6 ms·

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 thing

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
    Indeed it was ExtJS 3. Nowadays I use angular and react (different employer). They’re not as comprehensive as ExtJS but they are also more flexible. Productivity has not really improved all that much however since 2007, which I find somewhat disappointing. The lack of visual builder tools also grates on me as someone who cut his programming teeth on visual basic. It is clear to me that we are in a holding pattern for web components to become the norm and for component frameworks to become decoupled from application frameworks, so I have no idea what I will be using in 5 years.
    - SGML_ROCKSTAR 5y ago
      It is clear to me that we are in a holding pattern for web components to become the norm and for component frameworks to become decoupled from application frameworks, so I have no idea what I will be using in 5 years. So, we'll arrive to something similar to where we are with JavaScript and jQuery, where the latter is less relevant now that JavaScript is appreciably better? Meaning, that with web components the norm, we might arrive to less need for frameworks like React or Vue? (I might be misunderstanding due to the sleep deprivation, so apologies if what I write comes across as gibberish.)
      - Joeri 5y ago
        No, I think we have just as much of a need for frameworks, so you would have the same React for example, but instead of having JSX that is a combination of html5 elements and react components, you'd have JSX that is a combination of html5 elements, web components and fewer react components. That will allow for richer component libraries that share a lot more code between frameworks. In order to build those component libraries we're going to need frameworks that enable that. We've experimented with the combination react + stencil to build in this way, but there were just too many problems relating to workarounds to get things to work and performance which just wasn't good enough.
spapas82 5y ago
Another thing was that a lot of corporate apps supported IE6 only. I remember that I was working in an app back in 2010 that was heavily using the showModalDialog https://www.tjvantoll.com/2012/05/02/showmodaldialog-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-never-use-it/ https://www.tjvantoll.com/2012/05/02/showmodaldialog-what-it... This API was not supported by any other browser but was fundamental for our work because you could display a web page in a modal window that would return a value to the parent page when the modal was closed! It wouldn't surprise me if people are still running IE6 in some virtual environment to be able to access such apps.
- hadlock 5y ago
  Yeah corporate apps had support for IE6 ...and that was it. If you weren't using the internal business tool with IE6, the developers were under no obligation to even respond to your email. Another big thing was IE6 was supported by pretty much every online bank, particularly in South Korea, which is not a huge market, but SK was one of the last, most advanced economies to switch off IE6, primarily due to banking platforms.
  - tinus_hn 5y ago
    Didn’t they use ActiveX plug-ins for their authentication?
    - iudqnolq 5y ago
      It was surprisingly reasonable. They developed their own standard because the US restricted the export of strong SSL, and then had a hard time upgrading when that changed.
- williamdclt 5y ago
  > It wouldn't surprise me if people are still running IE6 in some virtual environment to be able to access such apps. I've worked on a project ~2y ago to rewrite the software powering the whole core business of a huge company (multi-hundreds-of-millions-a-year revenue I'd guess), the existing software being done somewhat like this, although it was a heavy client rather than web. A guy developped software to automate his job 25y+ ago with some microsoft tech (FoxPro), somehow the whole company ended up using it and the software kept growing until it was fundamental to the business. For some reason it only ran on something like Windows 95, so they got Windows95 servers that you had to connect to remotely just to use the software. It was incredibly slow of course, and you couldn't copy-paste through the virtualisation layer, which drove everybody crazy for years. The guy had developped that in his free time apparently (wasn't employed as a software developer), pretty good deal for the company who exploited that for decades and became a major player in the industry.
zxcvbn4038 5y ago
Even at places that supported other browsers, it used to be that once every couple years they would pick a new browser version, they would have an entire team spend 18 months testing it on all the applications in use, then roll that out and after a break for Christmas start again. That blown got blown away completely when Chrome and Firefox started doing updates. People finally got the message that instead of for coding to browsers you code to standards. The loser was IE because 1) they had been really loose with standards in feeble attempts to lock people in 2) they had stagnated for years while confident their market position could never be overturned 3) by stoically carrying the line that IE was actually part of the operating system and couldn’t be updated independently they locked themselves into a place where IE only got major updates along with major OS releases 4) they had a mess of their double diamond titanium partner program members that would howl every time they tried to fix anything in IE because they had internal applications that depended on the broken behavior in IE and 5) BYOD happened and IT depts no longer had authoritarian control over browsers and their versions. It worked out for the better I think. Today IE is only used to download Chrome or Firefox though I get a taste of the IE 6 experience trying to find a security profile for IE that actually allows me to hit a URL on the public internet, but it’s all good once you get one of the installers downloaded. Set the default browser to something else and never have to deal with IE again.
- TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
  > Set the default browser to something else and never have to deal with IE again. Edge could become, hands-down, the best browser in the world. It could automatically put free cake, pizza, and beer into my mouth. And i still would not use it because of the pain instilled on me by Microsoft by IE 6.
  - Eric_WVGG 5y ago
    You don’t deserve to be downvoted for this comment. I spent over a decade getting smacked upside the head by IE 6. Until Gates and Ballmer personally drop by with a cheque for ten years of wages, I will never give any Microsoft product the benefit of the doubt, and I question the sanity and integrity of anyone who does. Decisions should have consequences, and MS deserves a fate worse than Yahoo.
laumars 5y ago
You could still apply Group Policy’s to later versions of IE as well. So that wasn’t the reason. It was more to do with corporate apps being tied to specific versions of IE due to later versions of IE having breaking changes in the way it rendered content vs earlier versions of IE. Those of us who remember web development in the 90s and early 00s will vouch for how the pain wasn’t just supporting different rendering engines, but even different versions of the same rendering engine.
- dejongh 5y ago
  Agree. Early web development was a compability nightmare. Now that one platfrom rules the world it is less of a problem. It seems that making a standard failed, and we solved the problem by adopting the same platform.
  - trulyme 5y ago
    As someone who went through browser wars and lived under IE tyranny, I hate this point of view (which is pretty common, unfortunately). What happened is that standards finally got their act together, and FF was eating IE's lunch anyway. Chrome just sped up its demise. But, monoculture is never a good thing. Especially as the leading company is actually an advertising agency. Do you think we can trust them not to abuse their position?
marcosdumay 5y ago
So, they kept the browser with the worst security record in history, where one page could own your entire system, because it gives them the means to manage (some of) its security? Ok, looks like business as usual.

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
  Indeed it was ExtJS 3. Nowadays I use angular and react (different employer). They’re not as comprehensive as ExtJS but they are also more flexible. Productivity has not really improved all that much however since 2007, which I find somewhat disappointing. The lack of visual builder tools also grates on me as someone who cut his programming teeth on visual basic. It is clear to me that we are in a holding pattern for web components to become the norm and for component frameworks to become decoupled from application frameworks, so I have no idea what I will be using in 5 years.
  - SGML_ROCKSTAR 5y ago
    It is clear to me that we are in a holding pattern for web components to become the norm and for component frameworks to become decoupled from application frameworks, so I have no idea what I will be using in 5 years. So, we'll arrive to something similar to where we are with JavaScript and jQuery, where the latter is less relevant now that JavaScript is appreciably better? Meaning, that with web components the norm, we might arrive to less need for frameworks like React or Vue? (I might be misunderstanding due to the sleep deprivation, so apologies if what I write comes across as gibberish.)
    - Joeri 5y ago
      No, I think we have just as much of a need for frameworks, so you would have the same React for example, but instead of having JSX that is a combination of html5 elements and react components, you'd have JSX that is a combination of html5 elements, web components and fewer react components. That will allow for richer component libraries that share a lot more code between frameworks. In order to build those component libraries we're going to need frameworks that enable that. We've experimented with the combination react + stencil to build in this way, but there were just too many problems relating to workarounds to get things to work and performance which just wasn't good enough.

spapas82 5y ago

Another thing was that a lot of corporate apps supported IE6 only. I remember that I was working in an app back in 2010 that was heavily using the showModalDialog https://www.tjvantoll.com/2012/05/02/showmodaldialog-what-it-is-and-why-you-should-never-use-it/ https://www.tjvantoll.com/2012/05/02/showmodaldialog-what-it... This API was not supported by any other browser but was fundamental for our work because you could display a web page in a modal window that would return a value to the parent page when the modal was closed! It wouldn't surprise me if people are still running IE6 in some virtual environment to be able to access such apps.

hadlock 5y ago
Yeah corporate apps had support for IE6 ...and that was it. If you weren't using the internal business tool with IE6, the developers were under no obligation to even respond to your email. Another big thing was IE6 was supported by pretty much every online bank, particularly in South Korea, which is not a huge market, but SK was one of the last, most advanced economies to switch off IE6, primarily due to banking platforms.
- tinus_hn 5y ago
  Didn’t they use ActiveX plug-ins for their authentication?
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    It was surprisingly reasonable. They developed their own standard because the US restricted the export of strong SSL, and then had a hard time upgrading when that changed.
williamdclt 5y ago
> It wouldn't surprise me if people are still running IE6 in some virtual environment to be able to access such apps. I've worked on a project ~2y ago to rewrite the software powering the whole core business of a huge company (multi-hundreds-of-millions-a-year revenue I'd guess), the existing software being done somewhat like this, although it was a heavy client rather than web. A guy developped software to automate his job 25y+ ago with some microsoft tech (FoxPro), somehow the whole company ended up using it and the software kept growing until it was fundamental to the business. For some reason it only ran on something like Windows 95, so they got Windows95 servers that you had to connect to remotely just to use the software. It was incredibly slow of course, and you couldn't copy-paste through the virtualisation layer, which drove everybody crazy for years. The guy had developped that in his free time apparently (wasn't employed as a software developer), pretty good deal for the company who exploited that for decades and became a major player in the industry.

zxcvbn4038 5y ago

Even at places that supported other browsers, it used to be that once every couple years they would pick a new browser version, they would have an entire team spend 18 months testing it on all the applications in use, then roll that out and after a break for Christmas start again. That blown got blown away completely when Chrome and Firefox started doing updates. People finally got the message that instead of for coding to browsers you code to standards. The loser was IE because 1) they had been really loose with standards in feeble attempts to lock people in 2) they had stagnated for years while confident their market position could never be overturned 3) by stoically carrying the line that IE was actually part of the operating system and couldn’t be updated independently they locked themselves into a place where IE only got major updates along with major OS releases 4) they had a mess of their double diamond titanium partner program members that would howl every time they tried to fix anything in IE because they had internal applications that depended on the broken behavior in IE and 5) BYOD happened and IT depts no longer had authoritarian control over browsers and their versions. It worked out for the better I think. Today IE is only used to download Chrome or Firefox though I get a taste of the IE 6 experience trying to find a security profile for IE that actually allows me to hit a URL on the public internet, but it’s all good once you get one of the installers downloaded. Set the default browser to something else and never have to deal with IE again.

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
> Set the default browser to something else and never have to deal with IE again. Edge could become, hands-down, the best browser in the world. It could automatically put free cake, pizza, and beer into my mouth. And i still would not use it because of the pain instilled on me by Microsoft by IE 6.
- Eric_WVGG 5y ago
  You don’t deserve to be downvoted for this comment. I spent over a decade getting smacked upside the head by IE 6. Until Gates and Ballmer personally drop by with a cheque for ten years of wages, I will never give any Microsoft product the benefit of the doubt, and I question the sanity and integrity of anyone who does. Decisions should have consequences, and MS deserves a fate worse than Yahoo.

laumars 5y ago

You could still apply Group Policy’s to later versions of IE as well. So that wasn’t the reason. It was more to do with corporate apps being tied to specific versions of IE due to later versions of IE having breaking changes in the way it rendered content vs earlier versions of IE. Those of us who remember web development in the 90s and early 00s will vouch for how the pain wasn’t just supporting different rendering engines, but even different versions of the same rendering engine.

dejongh 5y ago
Agree. Early web development was a compability nightmare. Now that one platfrom rules the world it is less of a problem. It seems that making a standard failed, and we solved the problem by adopting the same platform.
- trulyme 5y ago
  As someone who went through browser wars and lived under IE tyranny, I hate this point of view (which is pretty common, unfortunately). What happened is that standards finally got their act together, and FF was eating IE's lunch anyway. Chrome just sped up its demise. But, monoculture is never a good thing. Especially as the leading company is actually an advertising agency. Do you think we can trust them not to abuse their position?

marcosdumay 5y ago

So, they kept the browser with the worst security record in history, where one page could own your entire system, because it gives them the means to manage (some of) its security? Ok, looks like business as usual.