One of the best things that's happened to the web is all browsers moving over to an evergreen model of distribution. IE was such a cancer on the internet, everyone in the bad old days programmed to the lowest common denominator (IE6, 7, or 8). Even while brand new features and standards were widely adopted by everyone else.<p>One of the worst things that's happened is nearly everyone converging on using webkit to render everything. Feels like slowly stepping backwards into the days when everyone writes for webkit rather than a more open internet.<p>That being said, there's so little difference between webkit and gecko now-a-days that it's really hardly a major issue.
I and every single other webdev I've known from the early aughts would immediately offer to buy this person a beer upon hearing this story in person. Those claiming that safari is the new chrome just don't understand how bad IE was at the time.
I worked on the front end of CollegeHumor.com at this time and spent a lot of working hours bashing my head against the wall debugging for IE6 (and even IE5).<p>I don’t remember the decision/approval process that happening internally but we put up a similar banner very shortly after YouTube added theirs. We continued supporting IE6 for some time but started prioritizing it less and less.
No other software I hated more than IE6 in my life. I've started webdev in 2003 and was doing PSD to HTML/CSS conversions in the evenings and nights after my webdev dayjob. Opera and Firefox was a pleasure and easy to convert for, IE6 caused no end of pain for these conversions. In time I've learned enough tricks to know all the workarounds and could look at a given PSD file and know within 30min precision how many hours it'll take me, at that point I've started charging clients on top for IE6 support, this was around 2008.<p>This IE6 hate transcended into me avoiding all MS products for a long time. Only after they bought github and linkedin I gave in.
On a tangent: the screenshot of the deprecation banner brings back memories of a time when the internet still felt relatively free, before the rise and dominance of mega platforms in the 2010s.<p>I still mourn the loss of community forums that were replaced by reddit, or worse, Discord. So many hours spent on various phpBB/vBulletin etc. forums. :^)
<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#The_Four_Essential_Freedoms_of_Free_Software" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Free_Software_Definition#T...</a><p>>The freedom to run the program as you wish, for any purpose (freedom 0).<p>That's pretty wild that a direct competitor targeted a browser based on a few random engineers's personal views. In 2024, privacy being front and center, I wonder if its even feasible to kill off Google. They are slowly becoming a bully and a menace to society (unless you're one of the three letter agencies).
Not saying IE6 is good. It's quite comfortable to have the left hand owning the Chrome and the right one blocking other browsers with very specific changes in one of the most popular web sites. Helps power, control, and ads, you know.<p>The similar thing is happening now [0] (however the reasons are showing ads - but essentially they've always been to show ads!). But this Firefox cow is too precious to kill it entirely: it prevents antimonopoly investigation as "see there are others" on the field of browsers.<p>0 - <a href="https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23970721/google-youtube-ad-blocker-five-second-delay-firefox-chrome" rel="nofollow">https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/21/23970721/google-youtube-...</a>
Back when I worked on websites (2011-2012), supporting IE6 through IE9 ate somewhere between 1/3 and 1/2 of all my development time, as nothing was consistent with any of them, and that included the same browser with slight tweaks. It was a horrible, time-wasting badly behaved set of browsers and because I worked on government sites for part of that, Internet Explorer support was mandatory.<p>I'm so very glad they're gone - they were the lemon cars of the computer world of those days.
"A small team of [hero] web developers conspired to kill IE6 from inside YouTube and got away with it [saving us all from eternal wackness]. - There, I fixed it for you. :)
The thing that gets me the most is how ancient 10 year-old YouTube looks. Which makes sense that this was the era before smartphones, when IE6 still had significant market share. But 10 years! Sounds like such a short time.
So what you’re saying is you helped your billion dollar mega-corp use their monopoly position to destroy another monopoly and ensure chromium would be the next IE.