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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 strin

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.
matheusmoreira 1y ago
The browser wars have not ended though... Chrome simply replaced IE6. We are in the exact same situation as before: the web is effectively owned by a single corporation.
- brazukadev 1y ago
  Not really, IE6 legacy was split in 2, Safari is the one that don't implement modern Web APIs, some times going with alternative implementations that benefits only them.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    "Modern Web APIs" are just what Chrome is doing. They even usurped the standards bodies with their "WHATWG". It's what Microsoft wishes it had achieved back then.
    - brazukadev 1y ago
      Just give me WebGPU, proper PWAs and the FileSystem API mate, I don't care if what the users want was proposed by Google. Maybe the bluetooth and NFC APIs too, if that would not disrupt their App Store too much :)
- aaa_aaa 1y ago
  I am old enough to remember banks and many sites shovelling windows to your mouth because they only work in IE. No, Chrome is not the same.
  - matheusmoreira 1y ago
    At work I have to use web applications that literally do not work in any non-Chrome browser on a daily basis. Nothing has changed.
    - tracker1 1y ago
      Except Chrome itself is open-source, cross platform and runs almost everywhere, not to mention multiple forks and other browser implementations around it.
SenHeng 1y ago
I ran a web dev agency back in 2012 building websites for restaurants and SMEs. One of my partners was insistent that we had to support IE6 and also avoid using CSS3 and HTML5. Despite our own analytics showing less than 3% usage. It was the worst two years of my life.

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.

matheusmoreira 1y ago

The browser wars have not ended though... Chrome simply replaced IE6. We are in the exact same situation as before: the web is effectively owned by a single corporation.

brazukadev 1y ago
Not really, IE6 legacy was split in 2, Safari is the one that don't implement modern Web APIs, some times going with alternative implementations that benefits only them.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  "Modern Web APIs" are just what Chrome is doing. They even usurped the standards bodies with their "WHATWG". It's what Microsoft wishes it had achieved back then.
  - brazukadev 1y ago
    Just give me WebGPU, proper PWAs and the FileSystem API mate, I don't care if what the users want was proposed by Google. Maybe the bluetooth and NFC APIs too, if that would not disrupt their App Store too much :)
aaa_aaa 1y ago
I am old enough to remember banks and many sites shovelling windows to your mouth because they only work in IE. No, Chrome is not the same.
- matheusmoreira 1y ago
  At work I have to use web applications that literally do not work in any non-Chrome browser on a daily basis. Nothing has changed.
  - tracker1 1y ago
    Except Chrome itself is open-source, cross platform and runs almost everywhere, not to mention multiple forks and other browser implementations around it.

SenHeng 1y ago

I ran a web dev agency back in 2012 building websites for restaurants and SMEs. One of my partners was insistent that we had to support IE6 and also avoid using CSS3 and HTML5. Despite our own analytics showing less than 3% usage. It was the worst two years of my life.