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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#171

Post by j_koreth »

8ytecoder wrote: post #108
UncleMeat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result. Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?

Microsoft Chrome is essentially Chrome slapped with a new, pardon the pun, chrome. If a website works on Chrome it should work on the MS version as well - assuming they haven't made many breaking changes - and from what I have read so far they have only replaced auxiliary services and haven't altered the rendering engine.

Presumably they're still loading a version of the website which Trident/Edgekit which used to make up for the discrepancies between the other browsers.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#172

Post by pjc50 »

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.

This may be a management culture thing, but I would regard that happening as a massive red flag and immediately start looking to quit.

Formal warning, perhaps, if it actually contravenes a written policy, but in this case is unlikely to have been one. There was no actual financial or reputation loss to the company.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#173

Post by user5994461 »

ljm wrote: post #66
jrochkind1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'd keep them on board but I'd get rid of that backdoor and encourage them to adapt to the new situation, for a number of reasons: - 'OldTubers' vs. the new Googlers is a clear us v. them thing. Bad for culture, especially when you get privileges on top. - Their plan was actually successful so there must have been a thing or two to learn on the product side, even if it's as simple as accepting engineering input and u…

It's not a us v. them thing since they were not OldTuber and the article says that many other people were granted the access in spite of not being OldTuber.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#174

Post by user5994461 »

user17843 wrote: post #112
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…

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, wher…

What makes you think it's different in financial organizations?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#175

Post by jeromebaek »

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 correct, but there's a complication: YouTube today is a lot more than the YouYube of 2006. Today, people's livelihoods depend on YouTube. Naturally, I'd expect more responsible engineers.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#176

Post by tracker1 »

chris_wot wrote: post #151
tracker1 wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't even think it's possible to run Flash on a Mac currently.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#177

Post by [deleted] »

forgotmypw3 wrote: post #72
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…

IE6 also had the first reasonably performant CSS/DOM implementation that was not just bolted on... Unless Opera 3.x came before?

[deleted]

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#178

Post by mattmanser »

TheKarateKid wrote: post #153
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…

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

You're right, looks like it did have an installable debugger way back when:

http://www.rdwarf.com/users/wwonko/jscript/jsd.pdf

Although the Developer Toolbar had dom explorer and all that jazz, way more than a console, it really was amazing when I first used it.

Here's the release blogs:

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2005/09/16/developer-too...

https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/ie/2007/05/10/internet-expl...

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#179

Post by CamperBob2 »

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…

One big problem with IE7 was its asinine "This page contains scripts or ActiveX controls that could access your computer" warning banner that it plastered all over basically everything, including static .htm pages that didn't have even a single line of JavaScript, much less ActiveX. I got really tired of answering emails from users who were frightened half to death by that warning. It had the effect of desensitizing users to actual threats, or at least it would have if IE7 had ever gained much popularity.

It was a terrible piece of work and I was glad when it never achieved any significant market share.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#180

Post by user5994461 »

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.

Win7 is end of life in 2020 in case you were not aware of that.
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