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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#211

Post by gcbw2 »

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?

> How would this explode in your face, exactly? What was the risk here?

for one thing that actually happened because they did (and got away) with this: youtube engineers feel like they can leverage their site to dictate what they want in the browser space, by deliberately making it 5x slower on firefox and edge[0].

As a rule of thumb, if something looks fishy and shady, but just because it doesn't directly explodes in your face, treat it as a "but I don't have anything to hide" situation, and be against it. Because eventually, it will be your face.

[0] http://fortune.com/2018/07/25/youtube-slow-mozilla-firefox-c...

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#212

Post by not2b »

darawk wrote: post #208
ljm wrote: post #193

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

No catastrophe would have ensued. They didn't remove support for IE6. They put up a banner telling IE6 users that support would be removed some time in the future. Only taking the second step (actually removing support) would have any consequences. If a large, powerful contingent demanded that IE6 support be kept indefinitely and persuaded management of this, the banner would have been removed.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#213

Post by guelo »

user5994461 wrote: post #180
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.

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

So? It works. I'm not upgrading my Win7 box. It's a much more user-centric OS than Win10.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#214

Post by tty2300 »

tracker1 wrote: post #145
homero wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE6 was insanely bad. Later browsers worked somewhat.

IE6 was pretty awesome when it was released... not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice. Eventually it became the next boat anchor. IE10-11 is the current boat anchor, and will probably cycle out within the next year. Already have internal apps with no IE support at all, and only the most recent Edge release. The perspective on outdated (insecure) browsers is becoming…

Our enterprise app (not internal) has 80% of users on IE11 :/

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#215

Post by octorian »

tracker1 wrote: post #145
homero wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE6 was insanely bad. Later browsers worked somewhat.

IE6 was pretty awesome when it was released... not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice. Eventually it became the next boat anchor. IE10-11 is the current boat anchor, and will probably cycle out within the next year. Already have internal apps with no IE support at all, and only the most recent Edge release. The perspective on outdated (insecure) browsers is becoming…

> not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice.

Ahh yes, the era when far too many web developers gleefully gave the finger to anyone not running Windows. I'm so glad those days are over.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#216

Post by tracker1 »

tty2300 wrote: post #214
tracker1 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE6 was pretty awesome when it was released... not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice. Eventually it became the next boat anchor. IE10-11 is the current boat anchor, and will probably cycle out within the next year. Already have internal apps with no IE support at all, and only the most recent Edge release. The perspective on outdated (insecure) browsers is becoming…

Our enterprise app (not internal) has 80% of users on IE11 :/

I'd suggest that comes down to the type of client/users you have... it's definitely not a common case. I'd also be willing to guess that most of those users also have a different browser installed. IE11 is pretty capable, but requires a lot of shims/shivs for modern code transpilation.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#219

Post by munk-a »

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?

> How would this explode in your face, exactly? What was the risk here?

The risk could be that a competitor could step into the market and use "legacy support" as a positive of their platform. Youtube is weird - especially at that time - since it didn't really have any movers and shakers in terms of either consumers or producers, but if they were selling software that corporations legitimately use (for instance - vimeo offers good streaming video embeds that do "things" to try and restrict the video to a limited audience) then a company using this service to host their streaming videos may be motivated to shift off of that service to a competitor that won't artificially limit the users that can actually use this third party plugin.

Again, it's a bit hard to say here with YouTube in particular, because it isn't a place where work happened at that point[1] so none of the consumers wielded significant power - honestly YouTube may have been fine just say "Welp, 18% of our user base is forcing us into supporting janky old browsers - guess we're losing 18% of our user base and saving a bunch on code maintenance."

[1] Now there are streamers that may legitimately threaten the company if they threaten to jump ship, it's economically weird but beside the point... just, back then there was nothing.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#220

Post by darawk »

gcbw2 wrote: post #211
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?

> How would this explode in your face, exactly? What was the risk here? for one thing that actually happened because they did (and got away) with this: youtube engineers feel like they can leverage their site to dictate what they want in the browser space, by deliberately making it 5x slower on firefox and edge[0]. As a rule of thumb, if something looks fishy and shady, but just because it doesn't directly explodes i…

> for one thing that actually happened because they did (and got away) with this: youtube engineers feel like they can leverage their site to dictate what they want in the browser space, by deliberately making it 5x slower on firefox and edge[0].

There's no evidence that that was deliberate. These two things are also pretty completely unrelated.

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