[HN Gopher] A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)
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A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)
Author : lawrenceyan
Score : 93 points
Date : 2024-02-07 21:14 UTC (1 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.chriszacharias.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.chriszacharias.com)
| lawrenceyan wrote:
| "The entire PR team had Macs running Chrome and could not even
| see what we had done, let alone issue comments to the press on
| any of it."
| tech234a wrote:
| (2019)
| cogman10 wrote:
| One of the best things that's happened to the web is all browsers
| moving over to an evergreen model of distribution. IE was such a
| cancer on the internet, everyone in the bad old days programmed
| to the lowest common denominator (IE6, 7, or 8). Even while brand
| new features and standards were widely adopted by everyone else.
|
| One of the worst things that's happened is nearly everyone
| converging on using webkit to render everything. Feels like
| slowly stepping backwards into the days when everyone writes for
| webkit rather than a more open internet.
|
| That being said, there's so little difference between webkit and
| gecko now-a-days that it's really hardly a major issue.
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| > One of the worst things that's happened is nearly everyone
| converging on using webkit to render everything. Feels like
| slowly stepping backwards into the days when everyone writes
| for webkit rather than a more open internet.
|
| WebKit and Blink are separate engines.
| LordDragonfang wrote:
| Yes, but the latter is a fork of the former's core
| components.
| arccy wrote:
| doesn't matter that it's a fork if behaviour / features
| diverge like they do
| bitvoid wrote:
| It was forked over 10 years ago now. I doubt their shared
| past is even recognizable now.
| jwells89 wrote:
| There were substantial differences even from day one. As
| I recall one of the differences of opinion that was a
| driving cause of the fork was the multiprocess model;
| WebKit team wanted that to be part of the framework,
| letting any WebKit-embedding app get it for "free",
| whereas the Blink team wanted it to be part of Chromium
| with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their
| own multiprocess.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| > with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their
| own multiprocess.
|
| Isn't that what happened anyway? The non-Chromium dists
| of Blink like Electron and WebView2 both employ the same
| multi-process approach as Chrome.exe (and my RAM
| availability is suffering for it...)
| jwells89 wrote:
| Electron bundles Chromium, not Blink directly. Believe
| this is true of WebView2 too but am not well-versed in
| Windows internals.
|
| In fact I'm not aware of any major non-Chromium usages of
| Blink, except _maybe_ in Qt (where it replaced WebKit a
| few years ago) but I'm not sure about that either.
| Macha wrote:
| Nah, QtWebEngine is using Chromium, not Blink directly
| zx8080 wrote:
| > whereas the Blink team wanted it to be part of Chromium
| with non-Chromium users of Blink needing to bring their
| own multiprocess.
|
| Is that why Electron basically means Chromium?
| randomdata wrote:
| And WebKit is a fork of KHTML, so...
| breathen wrote:
| ...sort of...
| bombcar wrote:
| The real dichotomy is Blink (Chrome/Android) vs Webkit
| (Apple/iPhone).
|
| Everyone tests everything on iPhone and Chrome.
| ksherlock wrote:
| The thing about IE, one thing anyway, is that it's CSS support,
| box model, etc, was broken and non standard. So you would need
| to exploit CSS parser bugs to give IE a separate CSS, use
| DXImageTransformFilter to make png transparency work, etc.
|
| Maybe by WebKit you mean Blink and by Blink you mean V8,
| because when somebody does a "Show HN: something that doesn't
| work in Safari or FireFox" it's usually a javascript problem
| not a CSS or rendering problem. And every 6 months someone
| complains that Safari is literally worse than IE 5 because it
| doesn't support some non-standard privacy nightmare API that
| Google added last week.
| jwells89 wrote:
| That DirectX filter hack for PNG transparency haunts me.
|
| What makes it so much worse is that Tasman, the engine used
| in IE for Mac, had awesome support for CSS, transparent PNGs,
| and more _years_ earlier, but for some reason it got
| dumpstered when IE for Mac was discontinued while the
| inferior Trident lived on in Windows.
| ttfkam wrote:
| I came to hate IE with every fiber of my being, but let's
| call a spade a spade here: IE basically invented modern CSS.
| Netscape 3/4 and IE 3/4 had very different views on how web
| pages should be dynamic and how they should be styled.
|
| IE championed CSS and the DOM. Netscape was fixated on
| bgcolor, font tags, etc. Netscape introduced the <layer> tag.
| IE just made every tag a potential layer. Remember AJAX?
| Loading content from a script and injecting it into a page?
| That was 100% IE.
|
| The issue wasn't that IE 5, 5.5, and 6 were bad when they
| came out. They weren't. Not one bit. They were absolutely the
| cutting edge. Then Netscape died, Microsoft had no more
| competition in the field, and so they basically just stopped.
| For years.
|
| Mozilla (and shortly after, Firefox) prompted an eventual
| response, which was IE7: I minor update to an otherwise
| abandoned codebase. Once it was clear folks were seriously
| looking at dumping IE, IE8 followed shortly after. The CSS
| Acid Test showed how far IE had fallen behind, so IE9 and
| IE10 moved to stop the bleeding. IE 11 was the final release
| before Microsoft finally dropped the legacy IE baggage, aka
| the Trident engine. By that time Chrome had stormed the
| field, and Edge's renderer just couldn't keep up relative to
| the amount of money Microsoft was willing to pay. So they
| dumped their own engine and moved to Blink. (If you can't
| beat em...)
|
| But let's be clear, between 1998 and 2003, IE was at the
| forefront. Its CSS support wasn't broken. It was the best and
| only. Its box model wasn't broken. There were no other box
| models to compare it to. You didn't need to give it separate
| CSS, because it was the only one around really to parse it.
| It didn't have non-standard AJAX support. It WAS the standard
| since no XMLHttpRequest object existed at the time.
|
| You could write VBScript on a web page instead of JavaScript
| and have a >90% chance that client could run it. Flash didn't
| have to be bundled or installed separately, ActiveX just took
| care of it in the middle of your browsing session.
|
| It was the Bronze Age of the web. IE was the one that moved
| us beyond stone tools. Later supplanted by Firefox and
| Safari's Iron Age, but still an important and arguably
| necessary step toward the modern web we know today, including
| the box model.
| tracker1 wrote:
| The difference with today and blink is that it's open source
| and if there's a serious issue it will be forked. And has been,
| twice, in order to get to Blink.
| adrr wrote:
| Webkit isn't the issue. The issue is Apple is making the same
| mistake as Microsoft by tying a browser version to a version of
| the OS. With no upgrade path for people with older phone, you
| have support the lowest common dominator instead of pushing
| people to install a new browser.
| toast0 wrote:
| OTOH, Apple does tend to get OS updates to their users a lot
| faster than anyone else with market share. At least until
| they stop supporting a beloved device.
| rekttrader wrote:
| So what you're saying is you helped your billion dollar mega-corp
| use their monopoly position to destroy another monopoly and
| ensure chromium would be the next IE.
| shadowgovt wrote:
| Browsers have a tendency to consolidate. I think "there is a
| dominant browser used by N-times-% of the userbase relative to
| the second-most-popular" is a feature endemic to the ecosystem.
|
| Much like "You can switch off Google search any time you want,
| but people will keep using it as the default until there's
| another clear better option, and then most people will switch
| to that instead." If browsers are pretty interchangeable, why
| not use the best?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| That's a pretty wild take, considering that the author
| specifically said they randomized the order of suggested
| browsers. They didn't push Chrome, they pushed "anything but
| IE6".
| coding123 wrote:
| I mean what he wrote is even less "wild" than the title of
| the post.
| Springtime wrote:
| The grandparent comment would only be somewhat revelant in
| future versions of Youtube and Google services, since they
| did end up pushing users to 'try' Chrome exclusively (for
| Youtube in the footer and everything else via top
| banner/popups, for both Firefox and even non-Chrome Chromium
| browsers).
|
| Which given the lawyers' concerns in this article is curious
| the 180 they did.
| duskwuff wrote:
| That seems like a fairly disingenuous take, given that the
| upgrade banner on YouTube also suggested upgrading to IE8 or
| Firefox.
|
| If anything, Microsoft was probably _grateful_ that the YouTube
| announcement pushed so many users to upgrade to a newer version
| of MSIE.
| summerlight wrote:
| It's exactly the opposite. At the moment, Microsoft had a
| really hard time to move users to IE7 mainly because their
| distribution model does not allow automatic upgrade at the
| time. You need to go to MSDN, download IE7 then manually
| install it. It's pretty clear MS was happy with this
| deprecation given that their response was a website called
| ie6countdown[1].
|
| [1]
| https://web.archive.org/web/20141217174028/https://www.moder...
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| (2019)
| ChrisArchitect wrote:
| Some discussion then:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678
|
| And in 2021:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293
| Octoth0rpe wrote:
| I and every single other webdev I've known from the early aughts
| would immediately offer to buy this person a beer upon hearing
| this story in person. Those claiming that safari is the new
| chrome just don't understand how bad IE was at the time.
| duskwuff wrote:
| Especially IE6, which was eight years old at the time, two
| major releases behind, and extremely buggy.
| politelemon wrote:
| > Those claiming that safari is the new chrome just don't
| understand how bad IE was at the time.
|
| I suffered in the IE6 times, understood how bad it is, but
| still claim otherwise; when we're saying that Safari is the new
| IE/the new Chrome, it's with good reason. We've recognized that
| a piece of history is repeating itself, and it's pretty sad
| that it gets handwaved away or dismissed, just because people
| happen to have bought into its ecosystem.
| ssl-3 wrote:
| It's still bad. The awful continues for end-users.
|
| Just this afternoon, I witnessed one elder tech teaching
| another elder tech how to enable IE mode on Windows 11 because
| that is the only way to get a hardware-based NVR to be
| viewable.
|
| The NVR has 2023 firmware.
| chupchap wrote:
| As a student I would struggle to put out a page that would
| render the same way in all browsers. It takes so little effort
| now and I'm so glad for that
| tracker1 wrote:
| It was as recently as 5 years ago I was able to do supporting
| legacy IE versions. Was so happy for it.
|
| Various CSS and JS shims to get anything close to modern. Ugh.
| Not as bad as the v4 browser days, but close.
| johnz wrote:
| I worked on the front end of CollegeHumor.com at this time and
| spent a lot of working hours bashing my head against the wall
| debugging for IE6 (and even IE5).
|
| I don't remember the decision/approval process that happening
| internally but we put up a similar banner very shortly after
| YouTube added theirs. We continued supporting IE6 for some time
| but started prioritizing it less and less.
| ElongatedMusket wrote:
| I worked in a dev shop making websites in the health care
| industry (most users were on XP, some still on 2000) and when
| youtube added the banner we pumped it out to all customer sites
| the same day.
|
| When bosses/customers got around to asking about it we simply
| pointed out that youtube and google were doing the same, and it
| made it ok.
|
| From a story I half remember, didn't the youtube devs basically
| do the same thing (skip approvals)? I think they knew the
| cascade would happen!
|
| Found the story:
| https://www.theverge.com/2019/5/4/18529381/google-youtube-in...
| scrlk wrote:
| On a tangent: the screenshot of the deprecation banner brings
| back memories of a time when the internet still felt relatively
| free, before the rise and dominance of mega platforms in the
| 2010s.
|
| I still mourn the loss of community forums that were replaced by
| reddit, or worse, Discord. So many hours spent on various
| phpBB/vBulletin etc. forums. :^)
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _A Conspiracy to Kill IE6_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210439 - Nov 2023 (1
| comment)
|
| _A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293 - Oct 2021 (80
| comments)
|
| _A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 at YouTube_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655890 - Sept 2021 (2
| comments)
|
| _A Conspiracy to Kill IE6_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 - May 2019 (363
| comments)
| karolist wrote:
| No other software I hated more than IE6 in my life. I've started
| webdev in 2003 and was doing PSD to HTML/CSS conversions in the
| evenings and nights after my webdev dayjob. Opera and Firefox was
| a pleasure and easy to convert for, IE6 caused no end of pain for
| these conversions. In time I've learned enough tricks to know all
| the workarounds and could look at a given PSD file and know
| within 30min precision how many hours it'll take me, at that
| point I've started charging clients on top for IE6 support, this
| was around 2008.
|
| This IE6 hate transcended into me avoiding all MS products for a
| long time. Only after they bought github and linkedin I gave in.
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(page generated 2024-02-07 23:00 UTC)