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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#141

Post by tracker1 »

lewiscollard wrote: post #88
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…

I'm glad you've actually measured this, because you've saved me from doing it! Killing off our "update your browser" nag on our sites has been something I've been considering for a while. Over the last week we hit the jackpot at work, in that we had errors come into Rollbar caused by every version of Internet Explorer we don't support all the way back to 6. Yes, there was a little celebration in our dev team when we…

Current apps I'm working on test for async function support (ES2017) and if the browser doesn't support it redirects to `/legacy.html` ... it's not public facing but that was the break point for supporting the application properly... anything newer is polyfilled with babel.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#142

Post by chris_wot »

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.

As opposed to the denial of service style bugs like an empty src element in an img tag?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#144

Post by settsu »

I'm not one for hero worship, but I want to buy everyone involved a beverage.

From '08-'10, I was in web design & development at a company that was neck-deep in IE6 dependency. The animus I harbored for IE6 was so intensely palpable that there were days where I was mere moments from getting a tattoo permanently documenting my burning hate for what I still reckon as the worst piece of software ever known, based on reach, potential for issues caused, and total net effort expended on all mitigations.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#145

Post by tracker1 »

homero wrote: post #129
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…

IE6 was insanely bad. Later browsers worked somewhat.

IE6 was pretty awesome when it was released... not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice. Eventually it became the next boat anchor. IE10-11 is the current boat anchor, and will probably cycle out within the next year. Already have internal apps with no IE support at all, and only the most recent Edge release.

The perspective on outdated (insecure) browsers is becoming more broadly accepted.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#146

Post by tracker1 »

nicoburns wrote: post #106
mpol wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

IE8 was also the first IE to address a lot of the memory leaks that older versions had. DOM JS access was referenced via COM interfaces and out of scope cleanup didn't cross bounds in earlier versions.

IE8 did have a really bad bug around the JSON.parse implementation though.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#147

Post by tracker1 »

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.

I wrote some pretty impressive applications with charting in NN4/IE4 days... it was horrible, and you couldn't pay me enough to do it again.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#149

Post by emj »

jrochkind1 wrote: post #50
apo wrote: post #27

Beautiful illustration of what keeps bad ideas going, and what it takes to break them. > Our boss, in on the conspiracy with us, had thoughtfully recommended that we randomize the order of the browsers listed and then cookie the random seed for each visitor so that the UI would not jump around between pages, which we had done. It's not exactly clear whether the boss was in on the conspiracy - or whether this was a st…

Also, do it as right and professionally as you can . I mean, randomizing the order is obviously the right thing to do when you hear it. The reason companies don't want people doing this without going through the proper channels is... what if the boss hadn't happened to think of it, or hadn't been in on it? Of course, in reality in this case, they would have just fixed it when they noticed, it in fact wouldn't have be…

The sad truth about proper channels is that they often forget those things as well.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#150

Post by throwaway66666 »

Epskampie wrote: post #148
throwaway66666 wrote: post #132

EDIT: I misunderstood the article. Nothing to see here.

Calm down, they just put a banner suggesting an upgrade up.

They were planning on using an exploit to crash the browser... Did I misunderstand?

EDIT: yes I did. Thanks for making me go back and read carefully rather than jumping to conclusions.

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