8 ms·

A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

212 points by romanhn 1y ago

skrebbel 1y ago
Amazing read! One detail jumped out at me: > Frustrated, one of the lawyers asked “Why did you have to put Chrome first?” Confused, I explained that we did not give any priority to Chrome. Our boss, in on the conspiracy with us, had thoughtfully recommended that we randomize the order of the browsers listed and then cookie the random seed for each visitor so that the UI would not jump around between pages, which we had done. As luck would have it, these two lawyers still used IE6 to access certain legacy systems and had both ended up with random seeds that placed Chrome in the first position. Their fear was that by showing preferential treatment to Chrome, we might prick the ears of European regulators already on the lookout for any anti-competitive behavior. Wow those lawyers must've left the place many years ago huh!
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
  Don't need em now! When you're small, cooperate, when you're big, take over. Google is big now
chews 1y ago
I'll go one step further, because the company I used to work at built browser extensions. Google built ChromeFrame (https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-getting-started/ https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-get...) a tool that would allow IE to load chrome as an activex component and transparently replace the rendering engine of IE. But building the software wasn't enough, they used some scammy browser toolbar company (one of our competitors) to deploy this software silently and without any user intervention, all of a sudden millions of users overnight switched to chrome. It was deployed as a proxy botnet and Google knew full well what was happening. I sent a note to the humans at Firefox because we had a top 10 extension at the time and were in the midst of porting it to Chrome. They called their contacts and sure enough our suspicions were correct. Google would later go on to buy that company because they were pushing so much traffic to Google's ad partners (Ad Meld being another acquisition). We got screwed and were never able to recover from the run-around. I became friends with the folks on the Chromium team and we talked about how google used a botnet to launch Chrome over beers in a SF dive bar.
dafelst 1y ago
I worked on the front end of Bing (then Live Search) back in 2007, and even within Microsoft, IE6 was hated and rallied against, at least by any team doing web development. I remember that the former GM of the Internet Explorer 5 and 6 team transferred to my org about a year after I joined. In his intro email, he included a sheepish apology for IE6, which I printed and kept on my office wall for the rest of my time at Bing, it was a prized possession. Man that browser caused so many nightmares. (to clarify, the GM was a good and smart guy, the apology was a little tongue-in-cheek since IE6 was arguably the best browser upon its release - the problem was Microsoft effectively abandoned it and let it languish and stagnate for years while the web moved on without it, which turned it and the IE org into well-deserved pariahs)
- gjsman-1000 1y ago
  Automatic updates get a bad rap on HN; but it's not like Microsoft wasn't happily giving away Internet Explorer 7 and 8 to any computer listening.
  - realityking 1y ago
    It took Microsoft over 5 years to release Internet Explorer 7. That’s what allowed the web to ossify around it. For comparison, Internet Explorer 6 came 2.5 years after 5 and so did 8 after 7.
    - gjsman-1000 1y ago
      Internet Explorer 7 had been on the market for three years, and Internet Explorer 8 for three months, when this story took place. The lesson of IE6 is that people cannot be trusted to handle updating themselves.
      - ryandrake 1y ago
        If IE6 did everything that a user wanted, why should he have to update? I totally disagree with this assumption that we should always have to be on the update treadmill, always changing the software we're using, and if we don't, then it's some kind of user failure showing "we cannot be trusted". Maybe if IE6 was so terrible, Microsoft shouldn't have released it in the first place. Don't blame the user. The only good justification I can think of to update totally working software that I am happy with, is for mitigating security vulnerabilities. And even then, the choice should be on the user.
more_corn 1y ago
This is why small scrappy (at the time the YouTube eng team was small) companies get shit done and big companies with process and controls take forever. The rogues take responsibility, think carefully, act carefully.
- dylan604 1y ago
  The problem is that pretty much all small scrappy companies grow up to be large behemoths that all migrate to have process and controls that take over. The way workflows are created while being small and scrappy doesn't lend itself well when you have more than one dev working on something and there's no guidance for how the devs are to move forward. One dev wants to take 3 left turns, another dev wants to take a simple right turn. After that, you start having meetings to layout code and how to handle merges and the next thing you know you have processes and controls
Magi604 1y ago
A small group of people took a chance, and it turned into a movement and changed internet history. I bet this could become a solid documentary.
behnamoh 1y ago
Is it really something to be proud of? Somehow as a result of IE hate we ended up with a Chrome-dominated world.
- loloquwowndueo 1y ago
  Chrome sucks but it’s miles better than IE ever was.
- overgard 1y ago
  IE was so much worse than Chrome will ever be. I do occasionally think Safari is the new IE though -- not in terms of terribleness but just in terms of holding back the web by being the slowest to implement big new features.
  - troupo 1y ago
    > being the slowest to implement big new features. You mean Chrome-only non-standards that Mozilla usually opposes, too
    - saxenaabhi 1y ago
      SharedWorker was implemented in Safari years after Chrome/Firefox I'm sure there are many such examples.
      - troupo 1y ago
        Shared Workers is weird. Safari released them in 2010, one month after Chrome. And then... removed them in 2013. Firefox implemented them in 2014, Edge in 2020, and Safari re-introduced them in 2022. The was a proposal to remove the spec entirely in 2015: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315 I don't think I've seen a feature that was shipped in s browser for years, then removed, and then shipped again. I'd love to know why. They only explanations I've seen seem to be this: https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 "The implementation of Shared Web Workers was imposing undesirable constraints on the engine. It never gained any adoption." and this: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 "This feature was originally removed temporarily during multiprocess bring-up, and actual usage on the web has been pretty low. We're willing to reconsider if there is significant demand."
romanhn 1y ago
I loved IE6 as as user when it came out, and grew to hate it as a developer when the browser standards moved on, but a stubborn, large-enough user base percentage had not. I blame slow-moving IT departments that refused to touch their internal environments when all the Web 2.0 progress made things new and scary. A product my team was in charge of had to support IE6 and IE7 years after the rest of the world moved on because the IT admins at Walgreens straight out refused to update the machines that the pharmacists used at their stores.
- nine_k 1y ago
  The risk of updating the machines to support IE9 might indeed be large, for not very obvious benefits. But what did they say about staying as is, and switching to Firefox or Chrome? Was it impossible due to use of some MS-only tech?
  - romanhn 1y ago
    It's hard to remember the exact details all these years later... I doubt it was due to MS-only tech, but rather that IE6/7 were tested and approved and everything else was not. The incentives for IT teams are such that it's a lot easier to say no to something than yes, and create a ton of work and liability.
- gldrk 1y ago
  The irony is that web standards didn’t move fast enough either, so the browser developers simply bypassed the standards body in favor of their own post-hoc ‘living standard’.
  - chrismorgan 1y ago
    It wasn’t so much about the tempo of web standards; it was rather that W3C cared about the consensus of a far wider variety of entities, and browsers got fed up with being told what they should and shouldn’t do by people that were nothing to do with browsers—people that had interests in HTML, sure, but who were trying to pull it in directions that none of the browsers were interested in. And so, W3C having failed as a venue for browser HTML standardisation, they took it over. To parody the situation: a consortium of bridge engineers is discussing building standards, but somehow they’ve been lumped together with every girl named Bridget and every young boy making toy bridges with blocks, and they all have voting rights, and the girls are insisting that bridges must sparkle, and the boys think every bridge should be able to support helicopters and diggers.
tcdent 1y ago
I spent the first few years of my career wrestling with Internet Explorer 6 compatibility while working in a marketing studio that was Internet-first and pioneered concepts like responsive web development (the precursor to native mobile experiences/layouts). Internet Explorer 6 was an incredible waste of resources. I developed primarily on a Mac OS system at the time, which was somewhat progressive in the industry, but in order to verify the functionality we had was working correctly on Internet Explorer 6 (which we still had observed was greater than 50% of the market share) I had to keep a PC on my desk just for IE6 testing. There were a number of hacks that we could incorporate into additional override style sheets like conditional HTML comments that you could use to incorporate IE6 overrides or weird patterns that you could do by using asterisks that would allow you to target it specifically. We didn't necessarily prioritize feature parity with IE6, but the site had to load and render correctly and support the cause of marketing the property that we were tasked to do. Once the adoption of it finally slowed, it was a great sigh of relief to the industry, and it made it feel like we could do anything we wanted to because we had been making concessions to it for so long.
aaronbrethorst 1y ago
Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.
dang 1y ago
Related: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294406 - Feb 2024 (106 comments) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210439 - Nov 2023 (1 comment) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293 - Oct 2021 (80 comments) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 at YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655890 - Sept 2021 (2 comments) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 - May 2019 (363 comments)
arscan 1y ago
Netscape 4 was the bane of my existence, moreso than IE6 ever was, as an important client standardized internally on that forever so our entire platform had to be completely compatible with it. At least with IE you could do things in a user friendly way (perhaps at 2x the development and maintenance cost). Netscape 4 simply didn’t have the capability to do things we wanted to do experience-wise (like getting pushed content, I think?) without doing some extremely crazy and brittle workarounds at best (making it feel more like 5x the cost). Also, IE4 was such a magnificent leap forward in the web that effectively enabled support for modern apps, which bought IE a ton of goodwill from me that didn’t wear off for a decade or so.
- unleaded 1y ago
  agreed*. You often hear this assumption today that Netscape was always the better browser and that people using IE were simply making a mistake. If anything they were just shit in different ways. For a while Netscape refused to implement CSS and wanted people to use their own JavaScript Style Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets technology which no-one did. * Kind of, I was born in the 2000s
  - bazoom42 1y ago
    Well I lived through it, and you are absolutely right. Netscape 4 was terrible. Internet Explorer was much better and more standards compliant in comparison. Netscape 4 was hated by web designers just like IE6 later came to be hated. The difference was that Netscapes marked share dwindled pretty fast, while IE6 lived on for an eternity.
    - arscan 1y ago
      Exactly, and in my sad and unfortunate case I had to support it because of that one stubborn client, even though the rest of the world moved on. Actually, it might have just been their CEO accessing the site from his home machine or something? Oh, what the heck, it’s been 20 years. Vertex Pharmaceuticals: shame on you. In the mid-2000s you had very poor taste in browsers ;-)
kstrauser 1y ago
From the depths of my heart: thank you. Whatever you did to kill it, I claim it was justified self-defense. I have my scars from the Browser Wars, and the string "IE6" fills me with loathing to this day. For my own part, I made sure my employer had plans to remove IE6 from our support list the day Google officially did the same in March 2010. The very next day, I started adding code to our site that complied with official standards and worked perfectly on every other browser, and removing all the compatibility hacks we'd deployed to make that pig render a screen correctly. It was incredibly liberating.
- suzzer99 1y ago
  My first serious web programming job was creating a complicated web-app with lots of JavaScript that had to support IE-4/4.5/5 and Netscape Communicator. FWIW that app is still running to this day: https://resultview.q2labsolutions.com/resultview/logon/logon.jsp https://resultview.q2labsolutions.com/resultview/logon/logon... Vanilla JavaScript just works. Marvel at the circa 2001 Login button!
  - kstrauser 1y ago
    Hey, nice job if it's still running! That was quite the exercise back in the day, wasn't it?
    - suzzer99 1y ago
      Well, JavaScript didn't have a ton of features back then to muddy up the waters. So that helped. And no frameworks kept things simple. The most complex part was a dynamic query builder where you could pick columns and various kinds of filters. We could have gone to the server each time the user changed the query, but I found it a lot snappier to do it all with document.write(). For a while, JavaScript was shunned by a lot of web shops. Applets and Flash were the future! Then Google Maps came out and showed what you could really do, and JS became cool again.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    I don't miss those days at all... A major client of my employer around 2000-2001 was "standardized" on Netscape 4.06. And I was expected to make stack diagrams and Gantt charts. I wrote an abstraction library just to draw boxes on the screen targeting the IE/NN 4x/5x differences, having to cover the screen in NN while "drawing" just to prevent the flickering effect causing someone a seizure. ILayer/IFrames, ugh... dynamic forms were horrible, having to mirror multiple forms into a composite hidden field form next to the submit button. So many hacks... Not to mention the IE 5.0.0 select api bug, or the later uncatchable error in IE8's JSON parser... those were some rough years.
spankalee 1y ago
Ironically, YouTube is now forced to support a browser that has terrible standards support, entirely of their own making: Cobalt[1]. YouTube on TVs is actually a web app that loads into a stripped down, custom webview. The YouTube team doesn't have the resources to implement many web APIs, so they implemented just what they needed. The problem is that they can't reliably update Cobalt versions on TVs, they can't ask users to update, and they can't just break older TVs in the wild. So the YouTube on TV frontend (not YouTube TV the service) has to only use APIs they shipped like 10 years ago. And because it takes so long for an old Cobalt version to go out of support, they don't invest in implementing new features because they wouldn't be usable anytime soon. 10 years ago I was in a meeting with them where they said they couldn't implement something because they wouldn't be able to use it for 5 years... They still haven't implemented it. [1]: https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt
- davidkwast 1y ago
  But the use case is just to serve videos right? I know that new things will not come. But YouTube is almost the same in these 10 years I think.
  - spankalee 1y ago
    Even simple web apps can benefit from web platform improvements. JS, HTML, and CSS have all gotten significantly better in recent years. But YouTube is also a very complex app. Yes it "just" exists to play videos, but the app is so much more than a video player. Browsing, searching, comments, chat, playlists, YT Live, subscriptions, profiles, ratings... there's a lot there.
    - troupo 1y ago
      And which of those things that people could build already in mid-90s require some nebulous unspecified "new broswer features"? Perhaps they could start with just cutting down their bloated 100x-duplicated 4MB CSS file?
breakfastduck 1y ago
This was a delightful read. You have done the world a service there, truly!
renewiltord 1y ago
Hahaha, I love that social proof worked. The Docs guys thought you guys had approval and the Youtube managers thought you were following through with a bigger initiative from across, started by Docs. Lucky break! Man, I love these tales of people doing the right thing cutting through the red tape.
Flamingoat 1y ago
I've read this story before on a different site. I was near the start of my career in 2009. I honestly think they are overstating the effect of those banners. The significant shift IMO was when Windows 7 machines replaced the ageing XP machines. That is what I saw in the google analytics on the sites I was supporting at the time.
- t0mas88 1y ago
  Indeed, their own graph shows IE7 dropping in usage share by very similar amounts at the same point in time, without a banner.
  - Flamingoat 1y ago
    Yes. I am sure it did contribute, but they are overstating the effect of the banner. I honestly think Win 7 being a good OS and the Intel Macs actually being good is what led to nibbling away of legacy IE. As an aside. IE7 was IMO worse in some ways the IE6. It had many of the same rendering bugs but was more subtle in how it failed.
gldrk 1y ago
The web was a much better place when it had to support IE6.
therealmarv 1y ago
Great article! I still remember the time when people cherished the arrival of IE5.5 and IE6 later. They were once the best browsers.
fmajid 1y ago
Back in 2010, my startup offered front-end engineer prospective hires a major perk: we don’t care about IE6 compatibility.
xcskier56 1y ago
My first startup we had to support IE 7 for a bit and then IE 8 until like 2017… I thought I had it bad then. I’m so glad I didn’t have to fight any older version
nl 1y ago
> Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review. Whoever this Croatian guy is, thankyou! True hero of the internet. As soon as that banner popped up on Youtube we were able to tell our customers the same thing.
teunispeters 1y ago
I don't miss IE 4/5/6 [etc subversion hell]. Supporting these tripled the time it took to build any site for WWW. Pick any w3C standard: some chance it worked - on one of the browsers but not others. Some chance each had entirely incompatible workarounds. Documentation? Good luck. What did exist tended to deny html standards other than their own existed so they didn't even give any clue how to solve this. Had to support them, never enjoyed it. There was nothing fun or rewarding about supporting any of them.
alganet 1y ago
IE6 was a great browser. It was superior in any way (at the time it was released). So good that no other browser was needed. And that's when it started to become garbage.
userbinator 1y ago
IE6 was basically the canary in the coalmine. Holding the web back from constant change was a good thing as it let many more implementations be usable. Remember Opera and the various other browsers around at the time? Not long after IE6 died, they got crushed too by Google using change as a weapon against its competitors. The recent notable change of Google requiring JS even for its own search engine, and thereby shutting out simple and basic browsers like Lynx, should be extremely concerning for the future of the web.
- greiskul 1y ago
  The reason Microsoft held the web back is because it saw it has a potential threat to it's dominance as the main platform for applications. And if you are actually concerned about the future of the web, instead of it's past, I would more concerned with Apple holding back development on Safari, to make people focus on writing native apps for mobile. There are so many apps that in the past would be websites, but end up being natively coded because that's the only way to get a good customer experience in mobile.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    > And if you are actually concerned about the future of the web >I would more concerned with Apple holding back development on Safari I think they are more concerned with the future of the web due to Google and so am I.
  - hbn 1y ago
    You're worried about Safari in the browser space? It's the only browser that's holding back a near 100% monopoly from Google at the moment. If Apple gets forced to allow other browser engines on iOS, it's game over. Google wins the web forever.
- bapak 1y ago
  The HTML-only web has been dead for years. Documents may be safe, but publishing websites that work without JS is war with no winners.
- 1y ago
Tommy430 1y ago
Now the YouTube layout is bloated and is in diminishing returns for a while. The writing is on the wall. Maybe we need to hire construction teams to break into peoples' houses and change them every 5 seconds.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
socalgal2 1y ago
Once person's conspiracy is another person's public service. Thank you for helping to kill IE6
xacky 1y ago
Can we have a conspiracy to kill IPv4 next?
- 1718627440 1y ago
  But only if we also kill NATs along the way, otherwise this would be a tangible effect.
tracker1 1y ago
I was really happy in (iirc) 2017 working on a green project where when we actually surveyed the users/customers, none were using legacy browsers at all... So we were able to ditch all the shims/shivs and drop babel altogether. The ability to target current browsers that at least supported async functions went a long way towards bringing down payloads. It took a bit of diligence, but while I was there the release app payload never got over 400kb of initial JS, which for a modern React+MUI app is pretty good. Having to yank moment.js and a couple other libraries a couple times was not the most fun sset of conversations to have. Not to mention, replacing massive charting libraries with plain svg generation in React. It bugs me to no end when developers don't seem to actually care about their craft at all.

212 points by romanhn 1y ago

Amazing read! One detail jumped out at me: > Frustrated, one of the lawyers asked “Why did you have to put Chrome first?” Confused, I explained that we did not give any priority to Chrome. Our boss, in on the conspiracy with us, had thoughtfully recommended that we randomize the order of the browsers listed and then cookie the random seed for each visitor so that the UI would not jump around between pages, which we had done. As luck would have it, these two lawyers still used IE6 to access certain legacy systems and had both ended up with random seeds that placed Chrome in the first position. Their fear was that by showing preferential treatment to Chrome, we might prick the ears of European regulators already on the lookout for any anti-competitive behavior. Wow those lawyers must've left the place many years ago huh!

01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y ago
Don't need em now! When you're small, cooperate, when you're big, take over. Google is big now

chews 1y ago

I'll go one step further, because the company I used to work at built browser extensions. Google built ChromeFrame (https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-getting-started/ https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-get...) a tool that would allow IE to load chrome as an activex component and transparently replace the rendering engine of IE. But building the software wasn't enough, they used some scammy browser toolbar company (one of our competitors) to deploy this software silently and without any user intervention, all of a sudden millions of users overnight switched to chrome. It was deployed as a proxy botnet and Google knew full well what was happening. I sent a note to the humans at Firefox because we had a top 10 extension at the time and were in the midst of porting it to Chrome. They called their contacts and sure enough our suspicions were correct. Google would later go on to buy that company because they were pushing so much traffic to Google's ad partners (Ad Meld being another acquisition). We got screwed and were never able to recover from the run-around. I became friends with the folks on the Chromium team and we talked about how google used a botnet to launch Chrome over beers in a SF dive bar.

dafelst 1y ago

I worked on the front end of Bing (then Live Search) back in 2007, and even within Microsoft, IE6 was hated and rallied against, at least by any team doing web development. I remember that the former GM of the Internet Explorer 5 and 6 team transferred to my org about a year after I joined. In his intro email, he included a sheepish apology for IE6, which I printed and kept on my office wall for the rest of my time at Bing, it was a prized possession. Man that browser caused so many nightmares. (to clarify, the GM was a good and smart guy, the apology was a little tongue-in-cheek since IE6 was arguably the best browser upon its release - the problem was Microsoft effectively abandoned it and let it languish and stagnate for years while the web moved on without it, which turned it and the IE org into well-deserved pariahs)

gjsman-1000 1y ago
Automatic updates get a bad rap on HN; but it's not like Microsoft wasn't happily giving away Internet Explorer 7 and 8 to any computer listening.
- realityking 1y ago
  It took Microsoft over 5 years to release Internet Explorer 7. That’s what allowed the web to ossify around it. For comparison, Internet Explorer 6 came 2.5 years after 5 and so did 8 after 7.
  - gjsman-1000 1y ago
    Internet Explorer 7 had been on the market for three years, and Internet Explorer 8 for three months, when this story took place. The lesson of IE6 is that people cannot be trusted to handle updating themselves.
    - ryandrake 1y ago
      If IE6 did everything that a user wanted, why should he have to update? I totally disagree with this assumption that we should always have to be on the update treadmill, always changing the software we're using, and if we don't, then it's some kind of user failure showing "we cannot be trusted". Maybe if IE6 was so terrible, Microsoft shouldn't have released it in the first place. Don't blame the user. The only good justification I can think of to update totally working software that I am happy with, is for mitigating security vulnerabilities. And even then, the choice should be on the user.

more_corn 1y ago

This is why small scrappy (at the time the YouTube eng team was small) companies get shit done and big companies with process and controls take forever. The rogues take responsibility, think carefully, act carefully.

dylan604 1y ago
The problem is that pretty much all small scrappy companies grow up to be large behemoths that all migrate to have process and controls that take over. The way workflows are created while being small and scrappy doesn't lend itself well when you have more than one dev working on something and there's no guidance for how the devs are to move forward. One dev wants to take 3 left turns, another dev wants to take a simple right turn. After that, you start having meetings to layout code and how to handle merges and the next thing you know you have processes and controls

Magi604 1y ago

A small group of people took a chance, and it turned into a movement and changed internet history. I bet this could become a solid documentary.

behnamoh 1y ago

Is it really something to be proud of? Somehow as a result of IE hate we ended up with a Chrome-dominated world.

loloquwowndueo 1y ago
Chrome sucks but it’s miles better than IE ever was.
overgard 1y ago
IE was so much worse than Chrome will ever be. I do occasionally think Safari is the new IE though -- not in terms of terribleness but just in terms of holding back the web by being the slowest to implement big new features.
- troupo 1y ago
  > being the slowest to implement big new features. You mean Chrome-only non-standards that Mozilla usually opposes, too
  - saxenaabhi 1y ago
    SharedWorker was implemented in Safari years after Chrome/Firefox I'm sure there are many such examples.
    - troupo 1y ago
      Shared Workers is weird. Safari released them in 2010, one month after Chrome. And then... removed them in 2013. Firefox implemented them in 2014, Edge in 2020, and Safari re-introduced them in 2022. The was a proposal to remove the spec entirely in 2015: https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315 https://github.com/whatwg/html/issues/315 I don't think I've seen a feature that was shipped in s browser for years, then removed, and then shipped again. I'd love to know why. They only explanations I've seen seem to be this: https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 https://x.com/xeenon/status/652573047623323648 "The implementation of Shared Web Workers was imposing undesirable constraints on the engine. It never gained any adoption." and this: https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=149850#c5 "This feature was originally removed temporarily during multiprocess bring-up, and actual usage on the web has been pretty low. We're willing to reconsider if there is significant demand."

romanhn 1y ago

I loved IE6 as as user when it came out, and grew to hate it as a developer when the browser standards moved on, but a stubborn, large-enough user base percentage had not. I blame slow-moving IT departments that refused to touch their internal environments when all the Web 2.0 progress made things new and scary. A product my team was in charge of had to support IE6 and IE7 years after the rest of the world moved on because the IT admins at Walgreens straight out refused to update the machines that the pharmacists used at their stores.

nine_k 1y ago
The risk of updating the machines to support IE9 might indeed be large, for not very obvious benefits. But what did they say about staying as is, and switching to Firefox or Chrome? Was it impossible due to use of some MS-only tech?
- romanhn 1y ago
  It's hard to remember the exact details all these years later... I doubt it was due to MS-only tech, but rather that IE6/7 were tested and approved and everything else was not. The incentives for IT teams are such that it's a lot easier to say no to something than yes, and create a ton of work and liability.
gldrk 1y ago
The irony is that web standards didn’t move fast enough either, so the browser developers simply bypassed the standards body in favor of their own post-hoc ‘living standard’.
- chrismorgan 1y ago
  It wasn’t so much about the tempo of web standards; it was rather that W3C cared about the consensus of a far wider variety of entities, and browsers got fed up with being told what they should and shouldn’t do by people that were nothing to do with browsers—people that had interests in HTML, sure, but who were trying to pull it in directions that none of the browsers were interested in. And so, W3C having failed as a venue for browser HTML standardisation, they took it over. To parody the situation: a consortium of bridge engineers is discussing building standards, but somehow they’ve been lumped together with every girl named Bridget and every young boy making toy bridges with blocks, and they all have voting rights, and the girls are insisting that bridges must sparkle, and the boys think every bridge should be able to support helicopters and diggers.

tcdent 1y ago

I spent the first few years of my career wrestling with Internet Explorer 6 compatibility while working in a marketing studio that was Internet-first and pioneered concepts like responsive web development (the precursor to native mobile experiences/layouts). Internet Explorer 6 was an incredible waste of resources. I developed primarily on a Mac OS system at the time, which was somewhat progressive in the industry, but in order to verify the functionality we had was working correctly on Internet Explorer 6 (which we still had observed was greater than 50% of the market share) I had to keep a PC on my desk just for IE6 testing. There were a number of hacks that we could incorporate into additional override style sheets like conditional HTML comments that you could use to incorporate IE6 overrides or weird patterns that you could do by using asterisks that would allow you to target it specifically. We didn't necessarily prioritize feature parity with IE6, but the site had to load and render correctly and support the cause of marketing the property that we were tasked to do. Once the adoption of it finally slowed, it was a great sigh of relief to the industry, and it made it feel like we could do anything we wanted to because we had been making concessions to it for so long.

aaronbrethorst 1y ago

Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

dang 1y ago

Related: A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294406 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294406 - Feb 2024 (106 comments) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210439 - Nov 2023 (1 comment) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28725293 - Oct 2021 (80 comments) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 at YouTube - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655890 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28655890 - Sept 2021 (2 comments) A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 - May 2019 (363 comments)

arscan 1y ago

Netscape 4 was the bane of my existence, moreso than IE6 ever was, as an important client standardized internally on that forever so our entire platform had to be completely compatible with it. At least with IE you could do things in a user friendly way (perhaps at 2x the development and maintenance cost). Netscape 4 simply didn’t have the capability to do things we wanted to do experience-wise (like getting pushed content, I think?) without doing some extremely crazy and brittle workarounds at best (making it feel more like 5x the cost). Also, IE4 was such a magnificent leap forward in the web that effectively enabled support for modern apps, which bought IE a ton of goodwill from me that didn’t wear off for a decade or so.

unleaded 1y ago
agreed*. You often hear this assumption today that Netscape was always the better browser and that people using IE were simply making a mistake. If anything they were just shit in different ways. For a while Netscape refused to implement CSS and wanted people to use their own JavaScript Style Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets technology which no-one did. * Kind of, I was born in the 2000s
- bazoom42 1y ago
  Well I lived through it, and you are absolutely right. Netscape 4 was terrible. Internet Explorer was much better and more standards compliant in comparison. Netscape 4 was hated by web designers just like IE6 later came to be hated. The difference was that Netscapes marked share dwindled pretty fast, while IE6 lived on for an eternity.
  - arscan 1y ago
    Exactly, and in my sad and unfortunate case I had to support it because of that one stubborn client, even though the rest of the world moved on. Actually, it might have just been their CEO accessing the site from his home machine or something? Oh, what the heck, it’s been 20 years. Vertex Pharmaceuticals: shame on you. In the mid-2000s you had very poor taste in browsers ;-)

kstrauser 1y ago

From the depths of my heart: thank you. Whatever you did to kill it, I claim it was justified self-defense. I have my scars from the Browser Wars, and the string "IE6" fills me with loathing to this day. For my own part, I made sure my employer had plans to remove IE6 from our support list the day Google officially did the same in March 2010. The very next day, I started adding code to our site that complied with official standards and worked perfectly on every other browser, and removing all the compatibility hacks we'd deployed to make that pig render a screen correctly. It was incredibly liberating.

suzzer99 1y ago
My first serious web programming job was creating a complicated web-app with lots of JavaScript that had to support IE-4/4.5/5 and Netscape Communicator. FWIW that app is still running to this day: https://resultview.q2labsolutions.com/resultview/logon/logon.jsp https://resultview.q2labsolutions.com/resultview/logon/logon... Vanilla JavaScript just works. Marvel at the circa 2001 Login button!
- kstrauser 1y ago
  Hey, nice job if it's still running! That was quite the exercise back in the day, wasn't it?
  - suzzer99 1y ago
    Well, JavaScript didn't have a ton of features back then to muddy up the waters. So that helped. And no frameworks kept things simple. The most complex part was a dynamic query builder where you could pick columns and various kinds of filters. We could have gone to the server each time the user changed the query, but I found it a lot snappier to do it all with document.write(). For a while, JavaScript was shunned by a lot of web shops. Applets and Flash were the future! Then Google Maps came out and showed what you could really do, and JS became cool again.
- tracker1 1y ago
  I don't miss those days at all... A major client of my employer around 2000-2001 was "standardized" on Netscape 4.06. And I was expected to make stack diagrams and Gantt charts. I wrote an abstraction library just to draw boxes on the screen targeting the IE/NN 4x/5x differences, having to cover the screen in NN while "drawing" just to prevent the flickering effect causing someone a seizure. ILayer/IFrames, ugh... dynamic forms were horrible, having to mirror multiple forms into a composite hidden field form next to the submit button. So many hacks... Not to mention the IE 5.0.0 select api bug, or the later uncatchable error in IE8's JSON parser... those were some rough years.

spankalee 1y ago

Ironically, YouTube is now forced to support a browser that has terrible standards support, entirely of their own making: Cobalt[1]. YouTube on TVs is actually a web app that loads into a stripped down, custom webview. The YouTube team doesn't have the resources to implement many web APIs, so they implemented just what they needed. The problem is that they can't reliably update Cobalt versions on TVs, they can't ask users to update, and they can't just break older TVs in the wild. So the YouTube on TV frontend (not YouTube TV the service) has to only use APIs they shipped like 10 years ago. And because it takes so long for an old Cobalt version to go out of support, they don't invest in implementing new features because they wouldn't be usable anytime soon. 10 years ago I was in a meeting with them where they said they couldn't implement something because they wouldn't be able to use it for 5 years... They still haven't implemented it. [1]: https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt

davidkwast 1y ago
But the use case is just to serve videos right? I know that new things will not come. But YouTube is almost the same in these 10 years I think.
- spankalee 1y ago
  Even simple web apps can benefit from web platform improvements. JS, HTML, and CSS have all gotten significantly better in recent years. But YouTube is also a very complex app. Yes it "just" exists to play videos, but the app is so much more than a video player. Browsing, searching, comments, chat, playlists, YT Live, subscriptions, profiles, ratings... there's a lot there.
  - troupo 1y ago
    And which of those things that people could build already in mid-90s require some nebulous unspecified "new broswer features"? Perhaps they could start with just cutting down their bloated 100x-duplicated 4MB CSS file?

breakfastduck 1y ago

This was a delightful read. You have done the world a service there, truly!

renewiltord 1y ago

Hahaha, I love that social proof worked. The Docs guys thought you guys had approval and the Youtube managers thought you were following through with a bigger initiative from across, started by Docs. Lucky break! Man, I love these tales of people doing the right thing cutting through the red tape.

Flamingoat 1y ago

I've read this story before on a different site. I was near the start of my career in 2009. I honestly think they are overstating the effect of those banners. The significant shift IMO was when Windows 7 machines replaced the ageing XP machines. That is what I saw in the google analytics on the sites I was supporting at the time.

t0mas88 1y ago
Indeed, their own graph shows IE7 dropping in usage share by very similar amounts at the same point in time, without a banner.
- Flamingoat 1y ago
  Yes. I am sure it did contribute, but they are overstating the effect of the banner. I honestly think Win 7 being a good OS and the Intel Macs actually being good is what led to nibbling away of legacy IE. As an aside. IE7 was IMO worse in some ways the IE6. It had many of the same rendering bugs but was more subtle in how it failed.

gldrk 1y ago

The web was a much better place when it had to support IE6.

therealmarv 1y ago

Great article! I still remember the time when people cherished the arrival of IE5.5 and IE6 later. They were once the best browsers.

fmajid 1y ago

Back in 2010, my startup offered front-end engineer prospective hires a major perk: we don’t care about IE6 compatibility.

xcskier56 1y ago

My first startup we had to support IE 7 for a bit and then IE 8 until like 2017… I thought I had it bad then. I’m so glad I didn’t have to fight any older version

nl 1y ago

> Our most renegade web developer, an otherwise soft-spoken Croatian guy, insisted on checking in the code under his name, as a badge of personal honor, and the rest of us leveraged our OldTuber status to approve the code review. Whoever this Croatian guy is, thankyou! True hero of the internet. As soon as that banner popped up on Youtube we were able to tell our customers the same thing.

teunispeters 1y ago

I don't miss IE 4/5/6 [etc subversion hell]. Supporting these tripled the time it took to build any site for WWW. Pick any w3C standard: some chance it worked - on one of the browsers but not others. Some chance each had entirely incompatible workarounds. Documentation? Good luck. What did exist tended to deny html standards other than their own existed so they didn't even give any clue how to solve this. Had to support them, never enjoyed it. There was nothing fun or rewarding about supporting any of them.

alganet 1y ago

IE6 was a great browser. It was superior in any way (at the time it was released). So good that no other browser was needed. And that's when it started to become garbage.

userbinator 1y ago

IE6 was basically the canary in the coalmine. Holding the web back from constant change was a good thing as it let many more implementations be usable. Remember Opera and the various other browsers around at the time? Not long after IE6 died, they got crushed too by Google using change as a weapon against its competitors. The recent notable change of Google requiring JS even for its own search engine, and thereby shutting out simple and basic browsers like Lynx, should be extremely concerning for the future of the web.

greiskul 1y ago
The reason Microsoft held the web back is because it saw it has a potential threat to it's dominance as the main platform for applications. And if you are actually concerned about the future of the web, instead of it's past, I would more concerned with Apple holding back development on Safari, to make people focus on writing native apps for mobile. There are so many apps that in the past would be websites, but end up being natively coded because that's the only way to get a good customer experience in mobile.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  > And if you are actually concerned about the future of the web >I would more concerned with Apple holding back development on Safari I think they are more concerned with the future of the web due to Google and so am I.
- hbn 1y ago
  You're worried about Safari in the browser space? It's the only browser that's holding back a near 100% monopoly from Google at the moment. If Apple gets forced to allow other browser engines on iOS, it's game over. Google wins the web forever.
bapak 1y ago
The HTML-only web has been dead for years. Documents may be safe, but publishing websites that work without JS is war with no winners.
1y ago

Tommy430 1y ago

Now the YouTube layout is bloated and is in diminishing returns for a while. The writing is on the wall. Maybe we need to hire construction teams to break into peoples' houses and change them every 5 seconds.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

socalgal2 1y ago

Once person's conspiracy is another person's public service. Thank you for helping to kill IE6

xacky 1y ago

Can we have a conspiracy to kill IPv4 next?

1718627440 1y ago
But only if we also kill NATs along the way, otherwise this would be a tangible effect.

tracker1 1y ago

I was really happy in (iirc) 2017 working on a green project where when we actually surveyed the users/customers, none were using legacy browsers at all... So we were able to ditch all the shims/shivs and drop babel altogether. The ability to target current browsers that at least supported async functions went a long way towards bringing down payloads. It took a bit of diligence, but while I was there the release app payload never got over 400kb of initial JS, which for a modern React+MUI app is pretty good. Having to yank moment.js and a couple other libraries a couple times was not the most fun sset of conversations to have. Not to mention, replacing massive charting libraries with plain svg generation in React. It bugs me to no end when developers don't seem to actually care about their craft at all.