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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#261

Post by puzzle »

Oh, God. I forgot about the empty src bug. YouTube wasn't the only substantial Google service affected by it from time to time. But I remember it differently.

Yes, it triggered a GET for /. But that generated HTML (usually the service's homepage, as was our case), which the browser would attempt to parse as an image, obviously failing. It would not trigger a recursive fetching of all the resources on the page. Even without recursion, it already inflicted major damage, because our service's homepage was dynamic, while the resources linked from it were mostly static (and thus a lot cheaper, as well as cacheable). I think I would have noticed if it multiplied other traffic, not just the homepage.

This was the bane of my existence for many months. Every few weeks I would have to fire up Dremel and try to figure what was causing the spurious page loads. I hated and still hate SQL, so that was no fun. I knew when it was time to investigate thanks to our human monitoring system: our PMs would get excited or puzzled by a sudden jump in the page view dashboards. (They lived by those graphs...)

Thank you Chris and co. for your contributions in killing the browser version from hell.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#263

Post by Iv »

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…

This part is why it worked:

"He had come in on an otherwise normal day to find email from every major tech news publication asking why the second largest website on the planet was threatening to cut off access to nearly a fifth of its user base. Fortunately for us, the publications had already settled on a narrative that this was a major benefit to the Internet. By their call, YouTube was leading the charge towards making the web a faster, safer experience for all of its users."

Go with the Zeitgeist, and you'll have a lot of wind in your sails.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#264

Post by Iv »

And this is how you hack organizations:

"Shortly thereafter, the Google Docs engineers whipped up their own IE6 banner and pushed it into production, presumably under the mistaken assumption that we had done our diligence and had received all of the necessary approvals."

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#265

Post by pixelrevision »

daotoad wrote: post #152
cpeterso wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you worked on web software at that time, 50% of the work was making something that worked in every other browser, then the next 50% was making it work in IE6 without breaking everything else. The arrival of IE8, while it was less awful than IE6, made things worse because many of the hacks used to make things IE6 friendly, worked with IE8, so the collection of stupid CSS hacks one had to memorize grew even more com…

It really is hard to describe how much bullshit devs have had to put up with to keep IE happy. Even today our front end team wants to use some modern JavaScript features which work fine in everything but IE. IE will never get another upgrade but it’s still holding tight to that small install base.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#266

Post by code_duck »

Perfect timing. For anyone not familiar from experience, personally I was doing heavy web development during this period and IE6 was a scourge - even IE7 was much better. The version was clearly beyond long in the tooth, having been released sometime like 2000 or 2001. Indeed, usage was still somewhere around 10%. If we didn’t support it, people would complain to us or even advertisers.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#268

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

pjc50 wrote: post #172
jrochkind1 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This may be a management culture thing, but I would regard that happening as a massive red flag and immediately start looking to quit. Formal warning, perhaps, if it actually contravenes a written policy, but in this case is unlikely to have been one. There was no actual financial or reputation loss to the company.

But mah autonomy!!!

THB, meh.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#269

Post by bobthepanda »

Causality1 wrote: post #135
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…

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.

Microsoft's antitrust settlement with the US only ended in 2011: https://www.seattletimes.com/business/microsoft/long-antitru...

More importantly, the EU's decision on bundling IE with Windows came down in 2007: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Corp._v._Commission

The EU has continued pursuing antitrust cases, and the FTC has now set up a task force to investigate antitrust in tech. The main problem is that the wheels of the legal system turn very slowly, much slower than the startups rise (and fall).

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#270

Post by underwater »

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.

That seems extreme.

I've worked in some organizations where the assumption is that engineers aren't capable of making product decisions. They are merely walking, talking machines that are there to implement the vision of the PM and designers.

In other orgs engineers are very much in tune with how product decisions are made, what the business is optimizing for, and what constraints they need to be aware of. They will generally work with the product owners to shape the user experience.

I'm guessing that YouTube was much more in the latter category.

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