8 ms·

Younger developers truly don’t understand the pain and suffering IE inflicted

by jtms 7y ago

necovek 7y ago
Well, hover link styling and dynamic HTML in IE3/4 did push the web forward a bit. Not necessarily for the better, but it was influential, and defined some of the things that became standard. But that was probably a bit earlier, since I was off Windows by '98 or '99.
nr2x 7y ago
“This site best viewed in Chrome”.
- simonh 7y ago
  "This application is optimised for Chrome, but the default browser is Edge. Please cut and paste the following link into Chrome." Literally read this today.
  - mcv 7y ago
    That's also the case at my workplace. On some machines, IE11 was still the default browser, despite it not being supported.
    - FranklinYu 7y ago
      Do you work for banks or something?
- patrickaljord 7y ago
  Chrome is open source and available on all OS. Try running IE with flash and activex on linux in 1999. People today don't know how easy they have it :) (not saying you in particular).
  - bergheim 7y ago
    That's not really true; chromium is open source. Chrome, while based on chromium, is not.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-similar rendering vs. other browsers. If you wanted pixel-perfect it was a fucking nightmare. Literally doubled your work time just to add WinIE compatibility. This was in the IE5/6/7 era. Speaking of JS... all this was made worse because there were NO good JS libraries at the time to make things easier. Debugging consisted of alerts. Eventually, Prototype (and later Jquery) were literally godsends, and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!) Chrome is not like that. The same rendering engine exists on Linux, Windows and Mac, and it has an open-source highly-compatible version, Chromium.
  - girvo 7y ago
    > and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!) Firebug changed my life when it came out!
  - mnd999 7y ago
    > Dude, IE was Windows-only. Not originally it wasn’t. The UNIX versions are an interesting relic.
    - jaywalk 7y ago
      It was available on MacOS as well.
      - code_duck 7y ago
        Up to version 5.5.
      - savoytruffle 7y ago
- 2zcon 7y ago
  Where have you seen this?
  - jimmaswell 7y ago
    I've had sites not work in anything but chrome, specifically one of those bicycle registry sites. I think it was fixed.
epanchin 7y ago
Try designing an email newsletter for Outlook. Microsoft really hasn’t moved on that far.
- pmarreck 7y ago
  I hear HTML emails are still a "dark art"
  - tehlike 7y ago
    They are. Many unsupportag tags. Thanks outlook.
ksec 7y ago
That is why I am pissed when they said WebKit ( or even Chrome ) is the new IE when they have never lived or developed during the IE era, even jQuery came much later.

Younger developers truly don’t understand the pain and suffering IE inflicted

by jtms 7y ago

Younger developers truly don’t understand the pain and suffering IE inflicted

Well, hover link styling and dynamic HTML in IE3/4 did push the web forward a bit. Not necessarily for the better, but it was influential, and defined some of the things that became standard. But that was probably a bit earlier, since I was off Windows by '98 or '99.

nr2x 7y ago

“This site best viewed in Chrome”.

simonh 7y ago
"This application is optimised for Chrome, but the default browser is Edge. Please cut and paste the following link into Chrome." Literally read this today.
- mcv 7y ago
  That's also the case at my workplace. On some machines, IE11 was still the default browser, despite it not being supported.
  - FranklinYu 7y ago
    Do you work for banks or something?
patrickaljord 7y ago
Chrome is open source and available on all OS. Try running IE with flash and activex on linux in 1999. People today don't know how easy they have it :) (not saying you in particular).
- bergheim 7y ago
  That's not really true; chromium is open source. Chrome, while based on chromium, is not.
pmarreck 7y ago
Dude, IE was Windows-only. It went against everything the open Internet standards advocated for. And on top of it, I was a Mac guy, and Mac IE was a completely different beast, so I had to code for Windows IE, Mac IE, then Safari and Firefox and eventually early Chrome. And Windows IE was always the motherfucker who you had to figure out these nasty CSS and JS hacks for to get, forget pixel-perfect, how about pixel-similar rendering vs. other browsers. If you wanted pixel-perfect it was a fucking nightmare. Literally doubled your work time just to add WinIE compatibility. This was in the IE5/6/7 era. Speaking of JS... all this was made worse because there were NO good JS libraries at the time to make things easier. Debugging consisted of alerts. Eventually, Prototype (and later Jquery) were literally godsends, and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!) Chrome is not like that. The same rendering engine exists on Linux, Windows and Mac, and it has an open-source highly-compatible version, Chromium.
- girvo 7y ago
  > and there was some JS lib (forgot the name) which added a reasonable debugger (this was before browsers themselves had reasonably good integrated debuggers!) Firebug changed my life when it came out!
- mnd999 7y ago
  > Dude, IE was Windows-only. Not originally it wasn’t. The UNIX versions are an interesting relic.
  - jaywalk 7y ago
    It was available on MacOS as well.
    - code_duck 7y ago
      Up to version 5.5.
    - savoytruffle 7y ago
2zcon 7y ago
Where have you seen this?
- jimmaswell 7y ago
  I've had sites not work in anything but chrome, specifically one of those bicycle registry sites. I think it was fixed.

epanchin 7y ago

Try designing an email newsletter for Outlook. Microsoft really hasn’t moved on that far.

pmarreck 7y ago
I hear HTML emails are still a "dark art"
- tehlike 7y ago
  They are. Many unsupportag tags. Thanks outlook.

ksec 7y ago

That is why I am pissed when they said WebKit ( or even Chrome ) is the new IE when they have never lived or developed during the IE era, even jQuery came much later.