15
kurtr
5y

Wow...lets a minute to appreciate the unsung hero's that revolted and went on to lead and win the battle against IE6.**shiver**

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-c...

The majority of you will not understand or be able to appreciate the gravity and extent their actions had on improving quality of life for web developers globally... that is the true gift & legacy of their noble deeds.

and yes it was that bad... no, actually it was even worse - the best words i can use to describe (attempting) development in IE6 is that it felt like we were imprisoned in the software equivalent of a concentration camp where they had perfected the cruellest form of torture, where they allowed us to develop amazing next level experiences in modern browsers just so they could watch all hope drain from our faces as we were forced to destroy them, tearing out the magic in the name of IE6.

Comments
  • 6
    "Majority of you will not understand..." he says, speaking to a community of developers 😂
  • 2
    That's really interesting, I had no idea. Unsung heroes...
  • 1
    The heroes we don't even deserve, but the heroes we get anyway
  • 1
    @simpleJack How to win friends and influence people
  • 1
    @simpleJack The vast majority of web devs globally have less than 5 years experience so they skipped the dark ages or were juniors in IE6 's final days and weren't directly responsible for making the sites cross browser compatible.

    IE6 is like a GOTO statement - so notorious that everyone knows it is bad but far less can actually tell you why it is bad.

    Even if you had the unfortunate experience of having to deal with IE6 enough to realise it was fucked if you weren't directly responsible for porting 2000 lines of CSS to a 8000 line IE specific style sheet you got off easy
  • 1
    Pure brilliancy, bypassing stupid and anxious management, and even to think of randomising the order of recommendations!

    What I don't understand though: the graph shows IE6 plunging and IE8 rising at that point. But how come that IE7 also fell over the cliff?
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop Because people won't use IE7 if they have a newer version of it too.
  • 1
    @kescherRant But they were not shown the dialogue. Viral marketing, sort of?
  • 1
  • 1
    @Fast-Nop alot of IE6's issues and behaviour persisted in IE7, mostly for Microsofts own backwards compatibility.

    A few IE6 critical issues were addressed and standardised and then in true IE style they promptly filled the gaps with some new shiny non standardized IE7 behaviour. Much more subtle but the same issues in different places... at one stage we had individual style sheets for ie 6-8.

    People were pissed, Microsoft took notice and were losing browser market share rapidly so they finally agreed to follow the w3 specifications more closely and stopped trying to reinvent and force their idea of the web on the world.

    Hence from IE8 on cross browser development became far easier and rendering consistently got better.
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