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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 Jo

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 https://twitter.com/johnath/status/1116871231792455686

rdiddly 8y ago
Yeah the part about giving the whole web "permission" to deprecate IE6 should ring alarm bells, even though it's not literal.
- phkahler 8y ago
  The most interesting thing to me is not that Google lead the charge here, but that everyone - including others at Google - was afraid to do it. Web developers the world over hated dealing with IE6 lack of compliance with established standards. Microsoft even had a newer versions of IE that was better. Everyone wanted this, it's just that nobody was willing to do anything about it. This is the world we live in. Even with a near worldwide consensus on what needs to be done, nobody is willing to say it for fear of repercussions. People would rather jump through hoops to support the status quo than risk backlash. Another problem is that the people who would normally have to approve a change like this are not the people who had to jump through the hoops to support IE6.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    I’m somehow a bit prickled by this. The ‘rest of the web’ had these banners for a long while before Google ever got around to adding it. My websites (and anything I worked on) certainly did.
jrochkind1 8y ago
Both?
nvarsj 8y ago
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.
- cpeterso 8y ago
  If YouTube developers are pushing changes that break IE6 layout for the "hundredth time" or crash the browser or OS, it sounds like they didn't have adequate QA or didn't test IE6, even though it was used by 18% of their users. "Nobody joining the team could be expected to know that early versions of IE" had some quirk could be caught by code reviews and QA.
  - daotoad 8y ago
    If you worked on web software at that time, 50% of the work was making something that worked in every other browser, then the next 50% was making it work in IE6 without breaking everything else. The arrival of IE8, while it was less awful than IE6, made things worse because many of the hacks used to make things IE6 friendly, worked with IE8, so the collection of stupid CSS hacks one had to memorize grew even more complex. IE6 was a browser of the same era as Netscape 4, when it was common and unsurprising for a CSS error or a malformed bit of HTML to crash the browser.
    - pixelrevision 8y ago
      It really is hard to describe how much bullshit devs have had to put up with to keep IE happy. Even today our front end team wants to use some modern JavaScript features which work fine in everything but IE. IE will never get another upgrade but it’s still holding tight to that small install base.
  - kevingadd 8y ago
    Yeah, I worked on a much smaller product and we aggressively ran automated selenium tests against our whole product with IE6. Sometimes we hit crashes in the browser and I helped people debug them using windbg and find string locals on the stack so we could identify the bad code. The idea that YT or any other Google product team would justify not CIing against IE6 or Firefox is absurd to me.
mherdeg 8y ago
Is there a good catchy name for this "oops" stuff? It's very interesting, an interesting modern take on "embrace and extend" or "FUD".
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I'm not sure what the term for the tech world is, but something similar seems to exist in many areas of many fields. It's one of the reasons I stopped accepting lawyers and law firms as clients. Every other client would pay on time. Those in the law field would consistently slow-pay, I believe because they knew they wouldn't get sued over it. "That overdue invoice? Oh, we never received it. Send it again." "Oh, Jenna in accounting must have it, but she's on vacation for two weeks." "Oh, that's in process." "Oh, we still haven't received it." "Oh, you have a signature on a certified mail delivery? It must be upstairs for approval." "Oh, we've already run all the checks for the month, it'll be in next month's batch." I eventually went to a pre-paid hours, payable by credit card-only model. It was the only way to stay afloat. Plus it was delicious when someone would use up all their hours and give give some excuse. "Oh, we really need this on the site today." "No problem. I can do that as soon as you buy more hours." "Oh, we'll get that paid next week." "No problem, your website went offline an hour ago and will be back when you buy more hours next week." Poof! payment comes through three minutes later.
  - sverige 8y ago
    As a class, lawyers and doctors are some of the cheapest people you'll ever meet. They don't want to pay full price for anything. I have tons of stories about this; one of the most egregious was a lawyer who made over a million a year and sued his mechanic to avoid paying an $800 repair job to his daughter's old VW Bug.
    - HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
      That's a nice anecdote. Here's mine- my orthodontist gives out a little wooden token for not breaking anything, wearing one of their t-shirts to the appointment, and answering a trivia question right. You can either return 30 tokens for a $10 gift card (great for teenagers, who always need more Amazon money, it seems), or he has this nice big box that you can put tokens in. Once the box is full, he plans a trip and goes to some third-world country to help out for a bit (generally it's his summer vacation.) He has gone on a trip for the last eight or nine years. Maybe my population is skewed- two of the three doctors I see are Eagle Scouts, but not everyone is a cheapskate.
vetinari 8y ago
I find it ironic that Mozilla complains about this, when they do exactly the same wrt platforms supported by Firefox.
- reaperducer 8y ago
  I don't follow Firefox news. Can you supply some examples?
  - vetinari 8y ago
    What they are complaining about - that they are treated as second-class citizen - is exacly, how they treat Linux, for example. No OMTP, OMTC, no hw video acceleration, no smooth scrolling, buggy dark theme, etc, so Firefox on Linux is not as polished and/or performing as on other platforms. The excuse for that was, that Linux has small market share, so it is not worth for putting more resources into solving these problems (some of them have bug reports open for over a decade!). Well, Firefox itself has also small market share, it is in single digits now. The irony is in the part, that they actively used this as rationalization for what they do, but do not like it, when others use exactly that reason on them. I'm not talking about validity of the rationale itself; just about the irony of finding them on the bottom of the hole they helped to dig out.
    - Aeolun 8y ago
      In those cases it never worked in the first place though. Nobody is in a position where they expect certain stuff to work because it never did.
      - vetinari 8y ago
        Lot of HTML/js stuff never worked in Firefox either. For example, Youtube uses polymer, which uses web components v0 if available. Firefox never implemented that. On the other hand, the above mentioned features could work, if Firefox would implement them, as they did for other platforms. Other applications on Linux are able to use the needed APIs available, why Firefox is not?
partiallypro 8y ago
Google has coincidentally made their products not work on Microsoft's Chromium based browser...and it's not even out of beta.
- UncleMeat 8y ago
  "Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result. Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?
  - ChrisSD 8y ago
    Considering it uses the same rendering engine as the most popular browser in the world?
  - 8ytecoder 8y ago
    Microsoft Chrome is essentially Chrome slapped with a new, pardon the pun, chrome. If a website works on Chrome it should work on the MS version as well - assuming they haven't made many breaking changes - and from what I have read so far they have only replaced auxiliary services and haven't altered the rendering engine.
    - j_koreth 8y ago
      Presumably they're still loading a version of the website which Trident/Edgekit which used to make up for the discrepancies between the other browsers.
      - kevingadd 8y ago
        The Edge devs went out of their way to craft a useragent that doesn't trigger Edge UA sniffing, which is why the pages used to work until Google intentionally broke them in Edge.
        8y ago
derefr 8y ago
In this case, the rest of the web put up the banners not because Google controlled the web, but because "if even Google, who has a huge monetary incentive to have their services be accessible to every web surfer [and puts a lot of work into achieving that], is willing to alienate IE6 users, IE6 must really be on the decline." It's sort of the reverse of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": nobody ever got fired for refusing to implement an accessibility measure that not even IBM (or Google, in this case) bothers to implement. Unless you're in a very specific sector (in which case you know what your obligations are), your legal duties will always be a strict subset of those of $BIGCORP; so you can use $BIGCORP's shirking of a particular duty as a heuristic to determine whether you can safely shirk that same duty.
TheOperator 8y ago
Influence can be used for good (Killing IE6) and evil (Killing Firefox).

rdiddly 8y ago

Yeah the part about giving the whole web "permission" to deprecate IE6 should ring alarm bells, even though it's not literal.

phkahler 8y ago
The most interesting thing to me is not that Google lead the charge here, but that everyone - including others at Google - was afraid to do it. Web developers the world over hated dealing with IE6 lack of compliance with established standards. Microsoft even had a newer versions of IE that was better. Everyone wanted this, it's just that nobody was willing to do anything about it. This is the world we live in. Even with a near worldwide consensus on what needs to be done, nobody is willing to say it for fear of repercussions. People would rather jump through hoops to support the status quo than risk backlash. Another problem is that the people who would normally have to approve a change like this are not the people who had to jump through the hoops to support IE6.
- Aeolun 8y ago
  I’m somehow a bit prickled by this. The ‘rest of the web’ had these banners for a long while before Google ever got around to adding it. My websites (and anything I worked on) certainly did.

jrochkind1 8y ago

Both?

nvarsj 8y ago

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.

cpeterso 8y ago
If YouTube developers are pushing changes that break IE6 layout for the "hundredth time" or crash the browser or OS, it sounds like they didn't have adequate QA or didn't test IE6, even though it was used by 18% of their users. "Nobody joining the team could be expected to know that early versions of IE" had some quirk could be caught by code reviews and QA.
- daotoad 8y ago
  If you worked on web software at that time, 50% of the work was making something that worked in every other browser, then the next 50% was making it work in IE6 without breaking everything else. The arrival of IE8, while it was less awful than IE6, made things worse because many of the hacks used to make things IE6 friendly, worked with IE8, so the collection of stupid CSS hacks one had to memorize grew even more complex. IE6 was a browser of the same era as Netscape 4, when it was common and unsurprising for a CSS error or a malformed bit of HTML to crash the browser.
  - pixelrevision 8y ago
    It really is hard to describe how much bullshit devs have had to put up with to keep IE happy. Even today our front end team wants to use some modern JavaScript features which work fine in everything but IE. IE will never get another upgrade but it’s still holding tight to that small install base.
- kevingadd 8y ago
  Yeah, I worked on a much smaller product and we aggressively ran automated selenium tests against our whole product with IE6. Sometimes we hit crashes in the browser and I helped people debug them using windbg and find string locals on the stack so we could identify the bad code. The idea that YT or any other Google product team would justify not CIing against IE6 or Firefox is absurd to me.

mherdeg 8y ago

Is there a good catchy name for this "oops" stuff? It's very interesting, an interesting modern take on "embrace and extend" or "FUD".

reaperducer 8y ago
I'm not sure what the term for the tech world is, but something similar seems to exist in many areas of many fields. It's one of the reasons I stopped accepting lawyers and law firms as clients. Every other client would pay on time. Those in the law field would consistently slow-pay, I believe because they knew they wouldn't get sued over it. "That overdue invoice? Oh, we never received it. Send it again." "Oh, Jenna in accounting must have it, but she's on vacation for two weeks." "Oh, that's in process." "Oh, we still haven't received it." "Oh, you have a signature on a certified mail delivery? It must be upstairs for approval." "Oh, we've already run all the checks for the month, it'll be in next month's batch." I eventually went to a pre-paid hours, payable by credit card-only model. It was the only way to stay afloat. Plus it was delicious when someone would use up all their hours and give give some excuse. "Oh, we really need this on the site today." "No problem. I can do that as soon as you buy more hours." "Oh, we'll get that paid next week." "No problem, your website went offline an hour ago and will be back when you buy more hours next week." Poof! payment comes through three minutes later.
- sverige 8y ago
  As a class, lawyers and doctors are some of the cheapest people you'll ever meet. They don't want to pay full price for anything. I have tons of stories about this; one of the most egregious was a lawyer who made over a million a year and sued his mechanic to avoid paying an $800 repair job to his daughter's old VW Bug.
  - HeWhoLurksLate 8y ago
    That's a nice anecdote. Here's mine- my orthodontist gives out a little wooden token for not breaking anything, wearing one of their t-shirts to the appointment, and answering a trivia question right. You can either return 30 tokens for a $10 gift card (great for teenagers, who always need more Amazon money, it seems), or he has this nice big box that you can put tokens in. Once the box is full, he plans a trip and goes to some third-world country to help out for a bit (generally it's his summer vacation.) He has gone on a trip for the last eight or nine years. Maybe my population is skewed- two of the three doctors I see are Eagle Scouts, but not everyone is a cheapskate.

vetinari 8y ago

I find it ironic that Mozilla complains about this, when they do exactly the same wrt platforms supported by Firefox.

reaperducer 8y ago
I don't follow Firefox news. Can you supply some examples?
- vetinari 8y ago
  What they are complaining about - that they are treated as second-class citizen - is exacly, how they treat Linux, for example. No OMTP, OMTC, no hw video acceleration, no smooth scrolling, buggy dark theme, etc, so Firefox on Linux is not as polished and/or performing as on other platforms. The excuse for that was, that Linux has small market share, so it is not worth for putting more resources into solving these problems (some of them have bug reports open for over a decade!). Well, Firefox itself has also small market share, it is in single digits now. The irony is in the part, that they actively used this as rationalization for what they do, but do not like it, when others use exactly that reason on them. I'm not talking about validity of the rationale itself; just about the irony of finding them on the bottom of the hole they helped to dig out.
  - Aeolun 8y ago
    In those cases it never worked in the first place though. Nobody is in a position where they expect certain stuff to work because it never did.
    - vetinari 8y ago
      Lot of HTML/js stuff never worked in Firefox either. For example, Youtube uses polymer, which uses web components v0 if available. Firefox never implemented that. On the other hand, the above mentioned features could work, if Firefox would implement them, as they did for other platforms. Other applications on Linux are able to use the needed APIs available, why Firefox is not?

partiallypro 8y ago

Google has coincidentally made their products not work on Microsoft's Chromium based browser...and it's not even out of beta.

UncleMeat 8y ago
"Website suddenly breaks on browser that is still in beta and likely isn't baked into all of the acceptance tests" seems like a completely expected result. Are you suggesting that a new browser that isn't out of beta should be less likely to weirdly break on some websites?
- ChrisSD 8y ago
  Considering it uses the same rendering engine as the most popular browser in the world?
- 8ytecoder 8y ago
  Microsoft Chrome is essentially Chrome slapped with a new, pardon the pun, chrome. If a website works on Chrome it should work on the MS version as well - assuming they haven't made many breaking changes - and from what I have read so far they have only replaced auxiliary services and haven't altered the rendering engine.
  - j_koreth 8y ago
    Presumably they're still loading a version of the website which Trident/Edgekit which used to make up for the discrepancies between the other browsers.
    - kevingadd 8y ago
      The Edge devs went out of their way to craft a useragent that doesn't trigger Edge UA sniffing, which is why the pages used to work until Google intentionally broke them in Edge.
      - 8y ago

derefr 8y ago

In this case, the rest of the web put up the banners not because Google controlled the web, but because "if even Google, who has a huge monetary incentive to have their services be accessible to every web surfer [and puts a lot of work into achieving that], is willing to alienate IE6 users, IE6 must really be on the decline." It's sort of the reverse of "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM": nobody ever got fired for refusing to implement an accessibility measure that not even IBM (or Google, in this case) bothers to implement. Unless you're in a very specific sector (in which case you know what your obligations are), your legal duties will always be a strict subset of those of $BIGCORP; so you can use $BIGCORP's shirking of a particular duty as a heuristic to determine whether you can safely shirk that same duty.

TheOperator 8y ago

Influence can be used for good (Killing IE6) and evil (Killing Firefox).