[HN Gopher] A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)
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A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)
Author : romanhn
Score : 117 points
Date : 2025-10-16 18:22 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.chriszacharias.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.chriszacharias.com)
| skrebbel wrote:
| Amazing read! One detail jumped out at me:
|
| > _Frustrated, one of the lawyers asked "Why did you have to put
| Chrome first?" Confused, I explained that we did not give any
| priority to Chrome. Our boss, in on the conspiracy with us, had
| thoughtfully recommended that we randomize the order of the
| browsers listed and then cookie the random seed for each visitor
| so that the UI would not jump around between pages, which we had
| done. As luck would have it, these two lawyers still used IE6 to
| access certain legacy systems and had both ended up with random
| seeds that placed Chrome in the first position. Their fear was
| that by showing preferential treatment to Chrome, we might prick
| the ears of European regulators already on the lookout for any
| anti-competitive behavior._
|
| Wow those lawyers must've left the place many years ago huh!
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Don't need em now! When you're small, cooperate, when you're
| big, take over. Google is big now
| chews wrote:
| I'll go one step further, because the company I used to work at
| built browser extensions. Google built ChromeFrame
| (https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-get...)
| a tool that would allow IE to load chrome as an activex component
| and transparently replace the rendering engine of IE.
|
| But building the software wasn't enough, they used some scammy
| browser toolbar company (one of our competitors) to deploy this
| software silently and without any user intervention, all of a
| sudden millions of users overnight switched to chrome. It was
| deployed as a proxy botnet and Google knew full well what was
| happening. I sent a note to the humans at Firefox because we had
| a top 10 extension at the time and were in the midst of porting
| it to Chrome. They called their contacts and sure enough our
| suspicions were correct.
|
| Google would later go on to buy that company because they were
| pushing so much traffic to Google's ad partners (Ad Meld being
| another acquisition).
|
| We got screwed and were never able to recover from the run-
| around. I became friends with the folks on the Chromium team and
| we talked about how google used a botnet to launch Chrome over
| beers in a SF dive bar.
| dafelst wrote:
| I worked on the front end of Bing (then Live Search) back in
| 2007, and even within Microsoft, IE6 was hated and rallied
| against, at least by any team doing web development.
|
| I remember that the former GM of the Internet Explorer 5 and 6
| team transferred to my org about a year after I joined. In his
| intro email, he included a sheepish apology for IE6, which I
| printed and kept on my office wall for the rest of my time at
| Bing, it was a prized possession. Man that browser caused so many
| nightmares.
|
| (to clarify, the GM was a good and smart guy, the apology was a
| little tongue-in-cheek since IE6 was arguably the best browser
| upon its release - the problem was Microsoft effectively
| abandoned it and let it languish and stagnate for years while the
| web moved on without it, which turned it and the IE org into
| well-deserved pariahs)
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Automatic updates get a bad rap on HN; but it's not like
| Microsoft wasn't happily giving away Internet Explorer 7 and 8
| to any computer listening.
| realityking wrote:
| It took Microsoft over 5 years to release Internet Explorer
| 7. That's what allowed the web to ossify around it.
|
| For comparison, Internet Explorer 6 came 2.5 years after 5
| and so did 8 after 7.
| gjsman-1000 wrote:
| Internet Explorer 7 had been on the market for three years,
| and Internet Explorer 8 for three months, when this story
| took place.
|
| The lesson of IE6 is that people cannot be trusted to
| handle updating themselves.
| more_corn wrote:
| This is why small scrappy (at the time the YouTube eng team was
| small) companies get shit done and big companies with process and
| controls take forever.
|
| The rogues take responsibility, think carefully, act carefully.
| dylan604 wrote:
| The problem is that pretty much all small scrappy companies
| grow up to be large behemoths that all migrate to have process
| and controls that take over. The way workflows are created
| while being small and scrappy doesn't lend itself well when you
| have more than one dev working on something and there's no
| guidance for how the devs are to move forward. One dev wants to
| take 3 left turns, another dev wants to take a simple right
| turn. After that, you start having meetings to layout code and
| how to handle merges and the next thing you know you have
| processes and controls
| behnamoh wrote:
| Is it really something to be proud of? Somehow as a result of IE
| hate we ended up with a Chrome-dominated world.
| loloquwowndueo wrote:
| Chrome sucks but it's miles better than IE ever was.
| overgard wrote:
| IE was so much worse than Chrome will ever be.
|
| I do occasionally think Safari is the new IE though -- not in
| terms of terribleness but just in terms of holding back the web
| by being the slowest to implement big new features.
| troupo wrote:
| > being the slowest to implement big new features.
|
| You mean Chrome-only non-standards that Mozilla usually
| opposes, too
| saxenaabhi wrote:
| SharedWorker was implemented in Safari years after
| Chrome/Firefox
|
| I'm sure there are many such examples.
| leptons wrote:
| I wouldn't care about Safari _at all_ if Apple allowed any
| other browser engine on iOS. The fact that they don 't allow
| other browsers to use their own browser engine is a fucking
| travesty, and it's part of the reason Apple is being sued by
| the DOJ.
|
| https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl
| pif wrote:
| The hate was not against IE, but against a popular tool that
| fought against shared standards.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| It was worse than IE not adopting standards. It was a
| capricious browser, would crash and misbehave for arbitrary
| reasons, and had an almost perverse implementation of web
| rendering.
|
| People try to equate it to Safari now but that's just not
| comparable. Safari will render something badly or not support
| a CSS decorator that you'd really like to use, but it will
| rarely crash, go into an infinite URL-fetching loop, or
| arbitrarily fail to recognize random HTML tags.
| gldrk wrote:
| IE didn't fight anything; it merely existed. There was no
| constant barrage of features that you 'had to' make use of to
| 'keep up with the times'. Microsoft correctly decided that
| the Web was done in ~1999. They even had 'Electron' in the
| form of HTAs, except it wasn't remotely as bad.
| syncsynchalt wrote:
| As someone involved in web dev during the IE5/6/7 days, the
| short answer is yes.
|
| The longer answer is yes, absolutely.
| linguae wrote:
| I think what did IE in was the security issues that IE,
| ActiveX, and Windows had in the mid-2000s. This, combined with
| IE 6's stagnation, gave Firefox an opening to compete and to
| challenge the IE 6 monopoly.
|
| There was a sweet spot between roughly 2007 and sometime in the
| mid 2010s when web developers coded to standards instead of
| just the dominant browser, and where there was browser
| diversity: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and IE 7+. It was a
| good time for the Web.
|
| Chrome then became dominant, and unfortunately now we're in a
| "Best viewed in Chrome" era, and we're back in an era where
| some developers only code for the dominant browser.
| Flamingoat wrote:
| It was Chrome, Win 7 and Smartphones that killed IE. Firefox
| was extremely niche and was downright bad browser when 3.0
| was released.
|
| Chrome when it came out was much faster than Firefox. It was
| lighter and worked better.
|
| Also macs had moved to Intel chips a few years before and
| were actually pretty decent so a lot of people were moving to
| them.
|
| Also of this chipped away at XP and the few people running XP
| machines were diehard xp fans or corps that were dragging
| their heels upgrading.
| babypuncher wrote:
| Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly call
| that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't come
| bundled with your operating system or have the marketing
| power of the world's default search engine.
|
| It also had an outsized impact on the web because it was a
| popular with developers for doing web development.
| Flamingoat wrote:
| > Firefox had 30% market share in 2010, I would hardly
| call that "niche", especially for a browser that didn't
| come bundled with your operating system or have the
| marketing power of the world's default search engine.
|
| On the sites I was building, which were mostly travel
| sites, e-commerce and later gambling. Firefox was maybe
| 5-10%. I am also no in the US. I just didn't see in the
| stats and citing what the global stats were at the time I
| think is misleading
|
| Later on it was IE and Chrome and Firefox was still at
| maybe 10%. I really cared about compatibility and web
| standards at the time and made every effort to make sure
| that the sites work.
|
| > It also had an outsized impact on the web because it
| was a popular with developers for doing web development.
|
| So people that used the net heavily used Firefox and
| people that didn't tended to use IE. They just didn't use
| the internet as much. That why the statistics are
| misleading.
| jraph wrote:
| I've used Firefox since version 1.5. I don't remember it
| being bad around version 3.0.
|
| There's a long time during which Firefox was somewhat slow,
| and I remember the spidermokey team releasinf the famous
| Are we fast yet website that was saying no during this
| period.
| Flamingoat wrote:
| It was horrendously bad. If you had more than 10 tabs
| open it was painful. I was using it at the time on a
| relatively high spec machine for the time (Core 2 Quad)
| and 8GB of ram.
|
| I was so happy when Chrome came out.
| 1oooqooq wrote:
| you're repeating google marketing.
|
| I was in perf engineering at the time. we would switch
| between a handful of string concatenation methods every
| browser release. it wasn't much about real performance, but
| just shifting trade-offs in the jit. but google PR team was
| very good at running in front of the changes and pointing
| their overly optimized way to magazines. so they would run
| an array concat test that was much faster while being much
| slower in plus sign concat, but they often left that out.
| anyway, everyone drank the coolaid. 100% of the v8
| performance over spider monkey was not attaching debuggers
| and dev tools. and sadly, mozilla had to follow. nowadays
| we are mostly back to square one (still some niceties from
| dalvik missing).
|
| true performance improvement came much later than that.
| Flamingoat wrote:
| > you're repeating google marketing.
|
| No I am not. I remember this clearly and all my friends
| were complaining about it _before_ chrome was released. I
| just checked the dates. Firefox 3 was released a whole
| year before Chrome.
|
| I really don't appreciate it when people tell me that I
| have been swayed by some big company, when my friends and
| I were complaining about it before we even knew that
| Google had a browser.
|
| Firefox used to just completely lock up. Wouldn't load a
| tab. Chrome didn't with the same number of tabs. I am not
| talking about JS perf speed or anything like that, I am
| talking about the browser just not locking up when using
| more than few tabs.
| spankalee wrote:
| You can see here https://www.w3counter.com/trends that Safari,
| Chrome, and IE8 all had bumps around that time, and looking at
| the IE-only chart it seems like the boost in IE8 might have
| actually slowed IE's overall decline a bit.
|
| But the trend for IE started before this and continued after
| it.
| jraph wrote:
| I don't think the chrome dominance is a result of the IE hate.
|
| Firefox briefly dominated the web in between.
|
| Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the
| web and its dominance in the ads and search areas.
| romanhn wrote:
| I loved IE6 as as user when it came out, and grew to hate it as a
| developer when the browser standards moved on, but a stubborn,
| large-enough user base percentage had not. I blame slow-moving IT
| departments that refused to touch their internal environments
| when all the Web 2.0 progress made things new and scary. A
| product my team was in charge of had to support IE6 and IE7 years
| after the rest of the world moved on because the IT admins at
| Walgreens straight out refused to update the machines that the
| pharmacists used at their stores.
| nine_k wrote:
| The risk of updating the machines to support IE9 might indeed
| be large, for not very obvious benefits. But what did they say
| about staying as is, and switching to Firefox or Chrome? Was it
| impossible due to use of some MS-only tech?
| romanhn wrote:
| It's hard to remember the exact details all these years
| later... I doubt it was due to MS-only tech, but rather that
| IE6/7 were tested and approved and everything else was not.
| The incentives for IT teams are such that it's a lot easier
| to say no to something than yes, and create a ton of work and
| liability.
| gldrk wrote:
| The irony is that web standards didn't move fast enough either,
| so the browser developers simply bypassed the standards body in
| favor of their own post-hoc 'living standard'.
| tcdent wrote:
| I spent the first few years of my career wrestling with Internet
| Explorer 6 compatibility while working in a marketing studio that
| was Internet-first and pioneered concepts like responsive web
| development (the precursor to native mobile experiences/layouts).
|
| Internet Explorer 6 was an incredible waste of resources. I
| developed primarily on a Mac OS system at the time, which was
| somewhat progressive in the industry, but in order to verify the
| functionality we had was working correctly on Internet Explorer 6
| (which we still had observed was greater than 50% of the market
| share) I had to keep a PC on my desk just for IE6 testing.
|
| There were a number of hacks that we could incorporate into
| additional override style sheets like conditional HTML comments
| that you could use to incorporate IE6 overrides or weird patterns
| that you could do by using asterisks that would allow you to
| target it specifically.
|
| We didn't necessarily prioritize feature parity with IE6, but the
| site had to load and render correctly and support the cause of
| marketing the property that we were tasked to do. Once the
| adoption of it finally slowed, it was a great sigh of relief to
| the industry, and it made it feel like we could do anything we
| wanted to because we had been making concessions to it for so
| long.
| Magi604 wrote:
| A small group of people took a chance, and it turned into a
| movement and changed internet history. I bet this could become a
| solid documentary.
| aaronbrethorst wrote:
| Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294406 - Feb 2024 (106
| comments)
|
| _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)
| arscan wrote:
| Netscape 4 was the bane of my existence, moreso than IE6 ever
| was, as an important client standardized internally on that
| forever so our entire platform had to be completely compatible
| with it. At least with IE you could do things in a user friendly
| way (perhaps at 2x the development and maintenance cost).
| Netscape 4 simply didn't have the capability to do things we
| wanted to do experience-wise (like getting pushed content, I
| think?) without doing some extremely crazy and brittle
| workarounds at best (making it feel more like 5x the cost).
|
| Also, IE4 was such a magnificent leap forward in the web that
| effectively enabled support for modern apps, which bought IE a
| ton of goodwill from me that didn't wear off for a decade or so.
| unleaded wrote:
| agreed*. You often hear this assumption today that Netscape was
| always the better browser and that people using IE were simply
| making a mistake. If anything they were just shit in different
| ways. For a while Netscape refused to implement CSS and wanted
| people to use their own JavaScript Style Sheets
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets
| technology which no-one did.
|
| * Kind of, I was born in the 2000s
| bazoom42 wrote:
| Well I lived through it, and you are absolutely right.
| Netscape 4 was terrible. Internet Explorer was much better
| and more standards compliant in comparison. Netscape 4 was
| hated by web designers just like IE6 later came to be hated.
| The difference was that Netscapes marked share dwindled
| pretty fast, while IE6 lived on for an eternity.
| Aloha wrote:
| I hung on to Netscape 4 until the first versions of Mozilla
| kstrauser wrote:
| From the depths of my heart: thank you. Whatever you did to kill
| it, I claim it was justified self-defense. I have my scars from
| the Browser Wars, and the string "IE6" fills me with loathing to
| this day.
|
| For my own part, I made sure my employer had plans to remove IE6
| from our support list the day Google officially did the same in
| March 2010. The very next day, I started adding code to our site
| that complied with official standards and worked perfectly on
| every other browser, and removing all the compatibility hacks
| we'd deployed to make that pig render a screen correctly. It was
| incredibly liberating.
| suzzer99 wrote:
| My first serious web programming job was creating a complicated
| web-app with lots of JavaScript that had to support IE-4/4.5/5
| and Netscape Communicator.
|
| FWIW that app is still running to this day:
| https://resultview.q2labsolutions.com/resultview/logon/logon...
|
| Vanilla JavaScript just works. Marvel at the circa 2001 Login
| button!
| kstrauser wrote:
| Hey, nice job if it's still running! That was quite the
| exercise back in the day, wasn't it?
| suzzer99 wrote:
| Well, JavaScript didn't have a ton of features back then to
| muddy up the waters. So that helped. And no frameworks kept
| things simple.
|
| The most complex part was a dynamic query builder where you
| could pick columns and various kinds of filters. We could
| have gone to the server each time the user changed the
| query, but I found it a lot snappier to do it all with
| document.write().
|
| For a while, JavaScript was shunned by a lot of web shops.
| Applets and Flash were the future! Then Google Maps came
| out and showed what you could really do, and JS became cool
| again.
| spankalee wrote:
| Ironically, YouTube is now forced to support a browser that has
| terrible standards support, entirely of their own making:
| Cobalt[1].
|
| YouTube on TVs is actually a web app that loads into a stripped
| down, custom webview. The YouTube team doesn't have the resources
| to implement many web APIs, so they implemented just what they
| needed.
|
| The problem is that they can't reliably update Cobalt versions on
| TVs, they can't ask users to update, and they can't just break
| older TVs in the wild. So the YouTube on TV frontend (not YouTube
| TV the service) has to only use APIs they shipped like 10 years
| ago.
|
| And because it takes so long for an old Cobalt version to go out
| of support, they don't invest in implementing new features
| because they wouldn't be usable anytime soon. 10 years ago I was
| in a meeting with them where they said they couldn't implement
| something because they wouldn't be able to use it for 5 years...
| They still haven't implemented it.
|
| [1]: https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt
| davidkwast wrote:
| But the use case is just to serve videos right? I know that new
| things will not come. But YouTube is almost the same in these
| 10 years I think.
| spankalee wrote:
| Even simple web apps can benefit from web platform
| improvements. JS, HTML, and CSS have all gotten significantly
| better in recent years.
|
| But YouTube is also a very complex app. Yes it "just" exists
| to play videos, but the app is so much more than a video
| player. Browsing, searching, comments, chat, playlists, YT
| Live, subscriptions, profiles, ratings... there's a lot
| there.
| troupo wrote:
| And which of those things that people could build already
| in mid-90s require some nebulous unspecified "new broswer
| features"?
|
| Perhaps they could start with just cutting down their
| bloated 100x-duplicated 4MB CSS file?
| mapontosevenths wrote:
| > 10 years ago I was in a meeting with them where they said
| they couldn't implement something because they wouldn't be able
| to use it for 5 years... They still haven't implemented it.
|
| I call that trailer park logic:
|
| They say: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I
| need a job now!"
|
| Then four years later, while still in a dead end job: "Why go
| to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"
| Filligree wrote:
| It's a trap, but that doesn't mean it's escapable if you _do_
| need a job now.
| observationist wrote:
| It's the type of trap that only works if you agree to allow
| it to work. You might call it Sunk Opportunity Cost
| Assumption, mostly fits.
| krzrak wrote:
| So profound. I'm keeping it to use later :)
| dgfitz wrote:
| Going to college usually means you work the same job after
| college, just with a lot more debt.
| silvestrov wrote:
| When a video is loaded on a Cobalt browser, why can't they
| redirect to something like youtube.com/cobalt/player/123456
|
| This way they could keep an old html/css/js implementation
| running alongside the upgraded one.
| troupo wrote:
| > And because it takes so long for an old Cobalt version to go
| out of support, they don't invest in implementing new features
|
| What new features?
|
| The only "new features" Youtube implements is shoving shorts
| down your throat and taking five seconds to show video times on
| thumbnails despite the fact that the data is already there.
|
| There's nothing Youtube requires from "new features" that can't
| be implemented in a browser tech from 15 years ago.
|
| Also, Youtube the site doesn't have to deal with Cobalt-the-TV-
| app just like it doesn't have to deal with YouTube-the-mobile-
| app
| quux wrote:
| And thanks to these old endpoints that can't be changed yt-dlp
| is able to function
| breakfastduck wrote:
| This was a delightful read. You have done the world a service
| there, truly!
| renewiltord wrote:
| Hahaha, I love that social proof worked. The Docs guys thought
| you guys had approval and the Youtube managers thought you were
| following through with a bigger initiative from across, started
| by Docs. Lucky break!
|
| Man, I love these tales of people doing the right thing cutting
| through the red tape.
| Flamingoat wrote:
| I've read this story before on a different site. I was near the
| start of my career in 2009. I honestly think they are overstating
| the effect of those banners.
|
| The significant shift IMO was when Windows 7 machines replaced
| the ageing XP machines. That is what I saw in the google
| analytics on the sites I was supporting at the time.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Indeed, their own graph shows IE7 dropping in usage share by
| very similar amounts at the same point in time, without a
| banner.
| Flamingoat wrote:
| Yes. I am sure it did contribute, but they are overstating
| the effect of the banner. I honestly think Win 7 being a good
| OS and the Intel Macs actually being good is what led to
| nibbling away of legacy IE.
|
| As an aside. IE7 was IMO worse in some ways the IE6. It had
| many of the same rendering bugs but was more subtle in how it
| failed.
| gldrk wrote:
| The web was a much better place when it had to support IE6.
| therealmarv wrote:
| Great article!
|
| I still remember the time when people cherished the arrival of
| IE5.5 and IE6 later. They were once the best browsers.
| fmajid wrote:
| Back in 2010, my startup offered front-end engineer prospective
| hires a major perk: we don't care about IE6 compatibility.
| xcskier56 wrote:
| My first startup we had to support IE 7 for a bit and then IE 8
| until like 2017... I thought I had it bad then. I'm so glad I
| didn't have to fight any older version
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