4 ms·
> quirks mode? Quirks mode was a necessary measure to ensure backwards compatibility for a majority of websites at the time (circa 2000 - this was IE5). If th
by TimTheTinker 6y ago
> quirks mode?
Quirks mode was a necessary measure to ensure backwards compatibility for a majority of websites at the time (circa 2000 - this was IE5).
If they had switched every website to standards mode, most of the internet at the time would have appeared broken, and people would have blamed Microsoft, not the websites.
(To be fair, IE5 through IE7 had a very broken standards mode, but it was much less broken than quirks mode.)
- Joeri 6y agoI remember some web developers would deliberately build for quirks mode because it was a stable target, unlike the always shifting standards mode.
- TimTheTinker 6y agoFor better or for worse, IE6 lived on, and on, and on for far too long with no changes. A bigger concern than the changing standards mode in other browsers was the fact that IE6 just wouldn’t die. I had people challenging me “why are you developing for Firefox first and then adapting your app to work on IE? Shouldn’t you be doing it the other way around?” Over 10 years later those apps I built are still working great on the latest browsers, with no layout fixes since then. Meanwhile, many of those “rich”, forward-thinking apps developed for IE and Silverlight are long dead.
- OliverJones 6y agoRight. In hospitals there was a very popular medical imaging web information system, GE, Maybe? It rendered with an ActiveX control embedded in IE6. It didn't work in IE7. So a lot of customers I worked with couldn't move past IE6. "No way, everybody need to be able to see those XRays images." We even tried, without success, to organize the quick development of some sort of replacement for that, umm, "legacy" ActiveX control.