A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6

by romanhn • 9 months ago

212 139 9 months ago

blog.chriszacharias.com

skrebbel• 9 months ago

Amazing read! One detail jumped out at me:

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!

01HNNWZ0MV43FF• 9 months ago

Don't need em now! When you're small, cooperate, when you're big, take over. Google is big now

chews• 9 months ago

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.

dafelst• 9 months ago

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)

gjsman-10002• 9 months ago

Automatic updates get a bad rap on HN; but it's not like Microsoft wasn't happily giving away Internet Explorer 7 and 8 to any computer listening.

realityking• 9 months ago

It took Microsoft over 5 years to release Internet Explorer 7. That’s what allowed the web to ossify around it.

For comparison, Internet Explorer 6 came 2.5 years after 5 and so did 8 after 7.

jiggawatts• 9 months ago

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.

more_corn• 9 months ago

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.

dylan604• 9 months ago

The problem is that pretty much all small scrappy companies grow up to be large behemoths that all migrate to have process and controls that take over. The way workflows are created while being small and scrappy doesn't lend itself well when you have more than one dev working on something and there's no guidance for how the devs are to move forward. One dev wants to take 3 left turns, another dev wants to take a simple right turn. After that, you start having meetings to layout code and how to handle merges and the next thing you know you have processes and controls

behnamoh• 9 months ago

Is it really something to be proud of? Somehow as a result of IE hate we ended up with a Chrome-dominated world.

loloquwowndueo• 9 months ago

Chrome sucks but it’s miles better than IE ever was.

overgard3• 9 months ago

IE was so much worse than Chrome will ever be.

I do occasionally think Safari is the new IE though -- not in terms of terribleness but just in terms of holding back the web by being the slowest to implement big new features.

troupo7• 9 months ago

being the slowest to implement big new features.

You mean Chrome-only non-standards that Mozilla usually opposes, too

leptons• 9 months ago

I wouldn't care about Safari at all if Apple allowed any other browser engine on iOS. The fact that they don't allow other browsers to use their own browser engine is a fucking travesty, and it's part of the reason Apple is being sued by the DOJ.

https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/media/1344546/dl

pif• 9 months ago

The hate was not against IE, but against a popular tool that fought against shared standards.

syncsynchalt2• 9 months ago

It was worse than IE not adopting standards. It was a capricious browser, would crash and misbehave for arbitrary reasons, and had an almost perverse implementation of web rendering.

People try to equate it to Safari now but that's just not comparable. Safari will render something badly or not support a CSS decorator that you'd really like to use, but it will rarely crash, go into an infinite URL-fetching loop, or arbitrarily fail to recognize random HTML tags.

gldrk3• 9 months ago

IE didn’t fight anything; it merely existed. There was no constant barrage of features that you ‘had to’ make use of to ‘keep up with the times’. Microsoft correctly decided that the Web was done in ~1999. They even had ‘Electron’ in the form of HTAs, except it wasn’t remotely as bad.

syncsynchalt2• 9 months ago

As someone involved in web dev during the IE5/6/7 days, the short answer is yes.

The longer answer is yes, absolutely.

linguae• 9 months ago

I think what did IE in was the security issues that IE, ActiveX, and Windows had in the mid-2000s. This, combined with IE 6's stagnation, gave Firefox an opening to compete and to challenge the IE 6 monopoly.

There was a sweet spot between roughly 2007 and sometime in the mid 2010s when web developers coded to standards instead of just the dominant browser, and where there was browser diversity: Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and IE 7+. It was a good time for the Web.

Chrome then became dominant, and unfortunately now we're in a "Best viewed in Chrome" era, and we're back in an era where some developers only code for the dominant browser.

Flamingoat9• 9 months ago

It was Chrome, Win 7 and Smartphones that killed IE. Firefox was extremely niche and was downright bad browser when 3.0 was released.

Chrome when it came out was much faster than Firefox. It was lighter and worked better.

Also macs had moved to Intel chips a few years before and were actually pretty decent so a lot of people were moving to them.

Also of this chipped away at XP and the few people running XP machines were diehard xp fans or corps that were dragging their heels upgrading.

spankalee3• 9 months ago

You can see here https://www.w3counter.com/trends that Safari, Chrome, and IE8 all had bumps around that time, and looking at the IE-only chart it seems like the boost in IE8 might have actually slowed IE's overall decline a bit.

But the trend for IE started before this and continued after it.

jraph3• 9 months ago

I don't think the chrome dominance is a result of the IE hate.

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.

Flamingoat9• 9 months ago

Chrome dominance is a result of Google wanting to control the web and its dominance in the ads and search areas.

Chrome was simply better than Firefox, Internet Explorer, Legacy Edge. I am not a Windows Admin, but Chrome also offered an MSI package whereas Firefox didn't bother until years later. So it was easy for IT to roll out Chrome as part of the standard corpo install image and not an option with Firefox.

As for web development it offered better JS debugging and had a decent phone emulator built in and this was back in 2014. I am sure I could also debug phones as well with some reverse proxy shenanigans via fiddler and some open source tooling I forgot the name of now.

cwyers• 9 months ago

If you read the article, one of the buttons on the bar prompted people to upgrade to the latest version of IE.

romanhn2• 9 months ago

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.

nine_k• 9 months ago

The risk of updating the machines to support IE9 might indeed be large, for not very obvious benefits. But what did they say about staying as is, and switching to Firefox or Chrome? Was it impossible due to use of some MS-only tech?

romanhn2• 9 months ago

It's hard to remember the exact details all these years later... I doubt it was due to MS-only tech, but rather that IE6/7 were tested and approved and everything else was not. The incentives for IT teams are such that it's a lot easier to say no to something than yes, and create a ton of work and liability.

gldrk3• 9 months ago

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’.

chrismorgan• 9 months ago

It wasn’t so much about the tempo of web standards; it was rather that W3C cared about the consensus of a far wider variety of entities, and browsers got fed up with being told what they should and shouldn’t do by people that were nothing to do with browsers—people that had interests in HTML, sure, but who were trying to pull it in directions that none of the browsers were interested in. And so, W3C having failed as a venue for browser HTML standardisation, they took it over.

To parody the situation: a consortium of bridge engineers is discussing building standards, but somehow they’ve been lumped together with every girl named Bridget and every young boy making toy bridges with blocks, and they all have voting rights, and the girls are insisting that bridges must sparkle, and the boys think every bridge should be able to support helicopters and diggers.

tcdent• 9 months ago

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.

Magi604• 9 months ago

A small group of people took a chance, and it turned into a movement and changed internet history. I bet this could become a solid documentary.

aaronbrethorst• 9 months ago

Better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

dang• 9 months ago

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)

arscan2• 9 months ago

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.

unleaded• 9 months ago

agreed*. You often hear this assumption today that Netscape was always the better browser and that people using IE were simply making a mistake. If anything they were just shit in different ways. For a while Netscape refused to implement CSS and wanted people to use their own JavaScript Style Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets technology which no-one did.

* Kind of, I was born in the 2000s

bazoom422• 9 months ago

Well I lived through it, and you are absolutely right. Netscape 4 was terrible. Internet Explorer was much better and more standards compliant in comparison. Netscape 4 was hated by web designers just like IE6 later came to be hated. The difference was that Netscapes marked share dwindled pretty fast, while IE6 lived on for an eternity.

lmm• 9 months ago

For a while Netscape refused to implement CSS and wanted people to use their own JavaScript Style Sheets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript_Style_Sheets technology

Man, literally every time the web platform had to choose between the IE way and the Netscape way they made the wrong choice huh.

Aloha• 9 months ago

I hung on to Netscape 4 until the first versions of Mozilla

kstrauser2• 9 months ago

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.

suzzer992• 9 months 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...

Vanilla JavaScript just works. Marvel at the circa 2001 Login button!

kstrauser2• 9 months ago

Hey, nice job if it's still running! That was quite the exercise back in the day, wasn't it?

tracker13• 9 months 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.

matheusmoreira3• 9 months 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.

brazukadev2• 9 months 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.

aaa_aaa• 9 months 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.

bazoom422• 9 months ago

The IE6 age was much worse. IE6 only worked on Windows so many sites did not work on Mac or Unix which was a big hiderence for the adoption of non-windows platforms.

While Chrome is big, Safari still has significant market share today.

SenHeng• 9 months 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.

spankalee3• 9 months ago

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.

[1] https://developers.google.com/youtube/cobalt

davidkwast• 9 months ago

But the use case is just to serve videos right? I know that new things will not come. But YouTube is almost the same in these 10 years I think.

spankalee3• 9 months ago

Even simple web apps can benefit from web platform improvements. JS, HTML, and CSS have all gotten significantly better in recent years.

But YouTube is also a very complex app. Yes it "just" exists to play videos, but the app is so much more than a video player. Browsing, searching, comments, chat, playlists, YT Live, subscriptions, profiles, ratings... there's a lot there.

mapontosevenths4• 9 months ago

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.

I call that trailer park logic:

They say: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"

Then four years later, while still in a dead end job: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"

Filligree• 9 months ago

It's a trap, but that doesn't mean it's escapable if you do need a job now.

krzrak• 9 months ago

So profound. I'm keeping it to use later :)

dgfitz• 9 months ago

Going to college usually means you work the same job after college, just with a lot more debt.

nradov• 9 months ago

That logic is also how established tech companies allow startups with disruptive technology to eat their lunch. Of course it can sometimes take decades for that disruptive innovation to appear.

philipallstar• 9 months ago

They say: "Why go to college? That will take four years and I need a job now!"

This is more like: "Why implement it? That won't be seen for five years and I need a promotion now!"

silvestrov• 9 months ago

When a video is loaded on a Cobalt browser, why can't they redirect to something like youtube.com/cobalt/player/123456

This way they could keep an old html/css/js implementation running alongside the upgraded one.

jtokoph• 9 months ago

I thought the whole thing was a different app at youtube.com/tv

lozenge• 9 months ago

They do. But the Cobalt version is still used on new TVs and to view new videos with new features, so it can't just be a time capsule.

17186274404• 9 months ago

Then everybody would just try to use that instead of the now common frontend.

troupo7• 9 months 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

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

nothrabannosir• 9 months ago

New codecs at least, I would assume?

quux2• 9 months ago

And thanks to these old endpoints that can’t be changed yt-dlp is able to function

userbinator4• 9 months ago

I'd be a bit more careful with making statements like that here. "The walls have ears."

justinator• 9 months ago

The YouTube team doesn't have the resources to implement many web APIs

Annual revenue is a few dozen billions.

So what's the problem, here?

TrainedMonkey• 9 months ago

So what's the problem, here?

Minimizing developer pain is not a business objective.

17186274404• 9 months ago

The irony, when you consider who pushes that "many web APIs"...

userbinator4• 9 months ago

Make no mistake, "standards" really mean "what Google wants" these days.

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.

socalgal22• 9 months ago

why can't they just serve different sites based on identifying the browser/app, and if it's old you get less features?

estimator7292• 9 months ago

That's exactly what they do. The hard part is making it work with fewer features

jank199x• 9 months ago

Are there alternate YouTube frontends (or apps) that emulate Cobalt?

Looks like stable API like that is a perfect candidate for usage in an open source app that replaces the official one.

breakfastduck• 9 months ago

This was a delightful read. You have done the world a service there, truly!

renewiltord• 9 months ago

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.

Flamingoat9• 9 months ago

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.

t0mas88• 9 months ago

Indeed, their own graph shows IE7 dropping in usage share by very similar amounts at the same point in time, without a banner.

Flamingoat9• 9 months ago

Yes. I am sure it did contribute, but they are overstating the effect of the banner. I honestly think Win 7 being a good OS and the Intel Macs actually being good is what led to nibbling away of legacy IE.

As an aside. IE7 was IMO worse in some ways the IE6. It had many of the same rendering bugs but was more subtle in how it failed.

gldrk3• 9 months ago

The web was a much better place when it had to support IE6.

therealmarv• 9 months ago

Great article!

I still remember the time when people cherished the arrival of IE5.5 and IE6 later. They were once the best browsers.

fmajid• 9 months ago

Back in 2010, my startup offered front-end engineer prospective hires a major perk: we don’t care about IE6 compatibility.

xcskier56• 9 months ago

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

nl• 9 months ago

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.

teunispeters• 9 months ago

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.

alganet• 9 months ago

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.

userbinator4• 9 months ago

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.

greiskul• 9 months ago

The reason Microsoft held the web back is because it saw it has a potential threat to it's dominance as the main platform for applications.

And if you are actually concerned about the future of the web, instead of it's past, I would more concerned with Apple holding back development on Safari, to make people focus on writing native apps for mobile. There are so many apps that in the past would be websites, but end up being natively coded because that's the only way to get a good customer experience in mobile.

17186274404• 9 months ago

And if you are actually concerned about the future of the web
I would more concerned with Apple holding back development on Safari

I think they are more concerned with the future of the web due to Google and so am I.

hbn2• 9 months ago

You're worried about Safari in the browser space? It's the only browser that's holding back a near 100% monopoly from Google at the moment.

If Apple gets forced to allow other browser engines on iOS, it's game over. Google wins the web forever.

bapak• 9 months ago

The HTML-only web has been dead for years. Documents may be safe, but publishing websites that work without JS is war with no winners.

hbn2• 9 months ago

Google requiring JS even for its own search engine

This has been annoying me personally because sometimes I'll "bookmark" something I want to come back to like a movie or a video game by Googling it and leaving the tab open on my phone's browser.

But now, seemingly when those pages are suspended, Javascript isn't allowed to run in them, so all my Google search tab thumbnails are just a static screen telling me that I need to enable Javascript.

Tommy4302• 9 months ago

Now the YouTube layout is bloated and is in diminishing returns for a while.

The writing is on the wall.

Maybe we need to hire construction teams to break into peoples' houses and change them every 5 seconds.

socalgal22• 9 months ago

Once person's conspiracy is another person's public service. Thank you for helping to kill IE6

xacky• 9 months ago

Can we have a conspiracy to kill IPv4 next?

17186274404• 9 months ago

But only if we also kill NATs along the way, otherwise this would be a tangible effect.

tracker13• 9 months ago

I was really happy in (iirc) 2017 working on a green project where when we actually surveyed the users/customers, none were using legacy browsers at all... So we were able to ditch all the shims/shivs and drop babel altogether. The ability to target current browsers that at least supported async functions went a long way towards bringing down payloads.

It took a bit of diligence, but while I was there the release app payload never got over 400kb of initial JS, which for a modern React+MUI app is pretty good. Having to yank moment.js and a couple other libraries a couple times was not the most fun sset of conversations to have. Not to mention, replacing massive charting libraries with plain svg generation in React.

It bugs me to no end when developers don't seem to actually care about their craft at all.

A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019)

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