A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 • Hacker News Board

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#191

Post by Zak » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:15 PM UTC

AceJohnny2 wrote: post #84

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. I can think of 2 reasons: 1. The gamble paid off. It turned out the time was ripe. Thus, there was really no negative impact on the organization that people had to be punished for. 2. The OldTubers were the experienced backbone of the group. Firing everyone with that privilege would li…

I can think of a third reason: everybody in the industry wanted IE6 dead. It was expensive to maintain support for an old, broken browser and often meant new features couldn't be added. The people who should have fired the conspirators were glad that the conspiracy succeeded even if they had objections to the methods used.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#192

Post by quickthrower2 » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:19 PM UTC

Aside: Look how much nicer the old Youtube looks in that screenshot. That's giving me nostalgia.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#193

Post by ljm » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #78

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 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?

Take it away from the specific case of IE6, and consider the situation where you have a product team that says one thing and a team of engineers insist on their solution.

They got lucky, IE6 in that sense was ready to die, and they basically declared mutiny with good cause.

Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particular set up a system to subvert their own company.

They even said it themselves: Legal shit their pants because they tried it and saw Chrome as the first suggestion. They were lucky that the media didn't capitalise on that if they got the same ordering.

This story with Youtube and IE6 is romantic. It's not realistic or aspirational. Besides which, we would not hear of it if the attempt failed.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#194

Post by notatoad » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:28 PM UTC

toast0 wrote: post #62

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…

People who upgraded to IE7 were capable and willing to upgrade, and more likely to upgrade to a later version when available. IE8 was the included browser with Windows 7, which was generally well received compared to Vista which included IE7. The timing lines up within the release window of IE 8 (March 2009) and Windows 7 (July 2009), so potentially a lot of upgrade push from other things in the air at the time. Edit…

> people on ie7 because it came with Vista probably had a more capable/pushy update system

the people on vista had the pushiest update system of all: vista was terrible, and most users (especially organizational users) switched to windows 7 ASAP.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#195

Post by olivierduval » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

Frightening abuse of power :-(

Sorry to disagree with the current "you're my hero" trend, but in my mind, this story just show that a bunch of irresponsible hackers can do whatever they want to ease their work - for which they're paid btw - without any regard on the impacts to users that may rely on the service.

This time, it was only showing a warning message (that may have frightened some people)... and what's the next step? Decide to allow only Chrome-users to use youtube? When a company try to reach a monopoly status, it bear a social responsability.

(anyway: I'm happy for IE6 been a thing of the past)

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#196

Post by partiallypro » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:30 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #90

partiallypro wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"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?

Except if you change the user agent it works.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#197

Post by Aeolun » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:32 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #76

rdiddly wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah the part about giving the whole web "permission" to deprecate IE6 should ring alarm bells, even though it's not literal.

The most interesting thing to me is not that Google lead the charge here, but that everyone - including others at Google - was afraid to do it. Web developers the world over hated dealing with IE6 lack of compliance with established standards. Microsoft even had a newer versions of IE that was better. Everyone wanted this, it's just that nobody was willing to do anything about it. This is the world we live in. Even w…

I’m somehow a bit prickled by this.

The ‘rest of the web’ had these banners for a long while before Google ever got around to adding it. My websites (and anything I worked on) certainly did.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#198

Post by 0xDEFC0DE » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:33 PM UTC

darawk wrote: post #140

jrochkind1 wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

IE6 had plenty of nasty vulns by the time this banner had gone up (06/14/2009): https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerability-list/vendor_id-26/p...

That said, the people with this access probably knew WTF they were doing.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#199

Post by spankalee » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

Nadya wrote: post #134

partiallypro wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Google is not a single entity. Chrome DevRel and Docs web front end are not even remotely related teams, and DevRel cannot dictate practices to other teams.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#200

Post by Aeolun » Wed, May 01, 2019, 10:34 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #123

reaperducer wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't follow Firefox news. Can you supply some examples?

What they are complaining about - that they are treated as second-class citizen - is exacly, how they treat Linux, for example. No OMTP, OMTC, no hw video acceleration, no smooth scrolling, buggy dark theme, etc, so Firefox on Linux is not as polished and/or performing as on other platforms. The excuse for that was, that Linux has small market share, so it is not worth for putting more resources into solving these pr…

In those cases it never worked in the first place though. Nobody is in a position where they expect certain stuff to work because it never did.