A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 • Hacker News Board

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#361

Post by trgamefn » Fri, May 03, 2019, 3:46 AM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #223

themacguffinman wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you consider the context and era, Chrome is still magnitudes better than IE because the real problem with IE6 was that it was hard to upgrade. It didn't matter that IE6 was fast at some point because IE didn't auto-update and Microsoft often tied IE to Windows upgrades, which in turn were often tied to new computer purchases or long enterprise contracts. Not to mention IE's significant divergence from standar…

IE was not tied to Windows upgrades, except in a sense that new IE versions would eventually stop supporting old Windows versions (but that's true of all browsers). IE6 was available on Win98+ and NT4+, for example. IE7 and IE8 were XP/2003+. As far as divergence from the standards, again, that was generally not the case when IE6 shipped - if anything, it was at the bleeding edge, and past it in some ways. The real p…

Actually it was tied to Windows upgrades. It available for older versions of Windows but it was developed as part of development of new version of Windows!

MS IE 1 was developed for Windows 95 Plus!, MS IE 2 for Windows NT 4.0, MS IE 3 was for Windows 95 OSR2 (essentially new OS, it even included it's own brand-new filesystem!), MS IE 4 was for Windows98 (but was rushed with Windows 95 OSR 2.5), MS IE 5.0 was for Windows 2000 (but was included as part of Windows 98 SE), MS IE 5.5 for was Windows ME (which wasn't initially planned - that's why it got 5.5 number, not 6), MS IE 6 was for Windows XP, MS IE 7 was for Windows Vista (and since Vista was horribly delayed so was MS IE 7) and MS IE 8 was for Window 7!

The first version of MS IE which wasn't developed as part of Windows development was actually MS IE 9.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#362

Post by trgamefn » Fri, May 03, 2019, 4:20 AM UTC

needle0 wrote: post #360

How come IE7 plunged nearly as severely at the same timing as IE6? Was the banner shown for IE7 too?

Microsoft started pushing MS IE 8 at that time, too. And you could see that modest MS IE 7 drop before "watershed moment" mirrors MS IE 8 jump.

But MS IE 6 was significantly more entrenched: I have seen plenty of MS IE 6 - only sites and internal tools, but never MS IE 7 - only ones. They existed, probably, but were obviously were rare.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#363

Post by Corrado » Fri, May 03, 2019, 7:34 AM UTC

This story reminds me of the ones about the beginnings of the Apple Macintosh over on folklore.org. If you haven't been to that site you're really missing out.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#364

Post by Isofarro » Fri, May 03, 2019, 7:55 AM UTC

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #312

darawk wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They got lucky, IE6 in that sense was ready to die, and they basically declared mutiny with good cause. Ok, and if IE6 had not been ready to die, what kind of catastrophe would have ensued? > Can you imagine any other scenario where insisting your idea is correct above every alternative, to the extent you can bypass the organisation and enforce your idea, could be utterly catastrophic? These developers in particula…

IE6 was ready to die the moment it was born. This story boils down to some influential developers saying "Fuck this shit" and doing something about it, taking most of the industry with them. Given that IE6 was one of the worst pieces of software in all of human history, there was never likely to be a significant downside.

That is untrue. When IE6 first arrived it was on par with Mac IE 5.2 in terms of web standards support. It was a great browser for its time.

The problem with IE6 is Microsoft declaring victory in the Browser war with Netscape, and IE6 development stopped. For years until Firefox and Chrome threatened Microsoft's browser dominance.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#365

Post by dwheeler » Fri, May 03, 2019, 11:58 AM UTC

saagarjha wrote: post #85

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?

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.

It's not like there was no oversight. As noted in the article, their boss was in on it, and "the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review." so there was review. They short-circuited a number of the usual steps, but it's not like there was a single person who made all the decisions.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#366

Post by [deleted] » Fri, May 03, 2019, 12:16 PM UTC

antoineMoPa wrote: post #207

user17843 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just implied it is different because the industry was so young, it is solidified now, thus resembling other industries. (i.e. in the corporate world the hierarchies in big tech now resemble the hierarchies in big [insert any other industry])

In my experience, I think it is a question of developper count and company culture. Larger corporations have processes & checks that smaller businesses do not always have.

[deleted]

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#367

Post by c0vfefe » Fri, May 03, 2019, 12:34 PM UTC

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".

Yeah, "stalling."

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#368

Post by c0vfefe » Fri, May 03, 2019, 12:36 PM UTC

reaperducer wrote: post #91

nvarsj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I really doubt the oopses were intentional. It doesn't matter if they were intentional. The author mentioned there may hav been hundreds of these "oops" events. Assuming it wasn't intentional, Google knew there was a problem and chose not to fix it. "Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me." Or in Google's case, "fool Mozilla a hundred times..."

This is semantics - he's saying that the individual "oopses" were accidental, but you're saying the overall strategy of neglecting Firefox support was intentional. This jells with what others here have said about individual googlers vs. executive leadership / emergent organizational behavior.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#369

Post by c0vfefe » Fri, May 03, 2019, 12:38 PM UTC

vetinari wrote: post #334

thomasz wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not that complicated to understand: While Google and Mozilla are competitors, Mozilla and Linux are not. Linux just gets less priority because it's quite frankly irrelevant as a Desktop OS.

> It's not that complicated to understand: While Google and Mozilla are competitors, Web apps and Chrome at Google are being made by entirely different team. Unless there is a mandate from the top to the web teams, it is irrelevant. They could be as well a different companies. > Linux just gets less priority because it's quite frankly irrelevant as a Desktop OS. That's exactly the point I was making: Firefox is also…

The problem is not the argument, but the conclusion of willful negligence. Firefox neglecting Linux is not an underhanded business decision because Mozilla stands to gain nothing by ignoring Linux; but Chrome does directly compete with Firefox. That's the point people here are making.

Re: A Conspiracy to Kill IE6

#370

Post by Shorel » Fri, May 03, 2019, 12:45 PM 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…

> 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.

You mean like they seem to be doing to Firefox right now?