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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#131

Post by wvenable »

themacguffinman wrote: post #80
wvenable wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the problem when looking back on the past; you miss the context. IE6, at the time in 2001, was the fastest most stable browser out there. It was magnitudes better than Netscape Navigator, which was bloated and far more crash happy. IE6 wasn't always terrible; it was just terrible compared what came after -- which is exactly how things should work.

Even if you consider the context and era, Chrome is still magnitudes better than IE because the real problem with IE6 was that it was hard to upgrade. It didn't matter that IE6 was fast at some point because IE didn't auto-update and Microsoft often tied IE to Windows upgrades, which in turn were often tied to new computer purchases or long enterprise contracts. Not to mention IE's significant divergence from standar…

But in the context and era, auto-updates were not common. No other browser auto-updated. Windows XP was released a month before IE6. Windows Update was still considered a revolutionary thing (and had been a stand-alone product only a short time earlier).

Considering the context and era, IE being updated through Windows Updates was actually a huge improvement over the state of the art at the time.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#133

Post by navs »

Fascinating read. I've worked with legacy IE a lot and that often included IE6 but never came across that bug. Who would have thought a missing src could do that.

I don't know why I get these warm fuzzies when reading about the Internet of yesteryear.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#134

Post by Nadya »

partiallypro wrote: post #73
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

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

Who would expect the browser user-agent to actually call itself "EDG" and not "EDGE" though? If you edit the user-agent to include "EDGE" in place of "EDG" everything works, someone thought "EDG" was surely a typo. Malice and stupidity and all that.

Now why they're still sniffing user agents instead of doing feature detection is a good question for Google, who themselves, to the best of my knowledge, push for feature detection instead of sniffing user agents as best practice. Do as we say - not as we do?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#135

Post by Causality1 »

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…

Something that stuck out to me was how concerned Google was that even while recommending other browsers next to Chrome, that putting Chrome first in the list could rankle antitrust regulators. Fast forward to 2019 and Windows 10 makes you fight multiple menus and "suggestions" just to switch your default browser away from Edge.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#136

Post by scarejunba »

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

Almost certainly HN would be ranting about the fact that Youtube is _discriminating_ against one in five users or some other crackpot shit.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#138

Post by ronsor »

baybal2 wrote: post #103

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.

don't forget that China practically runs on pirated Windows XP, without any service packs and no updates.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#139

Post by tracker1 »

kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #65
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…

ADP announced deprecation for IE10 and IE11 last year. They apparently didn't realize that Edge doesn't run in Win7 which many of their customers still have deployed, given the issues surrounding Win8 and 10. I guess they can use this as an excuse to not upgrade their shitshow flash app that beings a multi-core processor to it's knees just navigating between entry fields.

The OS upgrade is/was free, and IE11 is nearly 6 years old at this point. There are also other/current browsers available for Windows 7. There's really no excuse to not have a current browser.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#140

Post by darawk »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #128
derefr wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 .

I suppose more awful thing could be an accidental XSS or other vulnerability.

Which would then compromise what? People's youtube accounts?
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