A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 • Hacker News Board

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#341

Post by beaker52 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:00 PM UTC

I'm a bit salty about this - I've proposed the "dropping ie6 banner without actually dropping support" banner at multiple jobs in the past. Each time it was met with "ooooh we can't do that" by product. I didn't have the guts to just go ahead and do it.

On a related note, I feel like most of my career has been spent preaching things that I should have just asked for forgiveness for. I can't count the number of times I've heard "we want x, but we can't do anything to achieve x". Psssst, you can - you just need to do it. Scared of change/ the unforseen. If you don't know what the ramifications are going to be, there could be positive ones you're missing too. Try it. If it's truly sinking your ship, kill it. Otherwise sail off into the promised land. Rinse and repeat. Be brave. That's my advice.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#342

Post by aouk » Thu, May 02, 2019, 2:29 PM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #228

user5994461 wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>>> 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…

BAU = Business As Usual

thx

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#343

Post by pbhjpbhj » Thu, May 02, 2019, 3:29 PM UTC

buffalo2391 wrote: post #229

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.

This isn't exactly accurate, I've had multiple menus telling me to switch to edge from chrome.

Perhaps I'm not remembering it right but doesn't it day something like "you should use a stable modern browser instead! Are you sure you don't want to keep using Edge"??

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#344

Post by TazeTSchnitzel » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:10 PM UTC

tracker1 wrote: post #146

nicoburns wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IE7 did have tabs. In fact, it was one of the main features. They didn't make significant standards compatibility improvements until IE8, and only really in IE9. IE10 was the first one (since 6) to actually be comparable to other modern browsers.

IE8 was also the first IE to address a lot of the memory leaks that older versions had. DOM JS access was referenced via COM interfaces and out of scope cleanup didn't cross bounds in earlier versions. IE8 did have a really bad bug around the JSON.parse implementation though.

Oh, it had a JSON bug? The fact it supported JSON was one of my favourite parts :(

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#345

Post by SmellyGeekBoy » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:38 PM UTC

octorian wrote: post #215

tracker1 wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> not having to support IE4.x and NN4.x when it hit sufficient market share was really nice. Ahh yes, the era when far too many web developers gleefully gave the finger to anyone not running Windows. I'm so glad those days are over.

IE was available for Mac OS and desktop Linux wasn't really a "thing" in those days so I'm not sure who they were giving the finger to. BeOS users?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#346

Post by babypuncher » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:41 PM UTC

nvarsj wrote: post #51

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

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.

Intentionally testing one one browser when you know you've run into issues on other browsers is absolutely malicious.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#347

Post by Teknoman117 » Thu, May 02, 2019, 4:53 PM UTC

SXX wrote: post #293

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 C…

But what was the alternative before? Remember none of us could watch Netflix on Linux because they built the whole thing on Silverlight.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#348

Post by glenneroo » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:29 PM UTC

HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #271

sverige wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a class, lawyers and doctors are some of the cheapest people you'll ever meet. They don't want to pay full price for anything. I have tons of stories about this; one of the most egregious was a lawyer who made over a million a year and sued his mechanic to avoid paying an $800 repair job to his daughter's old VW Bug.

That's a nice anecdote. Here's mine- my orthodontist gives out a little wooden token for not breaking anything, wearing one of their t-shirts to the appointment, and answering a trivia question right. You can either return 30 tokens for a $10 gift card (great for teenagers, who always need more Amazon money, it seems), or he has this nice big box that you can put tokens in. Once the box is full, he plans a trip and g…

That anecdote actually sounds like you're supporting GP's cheapskate doctor hypothesis...

Wow only _30_ visits to the doctor and you get a $10 gift card? I have never been to an orthodontist but how often does one typically go? 30 times a year? Are those visits free?

On top of that, you have do free advertising (t-shirt) for him, plus having some useless trivia knowledge... I hope the questions are simple enough for people to always get right? This would just be pure frustration for me, I have learned over the years to literally dread trivia "opportunities".

And the best part... you can otherwise donate your paltry gift card to help him pay to go on vacation, albeit helping people, but you said vacation, therefore I'm guessing he works a couple days.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#349

Post by ufmace » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

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…

This seems like a kind of silly objection. It's kind of like - I have some knives in my kitchen for cutting food, as does most of the world's population. I, or anyone else, could pick one up and go out and stab somebody. 99% of the world is capable of not doing that.

Can't we presume that all of this setup happened because everyone involved knew perfectly well that it was just a moderately popular video hosting site? And that they would all have behaved differently if they knew that peoples' life savings and medical histories were at risk? Did it go out of style somehow to presume that people were mostly sane most of the time?

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#350

Post by zrobotics » Thu, May 02, 2019, 5:42 PM UTC

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 is a classic "better to ask for forgiveness than ask for permission" story. They didn't get fired because it turned out not to be a huge negative PR hit. Honestly they were just lucky in that regard, if the press had been negative about the banner they likely would have been disciplined.