A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 • Hacker News Board

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#291

Post by sincerely » Thu, May 02, 2019, 6:26 AM UTC

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…

But firefox and linux aren't competing for anything?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#292

Post by dgoldstein0 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 6:43 AM UTC

ljm wrote: post #201

chris_wot wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As opposed to the denial of service style bugs like an empty src element in an img tag?

They're perfectly capable of introducing other DOS bugs that don't depend on bad markup.

This is a poor argument - just because we can shoot our own feet, doesn't mean we should not try to prevent it from happening by accident.

And it sounds like it wasn't just DOS - also just plain "it doesn't work in ie6" seems the most likely outcome; crashes and DOS that the article describes just sounds like the most egregious cases.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#293

Post by SXX » Thu, May 02, 2019, 6:54 AM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #202

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…

> 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

I was reading your comment and wasn't sure if it's well hidden sarcasm or you are seriously don't know this already happened:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19553941

Basically you cannot watch high resolutions streams on Linux already even in Google Chrome because of DRM Google among others helped to push into HTML specification.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#294

Post by fredsted » Thu, May 02, 2019, 7:03 AM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #202

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…

Google is still doing this on stuff like Hangouts or Meet, where it tells you it won't work in Safari. But changing the user agent has worked for me.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#295

Post by icebraining » Thu, May 02, 2019, 7:05 AM UTC

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…

OMTP is enabled on Firefox for Linux.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#296

Post by mukundmr » Thu, May 02, 2019, 7:12 AM UTC

As a web developer, I can't thank these heroes enough.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#297

Post by closeparen » Thu, May 02, 2019, 7:22 AM UTC

neilv wrote: post #282

Zak wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of a third reason: everybody in the industry wanted IE6 dead. It was expensive to maintain support for an old, broken browser and often meant new features couldn't be added. The people who should have fired the conspirators were glad that the conspiracy succeeded even if they had objections to the methods used.

I'm really glad this method of execution was an honest banner. (The biggest problem here might've been cutting colleagues out of the loop it sounds like they were probably supposed to be in.) When I started reading the story, I was afraid it was going to go in the direction of sneaky sabotage, like intentionally causing performance problems or crashes. There've been accusations of that happening, within the last year…

You don't need sneaky sabotage to break the UX in IE6. Just not going out of your way for it will do that.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#298

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, May 02, 2019, 7:27 AM UTC

etaioinshrdlu wrote: post #285

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How so? I'm legitimately asking- I find Windows 10's Start Menu , of all things, to be way better on win10 than win7, especially in Enterprise deployments.

It's probably the forced internet login and forced OS updates and reboots that annoys people.

Plus the controversy about data gathering and support for ads in native applications, with data for ads provided from the OS.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#299

Post by Cthulhu_ » Thu, May 02, 2019, 7:28 AM UTC

codedokode wrote: post #202

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…

Just because a browser is unsupported doesn't mean it won't work; it means they're not going out of their way to fix it if a problem does occur.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#300

Post by vilius » Thu, May 02, 2019, 7:32 AM UTC

> Between YouTube, Google Docs, and several other Google properties posting IE6 banners, Google had given permission to every other site on the web to add their own.

YouTube started a domino effect with this. I remember I was working at a web agency at the time. And when I saw YouTube's banner regarding IE6 it was my "this is it" moment. I rushed my boss trying to convince him we should stop making our client websites IE6 compatible. He considered it and started incorporating YouTube IE6 stance in every client proposal from that moment.