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A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

blog.chriszacharias.com

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Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#351

Post by pmarreck »

Good fucking riddance. I was a junior web developer during the IE5/6 days.

Microsoft, that fucking browser caused so much grief YOU LITERALLY HAVE NO IDEA unless you were there. My cursewords are barely scratching the surface of the rage. Frontend dev would literally double in work if requirements dictated IE compliance. I have no doubt that it informed both the decision of many devs to head to the backend and stay there (like I did) as well as Material Design from Google which is not nearly so dependent on spacing being rendered precisely.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#352

Post by HeWhoLurksLate »

glenneroo wrote: post #348
HeWhoLurksLate wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The cost of the braces & treatment was competitively priced, too. It's almost always the parents who pay for it- the gift cards go to the teenagers and make them financially invested in being good to their faces.

  Are those visits free?
The cost of visits is included in the overall price, as are replacement brackets / etc. for the first few. The advisement / planning process part is free, and they weren't pushy at all- my parents asked if my then-8-year-old sibling (he has overjet) needed braces, too, and they recommended waiting until all the baby teeth came out. [ For comparison, other companies / doctors I've heard of recommend them to young kids frequently, even though the teething process causes structural changes to the jaw and generally makes another round of braces a necessity].

   On top of that, you have do free advertising (t-shirt) for him,
The T-Shirts are really nice, TBH. The company name / logo was on the back, with a simple message on the front, and they were made of soft, puffy synthetic stuff. I liked wearing them- and wearing them was optional- there were a few times when I changed into the shirt in the bathroom five minutes before the appointment and took it off five minutes after- they're pretty lax about it.

plus having some useless trivia knowledge...

The trivia questions were pretty easy- "what is the outer layer of your teeth called?", "what is the capital of $state?" etc. It's not that big of a deal.

   something something vacation
He pays for most of it, and it's a lot of work, in a third-world country. Not much by way of resorts there, though there are days off & hikes.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#353

Post by tracker1 »

tclancy wrote: post #240
tracker1 wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote some pretty impressive applications with charting in NN4/IE4 days... it was horrible, and you couldn't pay me enough to do it again.

Can I try? That sounds awful . Did you prefer `document.all` or `document.layers[]`?

I actually wrote an abstraction layer that normalized it a bit. Not nearly as cleanly as the DOM API eventually did, but enough to get work done (for the most part). Still had to do things like have a white overlay set/unset on the screen for NN to avoid visual flickering, etc.

document.all, the way IE worked had a few advantages... Layers in NN didn't allow you to break apart a form into child components you could hide/show was a particular issue. So you had to mirror values in/out of the child layer portions of the form. That was about the most common and painful problem between the two imho.

Another was when IE 5.0.0 broke the older API for dealing with changing the children of a node. Which was fixed in 5.0.1, but 5.0.0 was on every Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Disc, and what a LOT of people had. That was painful to deal with too.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#354

Post by tracker1 »

TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #344
tracker1 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 :(

If you modified the Object.prototype or Array.prototype (which was common at the type with libraries like PrototypeJS) and used a rehydration function with JSON.parse, the runtime would throw an error you couldn't catch, and stop JS functioning. In IE 8.x ... almost worse, the JSON.parse function was locked... I wound up using a wrapper JSON.parse2 or something that was the JSON library edited to attach to parse2 for IE8, other browsers would alias parse as parse2.

I then used the parse2 in everything at that time. In the end, it sucked and I'm glad I don't have to do it anymore. IE8's quirks were what I would consider the last bad version of IE... since then it's been mostly okay on release, but ages rapidly, but enough turnover that you aren't on it too long. Until current IE11 as it's tied to windows releases, and some people/orgs didn't upgrade.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#355

Post by tracker1 »

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.

By the time Firefox came out, it lined up with IE6 well enough to use the same code (W3C DOM) methods mostly. IE4.x and NN4.x support was horrific, and worse than IE6 when Google did what TFA mentioned. Dropping support for IE4/NN4 didn't mean not supporting other current browsers.

When it was in the >90% market share, a lot of people did that though.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#356

Post by niij »

mherdeg wrote: post #56
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

Is there a good catchy name for this "oops" stuff? It's very interesting, an interesting modern take on "embrace and extend" or "FUD".

Sabotage.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#357

Post by razakel »

Zak wrote: post #191
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #84

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. I can think of 2 reasons: 1. The gamble paid off. It turned out the time was ripe. Thus, there was really no negative impact on the organization that people had to be punished for. 2. The OldTubers were the experienced backbone of the group. Firing everyone with that privilege would li…

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 can think of a third reason: everybody in the industry wanted IE6 dead.

Ever heard the story of Ken McElroy? He was a rapist, burglar and child molester murdered in 1981 in Missouri.

In front of 46 witnesses. Nobody saw anything.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#358

Post by makapuf »

baud147258 wrote: post #307
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…

> 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…

The whole question about Kerviel is if his management let him "bypass" regulatory safety nets or if he did it by himself.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#359

Post by codedokode »

progval wrote: post #310
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.

Here is a trick: change UA to Edge 15 on Windows (or something that's supported) and Skype will magically work (tested on Debian, audio call also works). I also recommend running this under a separate profile or user account so that Microsoft is unable to track you on other sites.
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