Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5 • Hacker News Board

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#111

Post by fabriceleal » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 1:03 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #107

fabriceleal wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/ In Firefox 20.0.1, with Javascript disabled, after the login the home listing has a "The Dropbox website require JavaScript" text. [EDIT: Clickable, more info]

Well, Dropbox is an interesting example. If you have no JS, you probably can't download much either.

Why not? As it seems, JS is not doing anything that isn't do-able with a - as soon as the browser gets a file that it cant render (.zip, ...), it will download it.

The magic is in the server, which must set the MIME type to application\octet-stream or something similar, so the browser doesnt try to render certain browser-rendable files (.htmls, .pdfs, ...)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-usi...

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#112

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 2:49 PM UTC

fabriceleal wrote: post #111

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, Dropbox is an interesting example. If you have no JS, you probably can't download much either.

Why not? As it seems, JS is not doing anything that isn't do-able with a - as soon as the browser gets a file that it cant render (.zip, ...), it will download it. The magic is in the server, which must set the MIME type to application\octet-stream or something similar, so the browser doesnt try to render certain browser-rendable files (.htmls, .pdfs, ...) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-usi.…

I just mean users without JS usually aren't ones who are downloading files. Lynx is possibly an exception, though, since it's sometimes used by server admins like myself to grab packages.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#113

Post by fabriceleal » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 3:01 PM UTC

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #112

fabriceleal wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why not? As it seems, JS is not doing anything that isn't do-able with a - as soon as the browser gets a file that it cant render (.zip, ...), it will download it. The magic is in the server, which must set the MIME type to application\octet-stream or something similar, so the browser doesnt try to render certain browser-rendable files (.htmls, .pdfs, ...) http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-usi.…

I just mean users without JS usually aren't ones who are downloading files. Lynx is possibly an exception, though, since it's sometimes used by server admins like myself to grab packages.

Ah ok. But is there some reason for Lynx not to support JS? Is this by design? I also found out about links [1] and elinks [2] but seems that their JS support is marginal or requires compiling with certain flags [3]. Haven't anyone tried to incorporate V8 yet?

[1]: http://links.twibright.com/

[2]: http://elinks.or.cz/index.html

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353519/lynx-with-javascr...

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#114

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 3:04 PM UTC

fabriceleal wrote: post #113

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just mean users without JS usually aren't ones who are downloading files. Lynx is possibly an exception, though, since it's sometimes used by server admins like myself to grab packages.

Ah ok. But is there some reason for Lynx not to support JS? Is this by design? I also found out about links [1] and elinks [2] but seems that their JS support is marginal or requires compiling with certain flags [3]. Haven't anyone tried to incorporate V8 yet? [1]: http://links.twibright.com/ [2]: http://elinks.or.cz/index.html [3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353519/lynx-with-javascr...

Implementing JS would be a huge undertaking (they'd have to implement lots of APIs and the DOM, for starters). Such text-mode browsers are usually light on resources, too, and this would change that. Also, JS is usually used with the assumption graphics support is there.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#115

Post by katherineparker » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 4:41 PM UTC

jordanmoore_ wrote: post #91

alexvr wrote: post #24

I laughed out loud at Microsoft

Microsoft's design uses a mobile first approach with media queries and other techniques to make it a ubiquitous experience regardless of device. The others don't. That's why it looks the worst in an ancient browser, although it arguably looks better than the other examples if you were to open the same page on an array of devices with differing dynamics.

Thanks for explaining this :). There had to be a good reason as to why Microsoft would approach IE5 this way and I was wondering why.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#116

Post by mynameisvlad » Tue, Apr 30, 2013, 9:34 PM UTC

udp wrote: post #108

mynameisvlad wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't shock me. They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers. They created http://www.ie6countdown.com/ after all. It's also probably near impossible to get their current site working on IE5, and to make a completely separate site just for them (and it's a really really small percentage of worldwide users) would be highly cost prohibitive.

> They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers. Oh, so that's why they wanted my grandma to buy a new version of Windows (and a new computer to meet the system requirements) just to update Internet Explorer.

Windows XP supports up to IE8, Vista IE9 and 7 IE10. There's only so much you can do when an OS is on life support, and making sacrifices just to give an OS another version of IE is just stupid.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#117

Post by yuhong » Wed, May 01, 2013, 6:56 AM UTC

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #98

magic_haze wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed, but... the standards themselves have changed since 1999.

Yeah, it seems Microsoft always has had good excuses. I wonder if other browsers from that period would have as poor results as IE5 does. I seriously doubt it.

Well the main competitor was Netscape 4, which was even worse.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#118

Post by LekkoscPiwa » Thu, May 02, 2013, 10:41 AM UTC

yuhong wrote: post #117

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, it seems Microsoft always has had good excuses. I wonder if other browsers from that period would have as poor results as IE5 does. I seriously doubt it.

Well the main competitor was Netscape 4, which was even worse.

What exactly was worse in Netscape? Because I just loved using it.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#119

Post by yuhong » Thu, May 02, 2013, 6:07 PM UTC

LekkoscPiwa wrote: post #118

yuhong wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well the main competitor was Netscape 4, which was even worse.

What exactly was worse in Netscape? Because I just loved using it.

It's extremely bad and buggy CSS support, which was even worse than even IE4, let along IE5.

Re: Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

#120

Post by udp » Wed, May 08, 2013, 11:08 PM UTC

mynameisvlad wrote: post #116

udp wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers. Oh, so that's why they wanted my grandma to buy a new version of Windows (and a new computer to meet the system requirements) just to update Internet Explorer.

Windows XP supports up to IE8, Vista IE9 and 7 IE10. There's only so much you can do when an OS is on life support, and making sacrifices just to give an OS another version of IE is just stupid.

The very latest versions of Firefox and Chrome don't seem to have a problem supporting older versions of Windows.

Can you tell me more about these sacrifices that would have to be made? I'm genuinely interested.