201–210 of 386 posts
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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?
For example, tomorrow Google can implement a DRM that would require a plugin that works on Windows, Android (with Google Play Services) or Mac, but not on Linux. After all, Linux is not a DRM-friendly system (allowing the user to hack anything is not what copyright holders want), and almost nobody uses it on desktop, so why bother supporting it? Or Google can use it against new, not yet very popular browser, to slow its adoption.
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"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.
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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.
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
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.
Can you elaborate? I kind of agree on the Kubernetes part in that it's really biased towards Google-scale, but I fail to see such biases in Go, despite having used it as my primary language for 4 years now.
> Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review. I love this so much, it's so punk-rock. It's like John Henry's signature on the Declaration of Independence.
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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])
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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 an…
Ok, and if IE6 had not been ready to die, what kind of catastrophe would have ensued?
> 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.
I can imagine catastrophes. But they're mostly the sorts of catastrophes that are bad for an organization, but great for a civilization.
> 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.
Something we don't hear about if it fails, but produces a great social benefit if it succeeds seems like exactly the sort of thing we should be doing.
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 wonder if it worked in this case because it started a movement? It was continuing a movement and giving it visibility outside web developers. The youtube banner happened mid-2009, web developers around the world had soured on IE6 and actively trying to kill it off since 2005~2006. What the youtube banner provided was a way to finally get the word out, and an argument to give PHBs: it became much easier to sell br…
As a web developer at the time, I could put that in my proposals, saying “it’s the standard Google browser support policy”. At which point clients signed off on not needing legacy browser support.
To anyone thinking it was a good deed: please remember that later Google used similar techiniques against other browsers, like Opera. They showed a warning about an "unsupported browser" but if the user changed user-agent to Firefox or Chrome, everything worked. Another example is Web version of Skype which is very picky and doesn't work in many browsers, like mobile browsers, or slightly outdated Firefox. For exampl…