I like how wikipedia presents its contents in a usable way on IE5.<p>This is awesome and most likely a part of their mission to make knowledge <i>as accessible as possible</i>. I have seen old, low-end donated PCs that are rife in elementary education in rural India and I'm sure in other developing countries as well. I am sure that these machines will be able to render wikipedia just fine!
I think it's doing Wikipedia a disservice to say that it looks good because it's "minimalist" or "static content". There has obviously been a lot of work put into making Wikipedia work well in every browser.
The sad thing is that I was <i>actually needing to use IE5</i> in February. A Windows 2000 Server machine in India which had been unused for a few years but was being pressed back into service. And Windows Update seemed to need IE6 to be able to install IE6. With a separately-sourced IE6 installer, I did finally get it up to IE6, but I couldn't manage to get it up to IE6 SP1 even then.<p>IE5 was certainly rather painful to use. Google did not work correctly under it. Microsoft's sites were just about the most painful to browse.<p>Owing to some malware on the system hijacking some DNS things and some further DNS misconfiguration I couldn't even get Firefox for a while... but I did eventually restore order to the machine and get Firefox 10 ESR installed on it. (The latest supported version to work on Windows 2000.)
Believe it or not, in my previous company people were happy with IE4/5/6. I mean <i>really happy</i> with the blue icon in the middle of their screen. They did not want to move to IE7 even because it was simply "enough" for them. Happy married life, complete in all respects. And this was year 2011, not very far back.<p>Even in China, they say, a significant percentage of population lives happily with IE6 or below. Don't know the latest stats, but I am sure not much has changed there for good. If captain Jack Sparrow needs a broken compass for navigation, then broken compass is exactly what he'd use for navigation. What can anyone do about it?<p>[Edits: Jack Sparrow]
Look way more decent than I thought, google is apparently the only one really <i>supporting</i> ie5 as their interface seems absolutely unchanged.<p>Also noticed the irony of microsoft.com being the worst, maybe it shows that the company wants to move forward, maybe it's just lazyness/rationalisation.<p>Also it's kind of abvious that amazon works well, they don't want to lose potentials customers (maybe same for google)
Similarly interesting would be the rendering of these sites with IE5’s competitors, i.e. the major browsers available in 1999. This would have been Netscape 4.5 and some version of AOL, presumably.
It is not really enough to just compare looks.<p>For example, even Amazon sites on Firefox 3.6.* browsers in the last couple of months show extremely inconsistent behaviour, e.g. inability to submit new searches after an existing search.<p>I suspect the only sites that actually work on that list without significant issues are Google and Wikipedia, both optimized to be highly compatible.
Wikipedia stood good there. I'm sure with Netscape's then version, the scene would have been even worse.<p>But this is only visual aspect, which I believe, is the only part that's easy to measure. It would be interesting to think on how to make it 'easy' to add other dimensions like Functionality, SEO, Accessibility etc. to the list.
Since you're OK with poking fun at other people's software, I'll point out that your left margin vanishes at 990px viewport, and readers need the left-right scrollbar to read below 750px viewports. Not a great reading experience (in Safari 6 on Lion). Cheers!
What % of their revenue does traffic from IE 5 represent? Now, what would the cost in internal resources to maintain browser compatibility on the scale of these sites? (hint: it's a lot) The math is pretty clear.
I was surprised at the size of the screenshots - 750x340. Not 800x600, not even 854x480, but 22:10. Given that layouts tend to break vertically, I was expecting the shots to be at least to the fold.
About a year ago I did the same thing with IE 5.1 for Mac, which was Microsoft's couterpart from this era.<p><a href="https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150673019866971.379044.730116970&type=1&l=40814c5b72" rel="nofollow">https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150673019866971....</a><p>It had its own set of insane quirks, even worse than Windows IE5. It was the default browser on Mac OS for a long time, until Safari I think.
The funny thing is that MS supported IE 5.01 on Windows 2000 until 2010, unlike other versions of IE 5.x. If I remember correctly, even MS's own Windows Update v6 released in 2005 had problems displaying in that browser such that they had to put up a warning message.
It would be interesting to know how those pages function in IE5. Does anything they do rely on JS IE5 doesn't understand? CSS IE5 can't process? eBay, Amazon, and Facebook especially might become worthless even though it looks like they render in a usable fashion.