231–240 of 386 posts
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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?
> 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 - vim…
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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 mean, Google just paid a ton of money to acquihire this team, and then the acquihired team is going to turn around and fire all the people Google paid for? That doesn't sound like an arrangement Google would be happy with. (Which is to say, with more generality: people who get acquihired are basically temporarily invulnerable to office politics.)
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> 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 - vim…
I agree that in a hypothetical scenario that this wasn't, it could have been a catastrophe. But in the one that actually existed, it couldn't have been.
All that said... I had to work with ie6, it is terrible, and these people are heroes.
It would be a funny thing were it not for the fact that we have a massive company doing blatantly anti-competitive things. If the Feds every want to try to break up G, this will be submitted as evidence. Edit: this is exactly what a monopolizer looks like in action. One tactical move at a time, until they have full control of an adjacent layer in the value chain. In this case browsers.
I think this was fundamentally different than a monopoly move. A monopolistic action would require a user of one Monopoly service to use another service by the supplier, such as a browser. That is absolutely not what happened here. In this case, YouTube asked people to upgrade to a number of options, including a newer version of IE. Notice that they did not require tying of one of their services with another. I think that makes it completely different.
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Even if you consider the context and era, Chrome is still magnitudes better than IE because the real problem with IE6 was that it was hard to upgrade. It didn't matter that IE6 was fast at some point because IE didn't auto-update and Microsoft often tied IE to Windows upgrades, which in turn were often tied to new computer purchases or long enterprise contracts. Not to mention IE's significant divergence from standar…
IE was not tied to Windows upgrades, except in a sense that new IE versions would eventually stop supporting old Windows versions (but that's true of all browsers). IE6 was available on Win98+ and NT4+, for example. IE7 and IE8 were XP/2003+. As far as divergence from the standards, again, that was generally not the case when IE6 shipped - if anything, it was at the bleeding edge, and past it in some ways. The real p…
It would be a funny thing were it not for the fact that we have a massive company doing blatantly anti-competitive things. If the Feds every want to try to break up G, this will be submitted as evidence. Edit: this is exactly what a monopolizer looks like in action. One tactical move at a time, until they have full control of an adjacent layer in the value chain. In this case browsers.
> Edit: this is exactly what a monopolizer looks like in action. One tactical move at a time, until they have full control of an adjacent layer in the value chain. In this case browsers. I think this was fundamentally different than a monopoly move. A monopolistic action would require a user of one Monopoly service to use another service by the supplier, such as a browser. That is absolutely not what happened here. I…
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…
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I would disagree. IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in. Once we got to IE6/ Netscape 6/ Phoenix, it felt too easy.
I wrote some pretty impressive applications with charting in NN4/IE4 days... it was horrible, and you couldn't pay me enough to do it again.