> 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!
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-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.
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)
Microsoft was in such a hurry to kill off IE6 that if install a fresh copy of Windows Server 2022 with the latest updates, then Event Viewer will throw an “Access denied!” error in your face at startup. That’s because the IE6 logs were unceremoniously ripped out, but the default Administrative view still contains it in its list.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
> And because it takes so long for an old Cobalt version to go out of support, they don't invest in implementing new features
What new features?
The only "new features" Youtube implements is shoving shorts down your throat and taking five seconds to show video times on thumbnails despite the fact that the data is already there.
There's nothing Youtube requires from "new features" that can't be implemented in a browser tech from 15 years ago.
Also, Youtube the site doesn't have to deal with Cobalt-the-TV-app just like it doesn't have to deal with YouTube-the-mobile-app
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.
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.
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
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
43 comments
[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 62.2 ms ] thread> 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!
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.
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)
The rogues take responsibility, think carefully, act carefully.
Firefox briefly dominated the web in between.
Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the web and its dominance in the ads and search areas.
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.
A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39294406 - Feb 2024 (106 comments)
A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38210439 - Nov 2023 (1 comment)
A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019) - 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 - Sept 2021 (2 comments)
A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19798678 - May 2019 (363 comments)
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.
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.
It was the worst two years of my life.
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
What new features?
The only "new features" Youtube implements is shoving shorts down your throat and taking five seconds to show video times on thumbnails despite the fact that the data is already there.
There's nothing Youtube requires from "new features" that can't be implemented in a browser tech from 15 years ago.
Also, Youtube the site doesn't have to deal with Cobalt-the-TV-app just like it doesn't have to deal with YouTube-the-mobile-app
Annual revenue is a few dozen billions.
So what's the problem, here?
YouTube was perfectly usable 15 years ago, on the machines and software of the time.
I'll stop at the imminent conclusion that having Cobalt is a good thing for various reasons.
Looks like stable API like that is a perfect candidate for usage in an open source app that replaces the official one.
Man, I love these tales of people doing the right thing cutting through the red tape.
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.
I still remember the time when people cherished the arrival of IE5.5 and IE6 later. They were once the best browsers.
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.