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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#321

Post by tristanperry »

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.

And somehow IE5.5 was even worse. There was a brief period whereby CSS was becoming more popular and the recommended approach for layouts (_"tables are for tabulated data, not layouts"_), but IE5.5 still had enough market share to warrant trying to make it _somewhat_ work with the div/CSS based layout. Ugh.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#322

Post by [deleted] »

partiallypro wrote: post #196
UncleMeat wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result. Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?

Except if you change the user agent it works.

[deleted]

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#323

Post by profalseidol »

Cyberspy wrote: post #168
saagarjha wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From what it looks like, this is quite literally the ability to get code into the main codebase with no oversight. Even without malicious intentions, it seems very easy to do something awful by accident.

This is why I like to work at small businesses, where I'm either the only developer or one of just a few. Even with annual turnovers, through the website, of approaching $10million/year (in my current and last role) there is very little oversight of what I do - there's literally no-one to challenge me on a technical level. That doesn't mean I abuse my position, but it does give me a lot of technical freedom in how I…

Reminds me of Marx's Alienation of the worker from their product.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#324

Post by profalseidol »

megaremote wrote: post #284
ljm wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

If enough developers want to do something, you can't stop them. You can make it take more developers, that is the best you can do.

Pretty sure there was enough developers whom hated JavaScript. What happened is that made more if it.

A reality that we would still be supporting IE6 today because so many businesses still use it seems realistic to me. Maybe we would have developed a facade for it..

This brave actions of the OldTuber saved us a ton of effort.

Hopefully somebody from Oracle sneak in Clojure in the JVM!

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#325

Post by taf2 »

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.

zoom:1;float:left

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#326

Post by Quarrelsome »

titanomachy wrote: post #256
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 hackin…

where the guy that helped stop the attack got locked up by the US feds for stuff he did in his teens while visiting a security conference. They've kept him locked up on anything they can drum up for the purposes of flipping him. Has it been two years already?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#327

Post by taf2 »

Nadya wrote: post #134
partiallypro wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google has coincidentally made their products not work on Microsoft's Chromium based browser...and it's not even out of beta.

Who would expect the browser user-agent to actually call itself "EDG" and not "EDGE" though? If you edit the user-agent to include "EDGE" in place of "EDG" everything works, someone thought "EDG" was surely a typo. Malice and stupidity and all that. Now why they're still sniffing user agents instead of doing feature detection is a good question for Google, who themselves, to the best of my knowledge, push for feature…

In some cases feature detection is not enough because while the browser may define the method you need it’s implementation is broken. A good example of this was indexeddb was horribly broken in safari and even doing feature detection was tricky so you had to check the user agent to see that it probably had a bad indexeddb and work around it. It’s never ideal and there is always possibly and more clever work around but sometimes you have a tight timeline and need a site to work in a specific browser.

Note: I think safari has since fixed indexeddb?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#328

Post by tjpnz »

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…

They got visits from PR and Legal but there's no mention of a Project Manager - the sort of person I could imagine being the most pissed. Do PMs at YT not rule over their engineers with an iron fist?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#329

Post by simonh »

user5994461 wrote: post #159
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. Like, ALL of em, including everyone who set up the special "OldTuber" priv long before. That's really blowing it out of proportions. It's a minor button addition to the UI and they paid attention to not be sued by the European commission for it for anti competitive behavior. It's a job well done with nothing to criticize. It's a BAU example of how works get done in a la…

I can guarantee you if this happened in the organisation I work in, they would have been fired. It's a different kind of organisation, in a different kind of business though.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#330

Post by kurtisc »

progval wrote: post #311
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #299

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

When Skype decides your browser is unsupported, it means you can't use it at all: https://pix.toile-libre.org/upload/original/1556784915.png

I think your parent comment was talking about why changing the user-agent 'fixes' it.
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