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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#301

Post by DonHopkins »

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…

It's just like Murder on the Orient Express!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_on_the_Orient_Express_(...

>The next morning, Poirot discovers Ratchett was murdered during the night, having been stabbed a dozen times. [...]

>With the train back on track, Poirot concludes that justice is impossible in this case, as Cassetti deserved death; for the first time, Poirot will have to live with a lie and imbalance.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#302

Post by iggldiggl »

terinjokes wrote: post #230
tatersolid wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'm confused. It prompts me all the time to change my default browser to Edge. Microsoft products ignore the default browser bit and open links in Edge, which them opens pop-ups to change my default browser to Edge. Even the UI for changing the default browser in Settings heavily encourages you to set Edge.

> Microsoft products ignore the default browser bit and open links in Edge

Try something like EdgeDeflector (https://github.com/da2x/EdgeDeflector) for redirecting those links to your default browser.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#303

Post by dancek »

NeoBasilisk wrote: post #227

Anyone that started developing in the IE9 era or later cannot comprehend how painful it was to develop for IE6. You simply have no frame of reference whatsoever. Any gripes you have about IE9 or later sound like a joke in comparison. Even IE8 was a huge improvement.

Yes. IE9 was an improvement over IE8, which was a big improvement over IE7, which was a huge improvement over IE6. I don't have experience before that, but my understanding of history is that things were even worse before IE6.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#304

Post by neilv »

closeparen wrote: post #297
neilv wrote: post #282

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I remember. :) Getting browser developers to comply with basic standards was a bigger problem around then. (Initially, everyone out of the gate, including MCom/Netscape, was rushing to throw in new features without standards, either to make the Web more appealing to people, or because the nonstandard bits were a shorter path from their current platforms or implementations, or as a competitive play to be the preferred browser. A bit after, one of the developers had incentive to sabotage the Web, which arguably is part of the reason why many organizations got stuck on particular old browser versions.) After monumental amounts of work, everyone started accepting standards, we then had waves of other related problems, and might be entering a new wave now (unclear).

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#305

Post by solveit »

underwater wrote: post #270
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 co…

Yes, but

>They will generally work with the product owners

is exactly what the engineers didn't do in this story. The company was completely blindsided.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#306

Post by vijaybritto »

munk-a wrote: post #219
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? 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…

Do you seriously think people would scrap off their contracts for legacy browser support? This is not like all or nothing. If they think its unfair then the org is gonna complain to the vendor about this. I don't know if any org can decide to switch over to a different vendor without trying to resolve first.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#307

Post by baud147258 »

ljm wrote: post #39
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…

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…

> Imagine working at a medical or financial company and having secretive 'old timer' permissions that basically backdoored the company's engineering processes

Have you heard about Kerviel? A trader that cost his banks a few billions of euros? He was able to do this because he could bypass reviews by his boss and the internal compliance team.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J%C3%A9r%C3%B4me_Kerviel

Edit: to be fair, it look like he took the blame for all the failings of the company

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#309

Post by systematical »

We all killed IE6 eventually, the big shops and the little shops. Big shops had their banners, us little ones had their banter. Telling those in accounting, marketing, support, and sales to use FireFox, Chrome, or whatever instead of IE6 so we didn't have to #%$& with debugging IE6 on extranets.

Man those were rough days.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#310

Post by progval »

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…

> 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.

My Firefox is up to date (60.6.1esr), and Skype Web tells me it's unsupported and refused to work.

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