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A Conspiracy To Kill IE6

Childlike Empress

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Childlike Empress
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Interesting story published yesterday: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

Chris Zacharias said:
The bittersweet consequence of YouTube’s incredible growth is that so many stories will be lost underneath all of the layers of new paint. This is why I wanted to tell the story of how, ten years ago, a small team of web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and got away with it.
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10 years ago?
They were hardly alone in the area of producing sites that did not support IE6.
 
That’s a whole new group of people I’ll gladly buy a drink if I ever meet them. Anyone who contributed to the death of IE6 deserves my thanks.
 
I'm pretty sure the conspiracy to kill IE6 comprised mostly of Microsoft developers.
 
Tolls said:
10 years ago?
They were hardly alone in the area of producing sites that did not support IE6.
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That's not the point. They sneaked in a warning onto the youtube page that they would stop supporting IE6 "soon", without authorization or any real plan to do so. Which led to a wave of other significant website developing teams using that warning as justification to their bosses to put up similar warnings, cutting the remaining IE6 population to half in short time. And they got away with it because in hindsight everybody agreed that the end justified the means in this case.
 
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Dropping support for older browsers is fine. But these guys acted very unprofessionally and probably should have been fired. Not because they went after IE6, but because they flagrantly abused the position of responsibility they'd been entrusted with.

I'd respect YouTube/Google for having an official policy to kill IE6, and implementing it much as described in the article. But I don't respect these guys at all.
 
theprestige said:
Dropping support for older browsers is fine. But these guys acted very unprofessionally and probably should have been fired. Not because they went after IE6, but because they flagrantly abused the position of responsibility they'd been entrusted with.

I'd respect YouTube/Google for having an official policy to kill IE6, and implementing it much as described in the article. But I don't respect these guys at all.
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Some changes require breaking the rules. Some changes only happen if someone stands up and does what they’re not supposed to do. This was one of them.

Was it unprofessional? Yes.

Was it something that could get them justifiably fired? Yes.

Is bypassing QA to get code into production a bad idea on several levels? Yes.

Was killing IE6 an end that justified that means? I think it was.
 
halleyscomet said:
Some changes require breaking the rules. Some changes only happen if someone stands up and does what they’re not supposed to do. This was one of them.

Was it unprofessional? Yes.

Was it something that could get them justifiably fired? Yes.

Is bypassing QA to get code into production a bad idea on several levels? Yes.

Was killing IE6 an end that justified that means? I think it was.
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I'm sorry. Was this supposed to be satire?
 
theprestige said:
I'm sorry. Was this supposed to be satire?
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I have vivid memories of having to spend hours, even days, getting sites to work in that fetid prolapse IE6. I’ve had prolonged meetings and employment threatened over that piece of garbage’s quirks and bugs. I once had to spend literally weeks plodding through a legacy codebase to root out multiple kludges put in place to accommodate IE6 because they were mucking up the site for every other browser.

I work in IT. I’ve been a programmer, network admin, server admin, DBA, and a host of other roles. If anyone I managed pulled a stunt like that for any purpose other than killing IE6, I’d probably have fired them on the spot for being unreliable. At the very least it would have been a major strike against them during their review.

But to kill IE6? To put a knife in that abomination’s chest so it bleeds out at long last? After all the pain that SOB has caused me, for that, and that alone, I’ll congratulate them and buy them a drink.
 
halleyscomet said:
I have vivid memories of having to spend hours, even days, getting sites to work in that fetid prolapse IE6. I’ve had prolonged meetings and employment threatened over that piece of garbage’s quirks and bugs. I once had to spend literally weeks plodding through a legacy codebase to root out multiple kludges put in place to accommodate IE6 because they were mucking up the site for every other browser.

I work in IT. I’ve been a programmer, network admin, server admin, DBA, and a host of other roles. If anyone I managed pulled a stunt like that for any purpose other than killing IE6, I’d probably have fired them on the spot for being unreliable. At the very least it would have been a major strike against them during their review.

But to kill IE6? To put a knife in that abomination’s chest so it bleeds out at long last? After all the pain that SOB has caused me, for that, and that alone, I’ll congratulate them and buy them a drink.
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As someone who has also been in various IT roles over many years, I noped out of all the vehement religious arguments decades ago. Emacs or vi? Whatever works, bro. Windows or Mac or Linux? DGAF, TBQH. Etc.
 
theprestige said:
As someone who has also been in various IT roles over many years, I noped out of all the vehement religious arguments decades ago. Emacs or vi? Whatever works, bro. Windows or Mac or Linux? DGAF, TBQH. Etc.
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Obviously your roles didn't involve web development in the 00s or you would understand what the poor guy is telling you. The victims are legion.
 
Childlike Empress said:
Obviously your roles didn't involve web development in the 00s or you would understand what the poor guy is telling you. The victims are legion.
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Or maybe I just have a different view of those times. The frustration of supporting IE was real. But any time emotion started to override professionalism and dispassionate analysis, I noped out. I never really understood people who took pride in having a public tanty about their particular technical hobby horse.
 
dudalb said:
Piece of Software get outdated and sites quit supporting it. How shocking.
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The version of Firefox I am running on my Windows PC is less than 12 moths old, and was 'outdated' (with no more 'upgrades' available) 3 months after release. 'Modern' websites are so full of crap that they take ages to load and are unresponsive even on the latest most powerful PC you can buy. Browsers have to work with dozens of ever more complex encryption schemes to keep out hackers and nobody is doing anything to catch the criminals, they just blame the victims instead.

Imagine if this was any other technology:-

"I'm sorry sir you can't drive that car on the highway it's outdated."

"But it's only 3 months old!"

"That may be so - but it won't be able to keep up with other vehicles, and it's a security risk."

"But it cruises at 120mph. Is that not fast enough?"

"Only on a flat level road sir, not a 1:1 gradient. Without tracks and a 10,000hp engine it wouldn't handle modern roads..."

"...and it has mechanical door locks, an outdated alarm system, and no armor plating. Thieves could easily break into your car and use it to commit a crime, which would be your fault for not having the latest security features".

"But criminals wouldn't have the tools to picks locks, hack alarm systems or rip the doors off cars if you 'white hats' hadn't given them to them!".

"You don't understand sir - We're the good guys".
 
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theprestige said:
Or maybe I just have a different view of those times. The frustration of supporting IE was real. But any time emotion started to override professionalism and dispassionate analysis, I noped out. I never really understood people who took pride in having a public tanty about their particular technical hobby horse.
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This isn’t about emotion or preferred technologies. This is about companies clinging to insecure, outdated, deliberately incompatible software well after more modern and standards compliant browsers were available. IE 7 and up have been quite decent browsers. IE6 held back the rest of the Internet for YEARS and it was time for people to let go of the antiquated crap.

I’d have felt the same way about Netscape 4.x if it had held on with irrational and stubborn tenacity the way IE6 had.
 
Roger Ramjets said:
The version of Firefox I am running on my Windows PC is less than 12 moths old, and was 'outdated' (with no more 'upgrades' available) 3 months after release. 'Modern' websites are so full of crap that they take ages to load and are unresponsive even on the latest most powerful PC you can buy. Browsers have to work with dozens of ever more complex encryption schemes to keep out hackers and nobody is doing anything to catch the criminals, they just blame the victims instead.

Imagine if this was any other technology:-

"I'm sorry sir you can't drive that car on the highway it's outdated."

"But it's only 3 months old!"

"That may be so - but it won't be able to keep up with other vehicles, and it's a security risk."

"But it cruises at 120mph. Is that not fast enough?"

"Only on a flat level road sir, not a 1:1 gradient. Without tracks and a 10,000hp engine it wouldn't handle modern roads..."

"...and it has mechanical door locks, an outdated alarm system, and no armor plating. Thieves could easily break into your car and use it to commit a crime, which would be your fault for not having the latest security features".

"But criminals wouldn't have the tools to picks locks, hack alarm systems or rip the doors off cars if you 'white hats' hadn't given them to them!".

"You don't understand sir - We're the good guys".
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Ironically your analogy is outdated and obsolete. Here’s a more updated automotive comparison.

https://www.scmagazine.com/home/sec...king-into-two-gps-fleet-manager-applications/
 
Heh.

I used to manage a site via a CMS.

I had to maintain three stylesheets.

One for IE6, one for every other version of IE, one for every other browser in the world.

If it was my own site, I would have been tempted to do the browser detection thing and display the following message:

"This site is rendered via html, if you use a non-html compliant browser (i.e. everything made by microsoft) it will not display correctly."
 
Roger Ramjets said:
The version of Firefox I am running on my Windows PC is less than 12 moths old, and was 'outdated' (with no more 'upgrades' available) 3 months after release. 'Modern' websites are so full of crap that they take ages to load and are unresponsive even on the latest most powerful PC you can buy. Browsers have to work with dozens of ever more complex encryption schemes to keep out hackers and nobody is doing anything to catch the criminals, they just blame the victims instead.

Imagine if this was any other technology:-

"I'm sorry sir you can't drive that car on the highway it's outdated."

"But it's only 3 months old!"

"That may be so - but it won't be able to keep up with other vehicles, and it's a security risk."

"But it cruises at 120mph. Is that not fast enough?"

"Only on a flat level road sir, not a 1:1 gradient. Without tracks and a 10,000hp engine it wouldn't handle modern roads..."

"...and it has mechanical door locks, an outdated alarm system, and no armor plating. Thieves could easily break into your car and use it to commit a crime, which would be your fault for not having the latest security features".

"But criminals wouldn't have the tools to picks locks, hack alarm systems or rip the doors off cars if you 'white hats' hadn't given them to them!".

"You don't understand sir - We're the good guys".
Click to expand...

But I think both you and Dudalb are kind of missing the point. The YT people did not actually do anything except threaten to end support at some future date, goading users to update their browsers.

It may not have been such a good idea, but it was not as drastic as it seems.
 
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