11 ms·

A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019)

236 points by SerCe 5y ago

wolrah 5y ago
Proof that deprecating support for ancient software run by change-fearing businesses can still be done properly. The people responsible for this are heroes, they did what even Microsoft themselves were unable to do without their help, and they made the entire internet undeniably better by doing so.
ksec 5y ago
What I a great story. This is from 2019 and it somehow fly under my radar. I was always under the impression killing IE6 was a strategic decision from Google especially it came after they introduce Chrome where they previously said they were 100% behind Firefox. And we have email evidence that is not the case as they had always intend to have their own browser. It is also Interesting how Youtube seems to have resisted integration into Google infrastructure and tools for as long as possible. Vitess was created in 2010 to solve their mySQL scaling issues. And I believe it wasn't until late 2019 they moved it to some whatever Google standardise.
- deaddodo 5y ago
  YouTube has resisted it specifically because the spectacular failure of Google Videos. But you can totally see Google's hands in their business decisions such as shoving GPM into YouTube Music and switching their entire ad stack to be Google exclusive (an obvious move).
- tonto 5y ago
  Corresponds with dropping ie11 today too https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/1443962459723755533?s=20 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/1443962459723755533?s=2...
fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
I still remember the day this came out and how happy I was that I could now convince the project I was working on to give up on IE6 too.
tombert 5y ago
I wish I had thought of sneaking in a scary banner in ~2013 when I still had to support IE6 for a web development job I had. I, like a majority of web developers, was using Chrome to do all my development and testing, and would only occasionally VM Windows XP to test Internet Explorer, which usually had something broken, and would usually end up with me spending a majority of my time fixing, and when I would complain about it, management would point to the server logs and say "Look, N% of people are still using IE6, we have to support it!" If I had been smart enough to put a little deprecation warning on there, life might have been easier for me.
- irrational 5y ago
  And who gave management the numbers from the server logs? You guys should have fudged the numbers.
  - solarengineer 5y ago
    I’ve replied elsewhere in how I reported the support overhead for older browser versions. While one could fudge numbers once, we could get accustomed to misrepresenting in the future too. Once users/customers discover this, they’ll always keep second-guessing us. Trust once lost would be difficult to regain. It is better to how customers that they need not waste money anymore and shouldn’t support/facilitate users using insecure and outdated technology anymore either. They could give it a positive spin and get good PR too.
  - bpodgursky 5y ago
    This is terrible advice. Taking a bold gamble without total authorization can pay off sometimes... lying to management is how you get fired (at best) or sued.
ffitch 5y ago
To be fair, IE6 share was falling quickly on it’s own, and its sharp one-week drop coincided with IE8 launch. IE7 also saw drop that week, even though it didn’t have the deprecation message. Google’s banner probably made IE6 die a few months sooner, but that’s it.
- solarengineer 5y ago
  For years after, various customers facing websites required IE6 support because analytics showed that there was significant IE 6 traffic. Various enterprises were slow to move off IE6 because various websites and products continued to support it! I’d learned my lesson. When IE 7 was similarly entrenched, I’d start to provide separate estimates for IE 7 support, and explain to client-side business and IT folk that they could use this information to justify developing reduced functionality for IE7 users and for showing such users a banner urging them to upgrade to a newer browser.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
DawnKFunk 5y ago
I think it's funny that you can title an article "a conspiracy to kill x" but if I said this HN user is "part of a conspiracy to kill x" I will be accused of starting a flamewar.
ahmedfromtunis 5y ago
That's a great story and a beautiful reminder that relying on data to make decisions is not always a good strategy. I sometimes feel like people forget that data is an effect of our decisions and actions, not the other way around. A bit off topic, but this is also a reminder that even conspiring to put a miniscule banner can't go unnoticed, let alone one with much grander objectives like inserting chips into billions of vaccines, or fake a moon landing.
- noduerme 5y ago
  Excellent comment. Yes, it's terrifying to think of the social power of one silly banner on a huge website - that the bosses don't even notice! It's also really true, and I see it all the time on HN, that people expect data to make decisions rather than understanding that their own bias is shaping the data. Much of this ML data analysis approach is like shaping a huge statue on tiny legs, each person making it bigger and bigger at the top until it falls over. The best thing about this story is it reminds you to be a rebel.
- xg15 5y ago
  > A bit off topic, but this is also a reminder that even conspiring to put a miniscule banner can't go unnoticed, let alone one with much grander objectives like inserting chips into billions of vaccines, or fake a moon landing. I'm sorry I have to defend the tinfoil hatters here, but I think it's important to note the alleged situations are different: In the OP, we have a small group inside a large organisation (Google) conspiring "against" the organisation (even if ultimately to its benefit). Most conspiracy theories seem to assume the whole organisation (government, military-industrial complex, NSA/CIA/..., lizard people, etc) conspires against the general public. So, not so much an actual conspiracy, more like large-scale corporate projects which are hidden from the public and against the public interest. Inside the organisation, there would be no need to keep anything particularly secret as the conspiracy is a perfectly well-approved project of the organisation. Of course stuff like fake moon landings and vaccine microchips are still bullshit - however, events like the Snowden leaks or numerous cold war CIA operations which have been confirmed by now show that in principle, it's possible to keep large-scale projects completely unknown to the general public for an extensive timeframe. I think if anything, the OP could be a sign how hard it would be to reveal such projects. Because any potential whistleblowers would find themselves in a similar situation where they have to conspire against the organisation they are working in.
cletus 5y ago
This is a good story. You can take away several things from it. Here's mine: it demonstrates the value of reputation and trust and how easily they're lost and how hard they are to recover. IE4 came out at a time when Microsoft considered Netscape an existential threat. IE4 was really the last nail in the coffin. It was actually way better/faster than NS. By the time IE6 came around, there was no imminent threat to Windows in the form of the Web being a platform replacement. So IE6 stagnated and became the bane of the Internet. IE-specific hacks (and IE6 in particular) became the norm for Web developers. It was pervasive too. For example, IE had a completely different interpretation of the CSS box model to everyone else (specifically, how padding, margin and width should interoperate). Fast forward some years and Microsoft is not the same place it was under Gates or, more importantly, Ballmer (he had the longer tenure in the modern Internet era). Nadella really does seem to represent a different approach and MS has produced some great tech (eg Typescript). But IE died because of the reputation it earned and all the existing hacks around it. It got renamed to Edge specifically to avoid the if-IE blocks and to more cleanly cast off IE-legacy behaviour. But the fact is, no one really trusts MS anymore when it comes to the Web (Typescript notwithstanding). So Edge just became rebranded Webkit much like Safari/Chrome. To be fair, some other stuff contributed to the death of IE and some of it was pretty dodgy (eg little things Google did that crippled non-Chrome browsers such as hardware video decoding on Youtube). Anyway, you see this too with Google and what's now a meme about chat applications (Meet, Talk, Hangouts, Duo, allo, anyone?). Google is also now a meme for dropping support for things people use. Reader is the posterchild for this even though my opinion is this wasn't as big of a deal as people make out. But the cost in all that is now no one trusts anything Google launches to be there in 3 years. Reputation matters. Apple gets this even though they've also killed some things (eg Safari for Windows). Google really doesn't. Lastly, as far as Youtubers having an identity of not being Googlers, this was certainly still the case 5 years ago and may still be the case today. They have a separate campus (in San Bruno) and generally eschew anything Google3-related. They also still called themselves Youtubers.
- goldenkey 5y ago
  I suppose it's kind of humorous then that YouTube has hardly been integrated into the Google ecosystem sofar as a redirect to auth.youtube.com is done on other Google products to propagate the auth information. This has caused issues with teachers wanting to block YouTube yet still have Google Classroom [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28582334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28582334
i_like_apis 5y ago
Back when many people attempted to support ie6 and even ie4 (oof), we would sometimes joke about the amount of global developer man-hours spent on doing so (millions probably if you think about it). The drive for legacy IE support took a chunk out of the productivity of so many projects.
userbinator 5y ago
Now we have a monopoly of a much bigger, more user-hostile browser(s) and the web "standards" effectively under the control of a single company, which also happens to own YouTube and does things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 . This article is actually a nice reminder that YouTube used to work in browsers as "unstandard" as IE6, and with far less processing power than computers today, was not noticeably slow either. As much as you hate IE6, I hate the current situation far more. Those waging the browser-wars and evangelising the "push the web forward" propaganda have done nothing but contribute to the creation of a different monopoly and the waste of countless processor-hours of time and energy. My personal fuckings go out to everyone who thinks this is "progress" or in any way a good thing.
- scoopertrooper 5y ago
  For science, I just tried loading YouTube in both Chrome and Firefox. I'd say Chrome may have been marginally faster, but you'd really have to get a profiling tool out to quantify it. As to the rest of it, not really sure what you're talking about.
  - userbinator 5y ago
    YouTube and plenty of other sites worked fine on the typical computer of the time which would have IE6. Over a decade later, hardware is much more powerful yet the site is even slower than it used to be. I've started using Invidious exclusively because of that. Doing less with more is not "progress".
    - scoopertrooper 5y ago
      I haven't really noticed a slow down. Maybe you shouldn't base your entire world view on your own anecdotal observations?
      - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
        one should not base world views on personal observations alone, but one should probably modify personal behavior based on those observations.
reilly3000 5y ago
A lot of folks have wondered why IE 6 stuck around so long in the first place. It’s pretty simple: group policy. Through Active Directory, admins could do things like force a specific homepage, set proxies for all browsers in the company, disable media features for security, make history undeletable, or even turn off right clicking. Around that time there weren’t alternatives to set these policies in other browsers, so admins just disabled the ability to install them in order to maintain tight control. Now Chrome and possibly other browsers can do similar, but less draconian policies, and security concerns are mitigated with separate systems. After the time this article references, there started to be big changes around how corporate IT was managed. It went from being about gear and gate-keeping to strategically supporting business initiatives. I wonder if this little banner on the YouTube player helped nudge things forward.
- Joeri 5y ago
  I was stuck supporting IE6 for a lot of large organizations and was often in the loop on why they decided to stick with it. I never heard the ability to set strict group policies as a reason. What I mostly heard was internal web apps built for IE6 which needed to be updated to support IE8, and the incredible pain to actually get those update projects approved. There was also the one customer, a large bank, who had built a custom browser around the IE6 engine, and mandated its use for bureaucratic reasons. I mostly solved our IE6 problem by moving over our web product to a single page architecture based on ExtJS in 2007. ExtJS had a browser abstraction layer, and as long as you built your screens out of its components you rarely had issues. The major pain points that remained were memory leaks (IE6 was a digital sieve, and SPA made it worse), and performance.
  - gjvc 5y ago
    In 2007, I'm guessing that would have been ExtJS 3.x? ExtJS can be a pig to use, but the results are good, in my experience. What would you use nowadays? Have you found anything else with as complete a widget set than ExtJS?
    - Joeri 5y ago
noduerme 5y ago
From the article... >>Once they realized what had happened, they cornered our boss for details, grappled with the consequences of our actions and begrudgingly arrived at the conclusion that the ends had justified the means I totally applaud the guerrilla methods taken by employees, unbeknownst to the bosses, that are described in this essay. Sometimes you have to just cut out the committee. Getting people to ditch their ancient software so you can move on with features is virtually impossible unless you hold a gun to their head, and that is never something tasteful for the higher brass -- even the ones who demand the features in the first place. They're in the miserable position of keeping every single person satisfied and trying to improve things. That's why it's not terribly surprising that they're happy to have the engineers go rogue every once in awhile.
- cube00 5y ago
  If you have a flat management structure sure, but in this case they knew they were breaking the company's change management procedures because they were going to "slip the code into production without anyone catching on" I'll wager they were strongly warned they might not be so lucky if they try a stunt like this again. If something had gone wrong they'd all be out of a job and good luck getting a favorable reference.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    So? You do realize that most people who write code can easily find other jobs, and are usually paid better for thinking outside the box, right? >>if they try a stunt like this again Dear Principal Skinner - I will never make management look like idiots again. Sincerely, Bart.
    - cube00 5y ago
      Good luck finding a new job without a reference from your most recent employer. I suppose someone who is deceitful enough to "slip the code into production without anyone catching on" wouldn't have a problem "thinking outside the box" to get around that though, if we're going down this road we might as well go all in. My new employer may even increase my pay even further once they realize I diddled them with my last employer's reference to mask a termination for willful misconduct. I got as frustrated with IE6 as the next developer but this doesn't give anyone license to resort to "guerrilla methods"
cube00 5y ago
> Next, we just needed a way to slip the code into production without anyone catching on. The time when I need to "slip the code into production without anyone catching on" is the time I know I need to move on from a company. This isn't an action movie, it's a business, the business has procedures, if you don't like them, either try and change them or leave, you should never go rouge like this because if you don't pull it off flawlessly you will be terminated. Even if you succeed, it will be recorded in your file and wheeled out if they ever want to turf you for any other reason they feel like in the future because now you have a "history"
- sangnoir 5y ago
  > you should never go rouge like this because if you don't pull it off flawlessly you will be terminated Live a little; they knew the risks going in and were convinced it was worth getting terminated. I have staked my employment on things I strongly believed in before. The corollary was I wouldn't want the job anyway, if the organization disagreed.
tardyp 5y ago
Good ol times when front page videos were 40k views max...
gpvos 5y ago
This is probably the best example ever that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.
axegon_ 5y ago
Fun fact: I know a frontend dev who only used ie6 for development for as long as I knew him which sounded like masochism. But he had a point: "hey, if it works on ie6, it will work on a potato with a VGA stuck in it".
- TimTheTinker 5y ago
  That's a badly misguided take though. I bet his apps don't work anymore now.
Lio 5y ago
“It’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission”. Never truer.
marcodiego 5y ago
TLDR: "The plan was very simple. We would put a small banner above the video player that would only show up for IE6 users. It would read “We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one of these more modern browsers.” Next to the text would be links to the current versions of the major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, IE8 and eventually, Opera. The text was intentionally vague and the timeline left completely undefined. We hoped that it was threatening enough to motivate end users to upgrade without forcing us to commit to any actual deprecation plan. Users would have the ability to close out this warning if they wanted to ignore it or deal with it later. The code was designed to be as subtle as possible so that it would not catch the attention of anyone monitoring our checkins. Nobody except the web development team used IE6 with any real regularity, so we knew it was unlikely anyone would notice our banner appear in the staging environment. We even delayed having the text translated for international users so that a translator asking for additional context could not inadvertently surface what we were doing. Next, we just needed a way to slip the code into production without anyone catching on."
praptak 5y ago
Compare this to how Google handled Kathryn Spiers for unauthorized posting of an internal banner. We can at least stop pretending it was for abuse of commit rights and not for labor activism.
- captainredbeard 5y ago
  Labor activism isn’t a job role
  - seoaeu 5y ago
    It is however protected under the National Labor Relations Act: firing someone for engaging in concerted activity is a violation of their rights
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I think any behavior trying to influence the user's browser CHOICE is incredibly patronizing and self-serving. Web sites should bend over backwards to support whatever the user happens to have, but everyone is just too fucking lazy.
fusioneventz 5y ago
Thanks for sharing < a herf="https://fusioneventz.in https://fusioneventz.in"> Niranjan </a>
samgranieri 5y ago
Thank you for doing this. I was given photoshops for a hobby site I maintained and IE6 was always foiling my plants. I was working as a contractor for Tribune Interactive in the fall of 2009 and I heard stories about how the senior front end developer almost got in a screaming match with high level execs demanding they upgrade their browsers. It worked

236 points by SerCe 5y ago

Proof that deprecating support for ancient software run by change-fearing businesses can still be done properly. The people responsible for this are heroes, they did what even Microsoft themselves were unable to do without their help, and they made the entire internet undeniably better by doing so.

ksec 5y ago

What I a great story. This is from 2019 and it somehow fly under my radar. I was always under the impression killing IE6 was a strategic decision from Google especially it came after they introduce Chrome where they previously said they were 100% behind Firefox. And we have email evidence that is not the case as they had always intend to have their own browser. It is also Interesting how Youtube seems to have resisted integration into Google infrastructure and tools for as long as possible. Vitess was created in 2010 to solve their mySQL scaling issues. And I believe it wasn't until late 2019 they moved it to some whatever Google standardise.

deaddodo 5y ago
YouTube has resisted it specifically because the spectacular failure of Google Videos. But you can totally see Google's hands in their business decisions such as shoving GPM into YouTube Music and switching their entire ad stack to be Google exclusive (an obvious move).
tonto 5y ago
Corresponds with dropping ie11 today too https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/1443962459723755533?s=20 https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/1443962459723755533?s=2...

fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago

I still remember the day this came out and how happy I was that I could now convince the project I was working on to give up on IE6 too.

tombert 5y ago

I wish I had thought of sneaking in a scary banner in ~2013 when I still had to support IE6 for a web development job I had. I, like a majority of web developers, was using Chrome to do all my development and testing, and would only occasionally VM Windows XP to test Internet Explorer, which usually had something broken, and would usually end up with me spending a majority of my time fixing, and when I would complain about it, management would point to the server logs and say "Look, N% of people are still using IE6, we have to support it!" If I had been smart enough to put a little deprecation warning on there, life might have been easier for me.

irrational 5y ago
And who gave management the numbers from the server logs? You guys should have fudged the numbers.
- solarengineer 5y ago
  I’ve replied elsewhere in how I reported the support overhead for older browser versions. While one could fudge numbers once, we could get accustomed to misrepresenting in the future too. Once users/customers discover this, they’ll always keep second-guessing us. Trust once lost would be difficult to regain. It is better to how customers that they need not waste money anymore and shouldn’t support/facilitate users using insecure and outdated technology anymore either. They could give it a positive spin and get good PR too.
- bpodgursky 5y ago
  This is terrible advice. Taking a bold gamble without total authorization can pay off sometimes... lying to management is how you get fired (at best) or sued.

ffitch 5y ago

To be fair, IE6 share was falling quickly on it’s own, and its sharp one-week drop coincided with IE8 launch. IE7 also saw drop that week, even though it didn’t have the deprecation message. Google’s banner probably made IE6 die a few months sooner, but that’s it.

solarengineer 5y ago
For years after, various customers facing websites required IE6 support because analytics showed that there was significant IE 6 traffic. Various enterprises were slow to move off IE6 because various websites and products continued to support it! I’d learned my lesson. When IE 7 was similarly entrenched, I’d start to provide separate estimates for IE 7 support, and explain to client-side business and IT folk that they could use this information to justify developing reduced functionality for IE7 users and for showing such users a banner urging them to upgrade to a newer browser.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

DawnKFunk 5y ago

I think it's funny that you can title an article "a conspiracy to kill x" but if I said this HN user is "part of a conspiracy to kill x" I will be accused of starting a flamewar.

ahmedfromtunis 5y ago

That's a great story and a beautiful reminder that relying on data to make decisions is not always a good strategy. I sometimes feel like people forget that data is an effect of our decisions and actions, not the other way around. A bit off topic, but this is also a reminder that even conspiring to put a miniscule banner can't go unnoticed, let alone one with much grander objectives like inserting chips into billions of vaccines, or fake a moon landing.

noduerme 5y ago
Excellent comment. Yes, it's terrifying to think of the social power of one silly banner on a huge website - that the bosses don't even notice! It's also really true, and I see it all the time on HN, that people expect data to make decisions rather than understanding that their own bias is shaping the data. Much of this ML data analysis approach is like shaping a huge statue on tiny legs, each person making it bigger and bigger at the top until it falls over. The best thing about this story is it reminds you to be a rebel.
xg15 5y ago
> A bit off topic, but this is also a reminder that even conspiring to put a miniscule banner can't go unnoticed, let alone one with much grander objectives like inserting chips into billions of vaccines, or fake a moon landing. I'm sorry I have to defend the tinfoil hatters here, but I think it's important to note the alleged situations are different: In the OP, we have a small group inside a large organisation (Google) conspiring "against" the organisation (even if ultimately to its benefit). Most conspiracy theories seem to assume the whole organisation (government, military-industrial complex, NSA/CIA/..., lizard people, etc) conspires against the general public. So, not so much an actual conspiracy, more like large-scale corporate projects which are hidden from the public and against the public interest. Inside the organisation, there would be no need to keep anything particularly secret as the conspiracy is a perfectly well-approved project of the organisation. Of course stuff like fake moon landings and vaccine microchips are still bullshit - however, events like the Snowden leaks or numerous cold war CIA operations which have been confirmed by now show that in principle, it's possible to keep large-scale projects completely unknown to the general public for an extensive timeframe. I think if anything, the OP could be a sign how hard it would be to reveal such projects. Because any potential whistleblowers would find themselves in a similar situation where they have to conspire against the organisation they are working in.

cletus 5y ago

This is a good story. You can take away several things from it. Here's mine: it demonstrates the value of reputation and trust and how easily they're lost and how hard they are to recover. IE4 came out at a time when Microsoft considered Netscape an existential threat. IE4 was really the last nail in the coffin. It was actually way better/faster than NS. By the time IE6 came around, there was no imminent threat to Windows in the form of the Web being a platform replacement. So IE6 stagnated and became the bane of the Internet. IE-specific hacks (and IE6 in particular) became the norm for Web developers. It was pervasive too. For example, IE had a completely different interpretation of the CSS box model to everyone else (specifically, how padding, margin and width should interoperate). Fast forward some years and Microsoft is not the same place it was under Gates or, more importantly, Ballmer (he had the longer tenure in the modern Internet era). Nadella really does seem to represent a different approach and MS has produced some great tech (eg Typescript). But IE died because of the reputation it earned and all the existing hacks around it. It got renamed to Edge specifically to avoid the if-IE blocks and to more cleanly cast off IE-legacy behaviour. But the fact is, no one really trusts MS anymore when it comes to the Web (Typescript notwithstanding). So Edge just became rebranded Webkit much like Safari/Chrome. To be fair, some other stuff contributed to the death of IE and some of it was pretty dodgy (eg little things Google did that crippled non-Chrome browsers such as hardware video decoding on Youtube). Anyway, you see this too with Google and what's now a meme about chat applications (Meet, Talk, Hangouts, Duo, allo, anyone?). Google is also now a meme for dropping support for things people use. Reader is the posterchild for this even though my opinion is this wasn't as big of a deal as people make out. But the cost in all that is now no one trusts anything Google launches to be there in 3 years. Reputation matters. Apple gets this even though they've also killed some things (eg Safari for Windows). Google really doesn't. Lastly, as far as Youtubers having an identity of not being Googlers, this was certainly still the case 5 years ago and may still be the case today. They have a separate campus (in San Bruno) and generally eschew anything Google3-related. They also still called themselves Youtubers.

goldenkey 5y ago
I suppose it's kind of humorous then that YouTube has hardly been integrated into the Google ecosystem sofar as a redirect to auth.youtube.com is done on other Google products to propagate the auth information. This has caused issues with teachers wanting to block YouTube yet still have Google Classroom [1] [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28582334 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28582334

i_like_apis 5y ago

Back when many people attempted to support ie6 and even ie4 (oof), we would sometimes joke about the amount of global developer man-hours spent on doing so (millions probably if you think about it). The drive for legacy IE support took a chunk out of the productivity of so many projects.

userbinator 5y ago

Now we have a monopoly of a much bigger, more user-hostile browser(s) and the web "standards" effectively under the control of a single company, which also happens to own YouTube and does things like https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17606027 . This article is actually a nice reminder that YouTube used to work in browsers as "unstandard" as IE6, and with far less processing power than computers today, was not noticeably slow either. As much as you hate IE6, I hate the current situation far more. Those waging the browser-wars and evangelising the "push the web forward" propaganda have done nothing but contribute to the creation of a different monopoly and the waste of countless processor-hours of time and energy. My personal fuckings go out to everyone who thinks this is "progress" or in any way a good thing.

scoopertrooper 5y ago
For science, I just tried loading YouTube in both Chrome and Firefox. I'd say Chrome may have been marginally faster, but you'd really have to get a profiling tool out to quantify it. As to the rest of it, not really sure what you're talking about.
- userbinator 5y ago
  YouTube and plenty of other sites worked fine on the typical computer of the time which would have IE6. Over a decade later, hardware is much more powerful yet the site is even slower than it used to be. I've started using Invidious exclusively because of that. Doing less with more is not "progress".
  - scoopertrooper 5y ago
    I haven't really noticed a slow down. Maybe you shouldn't base your entire world view on your own anecdotal observations?
    - bryanrasmussen 5y ago
      one should not base world views on personal observations alone, but one should probably modify personal behavior based on those observations.

reilly3000 5y ago

A lot of folks have wondered why IE 6 stuck around so long in the first place. It’s pretty simple: group policy. Through Active Directory, admins could do things like force a specific homepage, set proxies for all browsers in the company, disable media features for security, make history undeletable, or even turn off right clicking. Around that time there weren’t alternatives to set these policies in other browsers, so admins just disabled the ability to install them in order to maintain tight control. Now Chrome and possibly other browsers can do similar, but less draconian policies, and security concerns are mitigated with separate systems. After the time this article references, there started to be big changes around how corporate IT was managed. It went from being about gear and gate-keeping to strategically supporting business initiatives. I wonder if this little banner on the YouTube player helped nudge things forward.

Joeri 5y ago
I was stuck supporting IE6 for a lot of large organizations and was often in the loop on why they decided to stick with it. I never heard the ability to set strict group policies as a reason. What I mostly heard was internal web apps built for IE6 which needed to be updated to support IE8, and the incredible pain to actually get those update projects approved. There was also the one customer, a large bank, who had built a custom browser around the IE6 engine, and mandated its use for bureaucratic reasons. I mostly solved our IE6 problem by moving over our web product to a single page architecture based on ExtJS in 2007. ExtJS had a browser abstraction layer, and as long as you built your screens out of its components you rarely had issues. The major pain points that remained were memory leaks (IE6 was a digital sieve, and SPA made it worse), and performance.
- gjvc 5y ago
  In 2007, I'm guessing that would have been ExtJS 3.x? ExtJS can be a pig to use, but the results are good, in my experience. What would you use nowadays? Have you found anything else with as complete a widget set than ExtJS?
  - Joeri 5y ago

noduerme 5y ago

From the article... >>Once they realized what had happened, they cornered our boss for details, grappled with the consequences of our actions and begrudgingly arrived at the conclusion that the ends had justified the means I totally applaud the guerrilla methods taken by employees, unbeknownst to the bosses, that are described in this essay. Sometimes you have to just cut out the committee. Getting people to ditch their ancient software so you can move on with features is virtually impossible unless you hold a gun to their head, and that is never something tasteful for the higher brass -- even the ones who demand the features in the first place. They're in the miserable position of keeping every single person satisfied and trying to improve things. That's why it's not terribly surprising that they're happy to have the engineers go rogue every once in awhile.

cube00 5y ago
If you have a flat management structure sure, but in this case they knew they were breaking the company's change management procedures because they were going to "slip the code into production without anyone catching on" I'll wager they were strongly warned they might not be so lucky if they try a stunt like this again. If something had gone wrong they'd all be out of a job and good luck getting a favorable reference.
- noduerme 5y ago
  So? You do realize that most people who write code can easily find other jobs, and are usually paid better for thinking outside the box, right? >>if they try a stunt like this again Dear Principal Skinner - I will never make management look like idiots again. Sincerely, Bart.
  - cube00 5y ago
    Good luck finding a new job without a reference from your most recent employer. I suppose someone who is deceitful enough to "slip the code into production without anyone catching on" wouldn't have a problem "thinking outside the box" to get around that though, if we're going down this road we might as well go all in. My new employer may even increase my pay even further once they realize I diddled them with my last employer's reference to mask a termination for willful misconduct. I got as frustrated with IE6 as the next developer but this doesn't give anyone license to resort to "guerrilla methods"

cube00 5y ago

> Next, we just needed a way to slip the code into production without anyone catching on. The time when I need to "slip the code into production without anyone catching on" is the time I know I need to move on from a company. This isn't an action movie, it's a business, the business has procedures, if you don't like them, either try and change them or leave, you should never go rouge like this because if you don't pull it off flawlessly you will be terminated. Even if you succeed, it will be recorded in your file and wheeled out if they ever want to turf you for any other reason they feel like in the future because now you have a "history"

sangnoir 5y ago
> you should never go rouge like this because if you don't pull it off flawlessly you will be terminated Live a little; they knew the risks going in and were convinced it was worth getting terminated. I have staked my employment on things I strongly believed in before. The corollary was I wouldn't want the job anyway, if the organization disagreed.

tardyp 5y ago

Good ol times when front page videos were 40k views max...

gpvos 5y ago

This is probably the best example ever that it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission.

axegon_ 5y ago

Fun fact: I know a frontend dev who only used ie6 for development for as long as I knew him which sounded like masochism. But he had a point: "hey, if it works on ie6, it will work on a potato with a VGA stuck in it".

TimTheTinker 5y ago
That's a badly misguided take though. I bet his apps don't work anymore now.

Lio 5y ago

“It’s easier to beg forgiveness than ask permission”. Never truer.

marcodiego 5y ago

TLDR: "The plan was very simple. We would put a small banner above the video player that would only show up for IE6 users. It would read “We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one of these more modern browsers.” Next to the text would be links to the current versions of the major browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, IE8 and eventually, Opera. The text was intentionally vague and the timeline left completely undefined. We hoped that it was threatening enough to motivate end users to upgrade without forcing us to commit to any actual deprecation plan. Users would have the ability to close out this warning if they wanted to ignore it or deal with it later. The code was designed to be as subtle as possible so that it would not catch the attention of anyone monitoring our checkins. Nobody except the web development team used IE6 with any real regularity, so we knew it was unlikely anyone would notice our banner appear in the staging environment. We even delayed having the text translated for international users so that a translator asking for additional context could not inadvertently surface what we were doing. Next, we just needed a way to slip the code into production without anyone catching on."

praptak 5y ago

Compare this to how Google handled Kathryn Spiers for unauthorized posting of an internal banner. We can at least stop pretending it was for abuse of commit rights and not for labor activism.

captainredbeard 5y ago
Labor activism isn’t a job role
- seoaeu 5y ago
  It is however protected under the National Labor Relations Act: firing someone for engaging in concerted activity is a violation of their rights

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I think any behavior trying to influence the user's browser CHOICE is incredibly patronizing and self-serving. Web sites should bend over backwards to support whatever the user happens to have, but everyone is just too fucking lazy.

fusioneventz 5y ago

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samgranieri 5y ago

Thank you for doing this. I was given photoshops for a hobby site I maintained and IE6 was always foiling my plants. I was working as a contractor for Tribune Interactive in the fall of 2009 and I heard stories about how the senior front end developer almost got in a screaming match with high level execs demanding they upgrade their browsers. It worked