3 ms·

> I think you have an unreasonable view of what “the lessons of IE-6” for web developers are. I agree with the OP. Perhaps you can elaborate on why you think w

> I think you have an unreasonable view of what “the lessons of IE-6” for web developers are. I agree with the OP. Perhaps you can elaborate on why you think we both have unreasonable views.

mnd999 8y ago
+1
scrollaway 8y ago
Some of the lessons of IE6: - Open source is important. - Web standards are important, especially living standards. - Continuous updates are extremely important. - Bundling browser updates with OS updates is an awful idea. - Plugins are a bad idea, let's not do those anymore. Am I missing any? I know people are afraid of a "browser monopoly" developing around Chrome and I think the fear is very legitimate, but I don't believe this is one of IE6's lessons. There has always been either a monopoly or a duopoly in browsers ever since… well, ever since web browsers were a thing. The web got as far as it did because there was very little fragmentation. In fact, the times where fragmentation was the highest (= when IE versions were legitimate separate browsers and auto-updating wasn't the norm) were the times with the least meaningful progress.
- majewsky 8y ago
  The missing lesson: Once a particular rendering engine has beyond 90% market share, it doesn't matter what the standard says. All that matters is what that engine does. We had that with IE6, and again now. There are plenty of Chrome-only sites already.
  - phkahler 8y ago
    >> Once a particular rendering engine has beyond 90% market share, it doesn't matter what the standard says. All that matters is what that engine does. That is exactly the wrong thinking that got people in trouble. The lesson is not to go that route. Every product that has ever existed had an end of life. To tailor your site to the browser of the day at the expense of standards compatibility is short sighted. People like to go for fancy new things and are willing to ignore standards and 2nd place browsers when they don't really have to. Your job is to make a usable site/app, not to show off how you managed to pull of some nifty thing enabled by using fancy proprietary feature X. Stick you your job and check your ego at the door please. You'll be better of down the road. A web site is not a product, it's a way to help sell your product. Unless you're a dot-com company and you're really trying to sell your web site to investors, in which case I don't really care do what you want.
- nirvdrum 8y ago
  You weren't the person I was responding to, so I really can't tell if we agree or disagree. I think we agree on many of the same points, but disagree perhaps on the whole picture. In its day, IE 6 was great and devs embraced it. When 90+% of the web was IE traffic, why bother wasting money developing for fringe browsers? > - Open source is important. I think if MS continued with IE's development, open source wouldn't be such an important issue. It became one because MS became a bad steward. But, I agree that being open source makes it unlikely that Chromium will stagnate in the same way. > - Continuous updates are extremely important. > - Bundling browser updates with OS updates is an awful idea. MS had a living standard. It was widely regarded as part of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Continuous updates & breaking away from the OS are important for security. They're bad for standards. > - Web standards are important, especially living standards. If you need a browser that's at most 6 weeks old to run a new site, what good is a standard? The Web was supposed to gracefully degrade, but that's not what's happening. Instead, devs are building sites & apps that only work in Chromium-based browsers and popping up splash screens that inform you you need to switch to use this site. This is something that in a post IE6 world we said we wouldn't do again, and yet here we are. I think the only real difference between what Google & MS did in terms of snubbing the W3C is that Google embraced the WHATWG. > - Plugins are a bad idea, let's not do those anymore. The difference between plugins, extensions, and add-ons to an end user is non-existent. There's certainly an improvement to security. But, otherwise end users frequently choose Chrome (or Firefox) based on what extensions are available.
  - scrollaway 8y ago
    > If you need a browser that's at most 6 weeks old to run a new site, what good is a standard? Is this argument in good faith, or do you genuinely not remember the IE6 days? We were talking about IE6 support still … what… four years ago? That's almost FIFTEEN YEARS. The point isn't that you need a "six weeks old" browser, the point is that you can't let it get so bad that you are no longer able to use features less than a decade old. I mean there's young web devs out there that wrote compatibility shims for a browser that's older than they are.
    - nirvdrum 8y ago

> I think you have an unreasonable view of what “the lessons of IE-6” for web developers are. I agree with the OP. Perhaps you can elaborate on why you think we both have unreasonable views.

mnd999 8y ago

scrollaway 8y ago

Some of the lessons of IE6: - Open source is important. - Web standards are important, especially living standards. - Continuous updates are extremely important. - Bundling browser updates with OS updates is an awful idea. - Plugins are a bad idea, let's not do those anymore. Am I missing any? I know people are afraid of a "browser monopoly" developing around Chrome and I think the fear is very legitimate, but I don't believe this is one of IE6's lessons. There has always been either a monopoly or a duopoly in browsers ever since… well, ever since web browsers were a thing. The web got as far as it did because there was very little fragmentation. In fact, the times where fragmentation was the highest (= when IE versions were legitimate separate browsers and auto-updating wasn't the norm) were the times with the least meaningful progress.

majewsky 8y ago
The missing lesson: Once a particular rendering engine has beyond 90% market share, it doesn't matter what the standard says. All that matters is what that engine does. We had that with IE6, and again now. There are plenty of Chrome-only sites already.
- phkahler 8y ago
  >> Once a particular rendering engine has beyond 90% market share, it doesn't matter what the standard says. All that matters is what that engine does. That is exactly the wrong thinking that got people in trouble. The lesson is not to go that route. Every product that has ever existed had an end of life. To tailor your site to the browser of the day at the expense of standards compatibility is short sighted. People like to go for fancy new things and are willing to ignore standards and 2nd place browsers when they don't really have to. Your job is to make a usable site/app, not to show off how you managed to pull of some nifty thing enabled by using fancy proprietary feature X. Stick you your job and check your ego at the door please. You'll be better of down the road. A web site is not a product, it's a way to help sell your product. Unless you're a dot-com company and you're really trying to sell your web site to investors, in which case I don't really care do what you want.
nirvdrum 8y ago
You weren't the person I was responding to, so I really can't tell if we agree or disagree. I think we agree on many of the same points, but disagree perhaps on the whole picture. In its day, IE 6 was great and devs embraced it. When 90+% of the web was IE traffic, why bother wasting money developing for fringe browsers? > - Open source is important. I think if MS continued with IE's development, open source wouldn't be such an important issue. It became one because MS became a bad steward. But, I agree that being open source makes it unlikely that Chromium will stagnate in the same way. > - Continuous updates are extremely important. > - Bundling browser updates with OS updates is an awful idea. MS had a living standard. It was widely regarded as part of "embrace, extend, extinguish." Continuous updates & breaking away from the OS are important for security. They're bad for standards. > - Web standards are important, especially living standards. If you need a browser that's at most 6 weeks old to run a new site, what good is a standard? The Web was supposed to gracefully degrade, but that's not what's happening. Instead, devs are building sites & apps that only work in Chromium-based browsers and popping up splash screens that inform you you need to switch to use this site. This is something that in a post IE6 world we said we wouldn't do again, and yet here we are. I think the only real difference between what Google & MS did in terms of snubbing the W3C is that Google embraced the WHATWG. > - Plugins are a bad idea, let's not do those anymore. The difference between plugins, extensions, and add-ons to an end user is non-existent. There's certainly an improvement to security. But, otherwise end users frequently choose Chrome (or Firefox) based on what extensions are available.
- scrollaway 8y ago
  > If you need a browser that's at most 6 weeks old to run a new site, what good is a standard? Is this argument in good faith, or do you genuinely not remember the IE6 days? We were talking about IE6 support still … what… four years ago? That's almost FIFTEEN YEARS. The point isn't that you need a "six weeks old" browser, the point is that you can't let it get so bad that you are no longer able to use features less than a decade old. I mean there's young web devs out there that wrote compatibility shims for a browser that's older than they are.
  - nirvdrum 8y ago