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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#251

Post by kevingadd »

j_koreth wrote: post #171
8ytecoder wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft Chrome is essentially Chrome slapped with a new, pardon the pun, chrome. If a website works on Chrome it should work on the MS version as well - assuming they haven't made many breaking changes - and from what I have read so far they have only replaced auxiliary services and haven't altered the rendering engine.

Presumably they're still loading a version of the website which Trident/Edgekit which used to make up for the discrepancies between the other browsers.

The Edge devs went out of their way to craft a useragent that doesn't trigger Edge UA sniffing, which is why the pages used to work until Google intentionally broke them in Edge.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#252

Post by kevingadd »

cpeterso wrote: post #61
nvarsj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If YouTube developers are pushing changes that break IE6 layout for the "hundredth time" or crash the browser or OS, it sounds like they didn't have adequate QA or didn't test IE6, even though it was used by 18% of their users. "Nobody joining the team could be expected to know that early versions of IE" had some quirk could be caught by code reviews and QA.

Yeah, I worked on a much smaller product and we aggressively ran automated selenium tests against our whole product with IE6. Sometimes we hit crashes in the browser and I helped people debug them using windbg and find string locals on the stack so we could identify the bad code.

The idea that YT or any other Google product team would justify not CIing against IE6 or Firefox is absurd to me.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#253

Post by kevingadd »

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…

A massive subset of Firefox devs are Linux users. Those features are missing largely because they are hard to implement reliably on Linux and customers (who are largely not Linux users) won't feel the impact. There are often flags you can set to try and use them on Linux, YMMV.

If you try doing much hardware graphics (let alone game development) for Linux end-users you'll understand why features like OMTP or OMTC are late to ship on that platform, if ever.

Even on Windows some new stuff like WebRender has to be manually opted in on specific driver versions and architectures one at a time, because it turns out video drivers are really bad and if you ship early your app will crash.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#254

Post by Causality1 »

tatersolid wrote: post #221
Causality1 wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that stuck out to me was how concerned Google was that even while recommending other browsers next to Chrome, that putting Chrome first in the list could rankle antitrust regulators. Fast forward to 2019 and Windows 10 makes you fight multiple menus and "suggestions" just to switch your default browser away from Edge.

Your comment is demonstrably nonsense. Windows 10 only suggests Edge if you make IE11 your default browser. If you choose Firefox or Chrome it never suggests that you should switch to Edge. Microsoft’s lawyers are not stupid.

I just reinstalled Windows 10 on my laptop to fix a driver issue Windows Update fucked up and it absolutely does do that.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#255

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#256

Post by titanomachy »

floatrock wrote: post #13

Was struggling with legacy IE6 support-hacks too once while building healthcare webapps. In that field, it was more because hospital IT admins lock everything down and upgrading stuff very much falls under the "if it ain't broke, don't fix it" mantra. We too got fed up with all the IE6-specific hacks we had to maintain. One day on the login page, we added a "IE6 might be a HIPAA violation, please upgrade your system"…

The "ain't broke don't fix it" attitude makes sense when you consider e.g. a medical scanning device with a Windows-based console. Those things generally live offline and get tested and approved as an integral unit, including the exact software loaded on them at the time.

Unfortunately, that attitude in healthcare leaks to things which _are_ connected to the internet, and you get disgraceful incidents like the hacking of Britain's NHS in 2017.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#257

Post by yellowapple »

amiga-workbench wrote: post #157
yellowapple wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of project in this day and age would require IE5 compatibility?

Its not a commercial project, just an alternate (lightweight) front end for a forum and I wanted to prove to myself that old versions of IE weren't as bad to develop for as I remember. The truth ended up being somewhere in the middle, I was reminded of rendering errors that I had long forgotten, but all in all it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It helps that I'm just building a website in the classic sense, n…

Neat!

I don't know if I'd ever want to target IE at all (I'd prefer to pretend it doesn't exist), but I do like to test stuff on niche browsers (NetSurf, Dillo, lynx/links/w3m) and see how usable the site is.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#258

Post by sundvor »

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.)

Chromium, to be precise. I've switched to the new Edge beta at home and prefer it to Chrome.

Google Meet does block me though..

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#259

Post by sonnyblarney »

dwheeler wrote: post #235
sonnyblarney wrote: post #93

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…

It's close enough to being a legal problem that an internal lawyer immediately responded, specifically with the issue of 'why did you put Chrome first'?

That there were options, doesn't absolve them of possible anti-competitive acts.

For example, imagine that they did this to a browser made by a small company? Or another search engine?

Google has enough power that it doesn't need to form an overt strategy in many of these areas. Just by having assertive employees, loose rules, and Engineers not considering implications beyond their noses ... they can make all sorts of little 'wins' like this.

Today, the Chrome/Mozilla market share issue is fundamentally about power, not about 'the better product' and has Google has an infinite amount of money to subsidize that layer of the market, they will dominate, much as they do with Android. If the iPhone weren't one of the greatest products of a generation, and it were just some other thingy ... then Android would be fully dominant as well. Arguably the only reason that Mozilla exists is to allay concerns of competition.

Google has an incredible amount of power, I'm actually thankfully it's not aggressively abused, but soon as the founders leave, culture erodes, other priorities sink in, I believe there's little doubt that bias will creep into search engine results, for example.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#260

Post by stevenjohns »

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".

I'll take "oopsie."

Google did an "oopsie" and blocked Firefox users from using Gmail

Sounds great.

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