this team, and then the acquihired team is going to turn around and fire all the people Google paid for? That doesn't sound like an arrangement Google would be happy with.

(Which is to say, with more generality: people who get acquihired are basically temporarily invulnerable to office politics.)

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#116

Post by [deleted] »

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.

[deleted]

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#117

Post by hoorayimhelping »

>Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review.

I love this so much, it's so punk-rock. It's like John Henry's signature on the Declaration of Independence.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#118

Post by tracker1 »

I was working on an SPA around this time in an internal environment at a large bank. IE6 was the bane of my existence and the memory leaks in IEAround the same time, there was a Chrome in IE plugin that was also suggested for other applications but never got approved.

People complain about the progression/changes in JS since around 2010 (node, commonjs, es5+). But nothing is so bad as dealing with the really old browsers. IE6 was decent at release but became a boat anchor to the industry. Even then, you couldn't pay me enough to ever support IE4.x + NN4.x ever again.

Wonderful story.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#119

Post by derefr »

cpeterso wrote: post #10

Is this a charming story about helping users upgrade to modern web browsers or a dark parable about the influence of tech giants? Compare with ex-Firefox VP Johnathan Nightingale's recent thread about Google "amateur hour" and "oopses" that only affected Firefox: https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686

In this case, the rest of the web put up the banners not because Google controlled the web, but because "if even Google, who has a huge monetary incentive to have their services be accessible to every web surfer [and puts a lot of work into achieving that], is willing to alienate IE6 users, IE6 must really be on the decline."

It's sort of the reverse of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": nobody ever got fired for refusing to implement an accessibility measure that not even IBM (or Google, in this case) bothers to implement. Unless you're in a very specific sector (in which case you know what your obligations are), your legal duties will always be a strict subset of those of $BIGCORP; so you can use $BIGCORP's shirking of a particular duty as a heuristic to determine whether you can safely shirk that same duty.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#120

Post by [deleted] »

dfabulich wrote: post #24

This is the first example I've ever heard of where a browser-upgrade banner worked . Every time I've tried it on sites I've worked on, the "please upgrade" banner does nothing. Years ago, we even tried turning it into an intrusive pop-up for a percentage of users. They just clicked through the pop-up, presumably without reading it. I wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement? > Between YouTube, G…

[deleted]
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