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I like the lawyers being concerned about the possibility they were pushing Chrome. Obviously Google soon decided that wasn’t a problem. (And now we’re back whe

I like the lawyers being concerned about the possibility they were pushing Chrome. Obviously Google soon decided that wasn’t a problem. (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.)

skunkworker 8y ago
That part reminded me of the BrowserChoice.eu site that Microsoft had to put up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu
- gmueckl 8y ago
  Wasn't that at roughly the same time? I think thus explains why the lawyers got nervous about the banner.
umvi 8y ago
> (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.) Except for the part where you get BSoD and infinite recursion or any of the other stated IE6 nightmares... Really, the only thing Chrome and IE have in common are market share. Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way as far as being a web dev goes.
- wvenable 8y ago
  This is the problem when looking back on the past; you miss the context. IE6, at the time in 2001, was the fastest most stable browser out there. It was magnitudes better than Netscape Navigator, which was bloated and far more crash happy. IE6 wasn't always terrible; it was just terrible compared what came after -- which is exactly how things should work.
  - TimTheTinker 8y ago
    > IE6 wasn't always terrible For web apps, IE6 and anything that came before was always terrible. It used to be hard to build a decent web app, even if most of your code ran on the server. There is a huge qualitative difference between building for an ad-hoc platform and one that is rigorously built and tested against some externally defined standard. Sure, Chrome may be lagging in some areas, but--like all modern browsers--the platform it provides conforms rigorously to the standards it supports. And that makes all the difference.
    - tclancy 8y ago
      I would disagree. IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in. Once we got to IE6/ Netscape 6/ Phoenix, it felt too easy.
      - TimTheTinker 8y ago
        > IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in My point is that in the IE6 era (and previously), doing so was categorically hard -- I didn't say impossible. Also, that changed with FF 3.5, IE8, Chrome, etc. Admittedly, IE6 and FF 1.5 were the first browsers I had to develop apps for from scratch. (And FF was already far more robust.)
      - tracker1 8y ago
        I wrote some pretty impressive applications with charting in NN4/IE4 days... it was horrible, and you couldn't pay me enough to do it again.
        wvenable 8y ago
        I think the desire to create this insane things using technology that wasn't ready for it is what drove browser development forward. But this is like complaining your toddler couldn't do algebra now that all your kids are teenagers.
        tclancy 8y ago
        Can I try? That sounds awful. Did you prefer `document.all` or `document.layers[]`?
        tracker1 8y ago
        I actually wrote an abstraction layer that normalized it a bit. Not nearly as cleanly as the DOM API eventually did, but enough to get work done (for the most part). Still had to do things like have a white overlay set/unset on the screen for NN to avoid visual flickering, etc. document.all, the way IE worked had a few advantages... Layers in NN didn't allow you to break apart a form into child components you could hide/show was a particular issue. So you had to mirror values in/out of the child layer portions of the form. That was about the most common and painful problem between the two imho. Another was when IE 5.0.0 broke the older API for dealing with changing the children of a <select> node. Which was fixed in 5.0.1, but 5.0.0 was on every Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Disc, and what a LOT of people had. That was painful to deal with too.
  - themacguffinman 8y ago
    Even if you consider the context and era, Chrome is still magnitudes better than IE because the real problem with IE6 was that it was hard to upgrade. It didn't matter that IE6 was fast at some point because IE didn't auto-update and Microsoft often tied IE to Windows upgrades, which in turn were often tied to new computer purchases or long enterprise contracts. Not to mention IE's significant divergence from standards meant it was hard to coordinate feature support. Chrome, in comparison, is easy to update and conforms to standards.
    - wvenable 8y ago
      But in the context and era, auto-updates were not common. No other browser auto-updated. Windows XP was released a month before IE6. Windows Update was still considered a revolutionary thing (and had been a stand-alone product only a short time earlier). Considering the context and era, IE being updated through Windows Updates was actually a huge improvement over the state of the art at the time.
    - int_19h 8y ago
      IE was not tied to Windows upgrades, except in a sense that new IE versions would eventually stop supporting old Windows versions (but that's true of all browsers). IE6 was available on Win98+ and NT4+, for example. IE7 and IE8 were XP/2003+. As far as divergence from the standards, again, that was generally not the case when IE6 shipped - if anything, it was at the bleeding edge, and past it in some ways. The real problem with it was that it wasn't updated fast enough to keep up with the rapid pace of web standards after the initial release; and when IE7 finally came, it had very minor improvements (IIRC the biggest one was PNG transparency?). But that was a different era already.
      - yuhong 8y ago
        It was tied for a short while.
      - trgamefn 8y ago
        Actually it was tied to Windows upgrades. It available for older versions of Windows but it was developed as part of development of new version of Windows! MS IE 1 was developed for Windows 95 Plus!, MS IE 2 for Windows NT 4.0, MS IE 3 was for Windows 95 OSR2 (essentially new OS, it even included it's own brand-new filesystem!), MS IE 4 was for Windows98 (but was rushed with Windows 95 OSR 2.5), MS IE 5.0 was for Windows 2000 (but was included as part of Windows 98 SE), MS IE 5.5 for was Windows ME (which wasn't initially planned - that's why it got 5.5 number, not 6), MS IE 6 was for Windows XP, MS IE 7 was for Windows Vista (and since Vista was horribly delayed so was MS IE 7) and MS IE 8 was for Window 7! The first version of MS IE which wasn't developed as part of Windows development was actually MS IE 9.
- mattmanser 8y ago
  And IE6 was similarly tons better the Netscape Navigator. It had XmlHttp, inventing Ajax, which revolutionised the web. Easy to forget that now. Also, did you know IE6 pioneered the browser web dev tools? IE6 was the first browser you could debug your JavaScript, css and html, which was copied by firebug about 12 months later. I can't even remember what it was called now, IE Dev toolbox? Something strange, you had to download it separately. And Firebug and Chrome Dev tools copied it almost verbatim. I've never seen any sort of acknowledgement of just how much the community owes to that early tool. The announcement blogs about it were still accessible a few years ago.
  - amiga-workbench 8y ago
    It was the Developer Toolbar, I've got a pet project that I'm making compatible with IE5 and its challenging to work without it.
    - yellowapple 8y ago
      What kind of project in this day and age would require IE5 compatibility?
      - amiga-workbench 8y ago
        Its not a commercial project, just an alternate (lightweight) front end for a forum and I wanted to prove to myself that old versions of IE weren't as bad to develop for as I remember. The truth ended up being somewhere in the middle, I was reminded of rendering errors that I had long forgotten, but all in all it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It helps that I'm just building a website in the classic sense, not a blob of JavaScript that happens to puke out HTML, and when I run into something that's awkward to implement I can just adjust the design to work with what I have. I realise that's not something a lot of people in a commercial job would have had the luxury of doing.
        yellowapple 8y ago
        Neat! I don't know if I'd ever want to target IE at all (I'd prefer to pretend it doesn't exist), but I do like to test stuff on niche browsers (NetSurf, Dillo, lynx/links/w3m) and see how usable the site is.
- tsmarsh 8y ago
  It is. There is a focus on standards, pushing the technology forward then sharing that with other browsers. Rapid updates. A focus on security and performance. And Chrome is the product, not the operating system its running on. Arguably, you could say that Chrome is actually designed to push you towards the Google Search and Gmail. But its a soft nudge in comparison to IE6 and Windows. I'm sure we'll find that a Pareto Distribution is an unavoidable market phenomenon, but I still believe its healthy for technologists to remain skeptical when one client massively outperforms others.
  - TheKarateKid 8y ago
    > And Chrome is the product, not the operating system its running on. Not quite the case. Chrome + Extensions create a very OS-like environment, hence not even needing Chrome OS.
- fpgaminer 8y ago
  In this context the comparison is not about the quality of IE6 as a browser, but the control it allowed Microsoft to exert on the internet ecosystem by virtue of its market share. Chrome is now in the same position, holding the vast majority of the www "hostage" to the whims of Google. The longer Chrome stays popular, the more websites will optimize for Chrome, bringing back the days of "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". And as more and more sites become accessible only in Chrome, user share tilts further in Chrome's favor, and so on in the vicious cycle we experienced in the browser dark ages. That's the fear, at least. I don't think anyone is concerned that Chrome is going to start BSoDing Windows anytime soon. The omens of monopoly are certainly here, though. All of Google's websites, which constitute a large percentage of web traffic, have been a "best viewed in Chrome" affair for a few years now. Microsoft recently dropped support for Firefox on the Skype web client. And I've seen my fair share of niche/corporate/etc websites that are Chrome-only. (FYI, I'm not personally worried that we'll see the same browser dark ages as before, but it's something we should be vigilant against.)
- cat199 8y ago
  >Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way Soo like - you mean: built in proprietary app stores, random DRM-enforcing blobs with camera/microphone access, phone-home tracking behavior, and gobs of memory use? side note: Firefox not IE user.
hadrien01 8y ago
According to the screenshot in the article there already was a permanent Chrome ad in the sidebar, so I don't really understand why the lawyers were concerned because of an additional banner.
sundvor 8y ago
Chromium, to be precise. I've switched to the new Edge beta at home and prefer it to Chrome. Google Meet does block me though..
thrusong 8y ago
I'd say Safari, particularly the versions of it in iOS with the different WebViews, is the new IE.

skunkworker 8y ago

That part reminded me of the BrowserChoice.eu site that Microsoft had to put up. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BrowserChoice.eu

gmueckl 8y ago
Wasn't that at roughly the same time? I think thus explains why the lawyers got nervous about the banner.

umvi 8y ago

> (And now we’re back where we started with Chrome as the new IE.) Except for the part where you get BSoD and infinite recursion or any of the other stated IE6 nightmares... Really, the only thing Chrome and IE have in common are market share. Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way as far as being a web dev goes.

wvenable 8y ago
This is the problem when looking back on the past; you miss the context. IE6, at the time in 2001, was the fastest most stable browser out there. It was magnitudes better than Netscape Navigator, which was bloated and far more crash happy. IE6 wasn't always terrible; it was just terrible compared what came after -- which is exactly how things should work.
- TimTheTinker 8y ago
  > IE6 wasn't always terrible For web apps, IE6 and anything that came before was always terrible. It used to be hard to build a decent web app, even if most of your code ran on the server. There is a huge qualitative difference between building for an ad-hoc platform and one that is rigorously built and tested against some externally defined standard. Sure, Chrome may be lagging in some areas, but--like all modern browsers--the platform it provides conforms rigorously to the standards it supports. And that makes all the difference.
  - tclancy 8y ago
    I would disagree. IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in. Once we got to IE6/ Netscape 6/ Phoenix, it felt too easy.
    - TimTheTinker 8y ago
      > IE5.5 was the first browser you could reliably write "rich" web UIs in My point is that in the IE6 era (and previously), doing so was categorically hard -- I didn't say impossible. Also, that changed with FF 3.5, IE8, Chrome, etc. Admittedly, IE6 and FF 1.5 were the first browsers I had to develop apps for from scratch. (And FF was already far more robust.)
    - tracker1 8y ago
      I wrote some pretty impressive applications with charting in NN4/IE4 days... it was horrible, and you couldn't pay me enough to do it again.
      - wvenable 8y ago
        I think the desire to create this insane things using technology that wasn't ready for it is what drove browser development forward. But this is like complaining your toddler couldn't do algebra now that all your kids are teenagers.
      - tclancy 8y ago
        Can I try? That sounds awful. Did you prefer `document.all` or `document.layers[]`?
        tracker1 8y ago
        I actually wrote an abstraction layer that normalized it a bit. Not nearly as cleanly as the DOM API eventually did, but enough to get work done (for the most part). Still had to do things like have a white overlay set/unset on the screen for NN to avoid visual flickering, etc. document.all, the way IE worked had a few advantages... Layers in NN didn't allow you to break apart a form into child components you could hide/show was a particular issue. So you had to mirror values in/out of the child layer portions of the form. That was about the most common and painful problem between the two imho. Another was when IE 5.0.0 broke the older API for dealing with changing the children of a <select> node. Which was fixed in 5.0.1, but 5.0.0 was on every Office 2000 and Windows 2000 Disc, and what a LOT of people had. That was painful to deal with too.
- themacguffinman 8y ago
  Even if you consider the context and era, Chrome is still magnitudes better than IE because the real problem with IE6 was that it was hard to upgrade. It didn't matter that IE6 was fast at some point because IE didn't auto-update and Microsoft often tied IE to Windows upgrades, which in turn were often tied to new computer purchases or long enterprise contracts. Not to mention IE's significant divergence from standards meant it was hard to coordinate feature support. Chrome, in comparison, is easy to update and conforms to standards.
  - wvenable 8y ago
    But in the context and era, auto-updates were not common. No other browser auto-updated. Windows XP was released a month before IE6. Windows Update was still considered a revolutionary thing (and had been a stand-alone product only a short time earlier). Considering the context and era, IE being updated through Windows Updates was actually a huge improvement over the state of the art at the time.
  - int_19h 8y ago
    IE was not tied to Windows upgrades, except in a sense that new IE versions would eventually stop supporting old Windows versions (but that's true of all browsers). IE6 was available on Win98+ and NT4+, for example. IE7 and IE8 were XP/2003+. As far as divergence from the standards, again, that was generally not the case when IE6 shipped - if anything, it was at the bleeding edge, and past it in some ways. The real problem with it was that it wasn't updated fast enough to keep up with the rapid pace of web standards after the initial release; and when IE7 finally came, it had very minor improvements (IIRC the biggest one was PNG transparency?). But that was a different era already.
    - yuhong 8y ago
      It was tied for a short while.
    - trgamefn 8y ago
      Actually it was tied to Windows upgrades. It available for older versions of Windows but it was developed as part of development of new version of Windows! MS IE 1 was developed for Windows 95 Plus!, MS IE 2 for Windows NT 4.0, MS IE 3 was for Windows 95 OSR2 (essentially new OS, it even included it's own brand-new filesystem!), MS IE 4 was for Windows98 (but was rushed with Windows 95 OSR 2.5), MS IE 5.0 was for Windows 2000 (but was included as part of Windows 98 SE), MS IE 5.5 for was Windows ME (which wasn't initially planned - that's why it got 5.5 number, not 6), MS IE 6 was for Windows XP, MS IE 7 was for Windows Vista (and since Vista was horribly delayed so was MS IE 7) and MS IE 8 was for Window 7! The first version of MS IE which wasn't developed as part of Windows development was actually MS IE 9.
mattmanser 8y ago
And IE6 was similarly tons better the Netscape Navigator. It had XmlHttp, inventing Ajax, which revolutionised the web. Easy to forget that now. Also, did you know IE6 pioneered the browser web dev tools? IE6 was the first browser you could debug your JavaScript, css and html, which was copied by firebug about 12 months later. I can't even remember what it was called now, IE Dev toolbox? Something strange, you had to download it separately. And Firebug and Chrome Dev tools copied it almost verbatim. I've never seen any sort of acknowledgement of just how much the community owes to that early tool. The announcement blogs about it were still accessible a few years ago.
- amiga-workbench 8y ago
  It was the Developer Toolbar, I've got a pet project that I'm making compatible with IE5 and its challenging to work without it.
  - yellowapple 8y ago
    What kind of project in this day and age would require IE5 compatibility?
    - amiga-workbench 8y ago
      Its not a commercial project, just an alternate (lightweight) front end for a forum and I wanted to prove to myself that old versions of IE weren't as bad to develop for as I remember. The truth ended up being somewhere in the middle, I was reminded of rendering errors that I had long forgotten, but all in all it wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. It helps that I'm just building a website in the classic sense, not a blob of JavaScript that happens to puke out HTML, and when I run into something that's awkward to implement I can just adjust the design to work with what I have. I realise that's not something a lot of people in a commercial job would have had the luxury of doing.
      - yellowapple 8y ago
        Neat! I don't know if I'd ever want to target IE at all (I'd prefer to pretend it doesn't exist), but I do like to test stuff on niche browsers (NetSurf, Dillo, lynx/links/w3m) and see how usable the site is.
tsmarsh 8y ago
It is. There is a focus on standards, pushing the technology forward then sharing that with other browsers. Rapid updates. A focus on security and performance. And Chrome is the product, not the operating system its running on. Arguably, you could say that Chrome is actually designed to push you towards the Google Search and Gmail. But its a soft nudge in comparison to IE6 and Windows. I'm sure we'll find that a Pareto Distribution is an unavoidable market phenomenon, but I still believe its healthy for technologists to remain skeptical when one client massively outperforms others.
- TheKarateKid 8y ago
  > And Chrome is the product, not the operating system its running on. Not quite the case. Chrome + Extensions create a very OS-like environment, hence not even needing Chrome OS.
fpgaminer 8y ago
In this context the comparison is not about the quality of IE6 as a browser, but the control it allowed Microsoft to exert on the internet ecosystem by virtue of its market share. Chrome is now in the same position, holding the vast majority of the www "hostage" to the whims of Google. The longer Chrome stays popular, the more websites will optimize for Chrome, bringing back the days of "Best viewed in Internet Explorer". And as more and more sites become accessible only in Chrome, user share tilts further in Chrome's favor, and so on in the vicious cycle we experienced in the browser dark ages. That's the fear, at least. I don't think anyone is concerned that Chrome is going to start BSoDing Windows anytime soon. The omens of monopoly are certainly here, though. All of Google's websites, which constitute a large percentage of web traffic, have been a "best viewed in Chrome" affair for a few years now. Microsoft recently dropped support for Firefox on the Skype web client. And I've seen my fair share of niche/corporate/etc websites that are Chrome-only. (FYI, I'm not personally worried that we'll see the same browser dark ages as before, but it's something we should be vigilant against.)
cat199 8y ago
>Chrome is magnitudes better than IE in every other way Soo like - you mean: built in proprietary app stores, random DRM-enforcing blobs with camera/microphone access, phone-home tracking behavior, and gobs of memory use? side note: Firefox not IE user.

hadrien01 8y ago

According to the screenshot in the article there already was a permanent Chrome ad in the sidebar, so I don't really understand why the lawyers were concerned because of an additional banner.

sundvor 8y ago

Chromium, to be precise. I've switched to the new Edge beta at home and prefer it to Chrome. Google Meet does block me though..

thrusong 8y ago

I'd say Safari, particularly the versions of it in iOS with the different WebViews, is the new IE.