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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#151

Post by chris_wot »

tracker1 wrote: post #139
kevin_thibedeau wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Notice he said that ADP uses Flash?

ADP has always been awful, I only wish they would get taken out by a competitor.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#152

Post by daotoad »

cpeterso wrote: post #61
nvarsj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting thread... but I really doubt the oopses were intentional. Instead it's just a case of nih syndrome, where the engineers have a myopic view and only test/build for the internal Google infra and apps. The same thing happens in golang and Kubernetes.

If YouTube developers are pushing changes that break IE6 layout for the "hundredth time" or crash the browser or OS, it sounds like they didn't have adequate QA or didn't test IE6, even though it was used by 18% of their users. "Nobody joining the team could be expected to know that early versions of IE" had some quirk could be caught by code reviews and QA.

If you worked on web software at that time, 50% of the work was making something that worked in every other browser, then the next 50% was making it work in IE6 without breaking everything else. The arrival of IE8, while it was less awful than IE6, made things worse because many of the hacks used to make things IE6 friendly, worked with IE8, so the collection of stupid CSS hacks one had to memorize grew even more complex.

IE6 was a browser of the same era as Netscape 4, when it was common and unsurprising for a CSS error or a malformed bit of HTML to crash the browser.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#153

Post by TheKarateKid »

mattmanser wrote: post #33
umvi wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.) Except for the part where you get BSoD and infinite recursion or any of the other stated IE6 nightmares... Really, the only thing Chrome and IE have in common are market share. Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way as far as being a web dev goes.

And IE6 was similarly tons better the Netscape Navigator. It had XmlHttp, inventing Ajax, which revolutionised the web. Easy to forget that now. Also, did you know IE6 pioneered the browser web dev tools? IE6 was the first browser you could debug your JavaScript, css and html, which was copied by firebug about 12 months later. I can't even remember what it was called now, IE Dev toolbox? Something strange, you had to…

I'm pretty sure Netscape Navigator had a Javascript debugger built-in back in v3.0, which was way before IE6.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#154

Post by yellowapple »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #63
mattmanser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And IE6 was similarly tons better the Netscape Navigator. It had XmlHttp, inventing Ajax, which revolutionised the web. Easy to forget that now. Also, did you know IE6 pioneered the browser web dev tools? IE6 was the first browser you could debug your JavaScript, css and html, which was copied by firebug about 12 months later. I can't even remember what it was called now, IE Dev toolbox? Something strange, you had to…

It was the Developer Toolbar, I've got a pet project that I'm making compatible with IE5 and its challenging to work without it.

What kind of project in this day and age would require IE5 compatibility?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#155

Post by wvenable »

tracker1 wrote: post #147
tclancy wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think the desire to create this insane things using technology that wasn't ready for it is what drove browser development forward. But this is like complaining your toddler couldn't do algebra now that all your kids are teenagers.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#157

Post by amiga-workbench »

yellowapple wrote: post #154
amiga-workbench wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was the Developer Toolbar, I've got a pet project that I'm making compatible with IE5 and its challenging to work without it.

What kind of project in this day and age would require IE5 compatibility?

Its not a commercial project, just an alternate (lightweight) front end for a forum and I wanted to prove to myself that old versions of IE weren't as bad to develop for as I remember.

The truth ended up being somewhere in the middle, I was reminded of rendering errors that I had long forgotten, but all in all it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It helps that I'm just building a website in the classic sense, not a blob of JavaScript that happens to puke out HTML, and when I run into something that's awkward to implement I can just adjust the design to work with what I have.

I realise that's not something a lot of people in a commercial job would have had the luxury of doing.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#158

Post by cpeterso »

behringer wrote: post #37
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…

There's no way this banner did anything in reality. Corporations didn't upgrade because of their tooling, not youtube. What corporation upgraded to make sure their employees could youtube harder?

StatCounter's graph of browser version market share for 2009 doesn't show the same sharp IE6 drop as the YouTube graph. IE6 users probably just switched another browser when they wanted to watch YouTube. IE6 and IE7 were already on their way out, being replaced by IE8 and Chrome.

http://gs.statcounter.com/browser-version-partially-combined...

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#159

Post by user5994461 »

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…

>>> I don't know how they didn't all get fired. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special "OldTuber" priv long before.

That's really blowing it out of proportions. It's a minor button addition to the UI and they paid attention to not be sued by the European commission for it for anti competitive behavior. It's a job well done with nothing to criticize.

It's a BAU example of how works get done in a large bureaucratic organization.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#160

Post by crazygringo »

Besides being a great story, this is a perfect example of how corporations aren't people.

Corporations don't have single agendas, they don't think with one mind, they can't be simplified to a single narrative.

Rather, they're collections of 1,000's of individual each doing their own theing, and the CEO is trying (and often failing) to herd the cats in a single logical direction.

Plenty of good things (like this) can come out of it. But also plenty of bad things, like security breaches, anticompetitive behavior, and invasions of privacy.

Whenever anyone says "because Google always does " or "Google is always like ", a story like this is a great antidote.

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