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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#181

Post by mattmanser »

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?

I made a pivot table implementation in IE6 that used XSLT transforms.

It was actually blazing quick, far, far faster than the JS implementation I tried (like instant vs 20 seconds). While XSLT was hard to develop in and perhaps deserves to die its death, it really was a quite amazing bit of tech.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#182

Post by stiGGG »

I remember that day this banner showed up. My team at the company I was working for at that time was trying to do bleeding edge web development and we desperately tried to convince management to drop IE6 support too. This helped a lot. It’s amazing to read this story and I only can say thank you OldYoutubers!

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#183

Post by hadrien01 »

acheron wrote: post #16

I like the lawyers being concerned about the possibility they were pushing Chrome. Obviously Google soon decided that wasn’t a problem. (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)

According to the screenshot in the article there already was a permanent Chrome ad in the sidebar, so I don't really understand why the lawyers were concerned because of an additional banner.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#184

Post by Cyberspy »

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.

It doesn't seem though, from the story, that the 'OldTubers' group was exposed. It seems like the 'why' was more important than the 'how'

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#185

Post by skybrian »

mherdeg wrote: post #56
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

Is there a good catchy name for this "oops" stuff? It's very interesting, an interesting modern take on "embrace and extend" or "FUD".

Sadly, no amount of testing can help protect against unexpected changes in browser versions that don't exist yet.

The best you can do is test the nightly or beta track all the time (if they have one). But that may have false positives due to bugs on their end. And once you notice the bug, you still have to fix it. This isn't something to drop everything for like a security bug, so it may have to wait on other things.

Meanwhile, people outside the company will assume it's intentional sabotage, because that's how the Internet thinks these days.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#186

Post by anon87345 » 

  OldTuber granted you the ability 
  to completely bypass the new 
  Google-oriented code enforcement 
  policies, enabling anyone 
  holding it to commit code 
  directly to the YouTube 
  codebase, with only the most 
  glancing of code reviews from 
  anyone. No need for code 
  readability. No need for 
  exhaustive tests. No need for 
  maintaining code coverage. If 
  you broke the site by improperly 
  wielding OldTuber status, it was 
  on your head and you would lose 
  the privilege immediately, if 
  not your job. So you just had to 
  be a good citizen and never 
  break the site.
I have a secret theory from seeing this at a few companies by now; I think that it’s nearly critical to deploying complex / cloud-based stacks. There’s so much unique infrastructure to production that at some point you need a few people at least with engineering / ops expertise who can be the unblocker for getting something seeded or whatever. I’ve seen this either done explicitly or through a slow burn of acquiring grants over time which just never get revoked. But now I’m curious seeing it elsewhere if this is just a common and sort of necessary thing that happens.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#187

Post by user17843 »

user5994461 wrote: post #174
user17843 wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I just implied it is different because the industry was so young, it is solidified now, thus resembling other industries. (i.e. in the corporate world the hierarchies in big tech now resemble the hierarchies in big [insert any other industry])

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#189

Post by Aeolun »

saagarjha wrote: post #85
darawk wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly the sort of riskless sentiment that causes something like IE6 to persist forever. > I mean, who are we to say that this was doing it right? It turned out to be beneficial but there are thousands of ways that this could explode in your face if you tried it yourself. How would this explode in your face, exactly? What was the risk here?

From what it looks like, this is quite literally the ability to get code into the main codebase with no oversight. Even without malicious intentions, it seems very easy to do something awful by accident.

This must not be such a strange ability? Even at ‘big enterprise corp’ we have the ability (though not necessarily approval) to push directly to master, and I doubt there’s more restrictions in smaller companies.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#190

Post by TheOperator »

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

Influence can be used for good (Killing IE6) and evil (Killing Firefox).
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