Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

http://cross-browser.org/Blog/post/2013/04/29/How-10-Popular-Websites-Are-Displayed-in-IE-5.aspx

by dherken • 13 years ago

193 112 13 years ago

cross-browser.org

pinko• 13 years ago

You've got to appreciate the irony of microsoft.com being among the worst of the ten (if not the very worst) to render.

evanbriggs• 13 years ago

Haha, I was just thinking that myself.

smoyer2• 13 years ago

And yet you still have a "command prompt" so that you can run your DOS programs as well as "compatibility mode" so that older applications can run on the post-XP systems.

ajross• 13 years ago

That's backwards, though. MS wants to enable new systems to run old software, and they do this very well. The case in hand is running old software against new content, which they don't care about. The relevant comparison would be running IE10 against a cached copy of some website from 1999. I suspect that test would work rather well.

guard-of-terra6• 13 years ago

"Command prompt", i.e. terminal, is what makes you toy a computer. If you don't have one, it's still a toy.

MS did a lot to turn their lame "DOS command prompt" into a command line terminal; not enough, but a lot.

So no, "command prompt" has nothing to do with DOS. You can run DOS programs from the GUI as well.

mbell• 13 years ago

Window's console app has nothing to do with the ability to run DOS applications and the bit that actually does, the DOS virtual machine, doesn't exist on 64-bit versions of windows.

jpswade• 13 years ago

No. MS-DOS programs won't run on Windows. CMD isn't DOS.

You need something like FreeDOS or DOSbox to run the old DOS programs these days.

speiler• 13 years ago

I'd argue that they have the most incentive for the users to move off of ie5. That being said a message that tells users how to update would be much better then a partially rendered mess.

yuhong11• 13 years ago

Well, IE5 is out of support now.

olegbl• 13 years ago

I think it makes sense. They have the most incentive for people to stop using their outdated product (it's hard restoring the image of software like IE).

monsterix• 13 years ago

Believe it or not, in my previous company people were happy with IE4/5/6. I mean really happy 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.

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?

[Edits: Jack Sparrow]

majke• 13 years ago

Yes, I'd like to see some chinese sites on the list.

For what I can test http://www.alibaba.com/ looks decent in IE6.

One in four browsers in china are IE6. Source: http://www.ie6countdown.com/

(can someone check baidu.com, qq.com, sina.com.cn, csdn.net, alibaba.com in IE5?)

melling• 13 years ago

Just depends on the source. According to this, active users is less than 5%:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201203...

dherken2• 13 years ago

All 5 pages render fine on IE 5 (I cannot read the text though). Only baidu gives me a JS error message, but seems to work regardless...

infinita740• 13 years ago

Look way more decent than I thought, google is apparently the only one really supporting ie5 as their interface seems absolutely unchanged.

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.

Also it's kind of abvious that amazon works well, they don't want to lose potentials customers (maybe same for google)

sliverstorm• 13 years ago

I doubt Google "supports" ie5, their home page is just ultra-stripped down. Before they added that toolbar at the top, it was a text box and three or four links. Not much to mess up.

TazeTSchnitzel8• 13 years ago

No, that's recognisably the more basic version they serve to older browsers.

blktiger• 13 years ago

I absolutely love the irony there. Then again, I can't really knock them for not making their website work on IE 5 since they don't support that browser any more.

mynameisvlad2• 13 years ago

Doesn't shock me. They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers. They created http://www.ie6countdown.com/ after all.

It's also probably near impossible to get their current site working on IE5, and to make a completely separate site just for them (and it's a really really small percentage of worldwide users) would be highly cost prohibitive.

udp2• 13 years ago

> They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers.

Oh, so that's why they wanted my grandma to buy a new version of Windows (and a new computer to meet the system requirements) just to update Internet Explorer.

warfangle5• 13 years ago

It looks like the microsoft site is "feature detecting" at some level, and serving up a really basic mobile-oriented site. Think feature phone web browser.

yuhong11• 13 years ago

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.

derleth• 13 years ago

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.

ultimoo2• 13 years ago

Although I am not certain about it, the way browsers are expected to handle encryption may have also changed in 14 years -- making payment gateways on these websites wither unusable or risky.

bicknergseng2• 13 years ago

IE5 had XHR, but didn't have native JSON support and a number of other features. I think it was on ECMA 1 or 2 until IE5.5, which had 3.

I wager no one uses JSON shims anymore. I don't really know what would happen when you try to use JSON in ECMA 1 or 2.

yuhong11• 13 years ago

Native JSON support was only added in IE8.

robin_reala• 13 years ago

Anyone that uses jQuery’s (<=1.9) JSON functionality is using a JSON shim:

https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/1.9-stable/src/core.js...

greghinch• 13 years ago

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.

burntsushi• 13 years ago

RTFA. It clearly states that this is an exercise in fun, not in judgment or criticism.

sharkweek• 13 years ago

I bet Hacker News would look fantastic in IE5, tables and all

yuhong11• 13 years ago

And they can make the up/down arrows work in even older browsers by using document.images instead of document.getElementById.

stfu• 13 years ago

And rightfully so!

I would love to see more websites offering a no-frills version for older browsers, mobile browsers, smaller screens, etc.

Once I know that a site provides a specific value to me I really don't care about design and usability anymore.

scottrblock• 13 years ago

That seems to be the goal of the Universal ie6 [0] project, albiet for ie6!

[0] https://code.google.com/p/universal-ie6-css/

nwh• 13 years ago

Yep, in IE 5.5 it looks peachy.

http://i.imgur.com/XulRdv4.png

bicknergseng2• 13 years ago

And for my next magic trick, popular modern video games rendered in 256 bit color.

alan_cx• 13 years ago

Sort of....ish....

Have a look what the Far Cry 3 people have created with Blood Dragon. Dont have to buy it, just have a look on youtube.

ijk• 13 years ago

256 colors? Why so high? And not, say, running on a monochrome text terminal? http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/

Samuel_Michon• 13 years ago

I think you mean 8-bit, which allows for 256 colors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth

malkia• 13 years ago

20 or so years ago, I've got a Hercules card for my dear old 386 machine - Good resolution at the time, but just two colors. There are couple of good games - Star Control II, Trolls, etc. that I've liked and what I did was first to disable the VGA detection, second was to find where the back buffer was in the game, and if there was none (Star Control II), point to my allocated.

Then on the fly convert 320x200x256 colors to monochrome - I mean it was very silly - just pick one of the bits - and with some experiments it worked (no, it's not the way to go in general - but I was able to play).

That was dog slow, but it felt like smoking something, getting high - it didn't matter that the game was unplayable (10fps or less) - it was the fact that it worked!!!

Moto7451• 13 years ago

Probably not too far off:

Doom 3 on a VooDoo 2 SLI setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUVXAl0dgYY

alexvr• 13 years ago

I laughed out loud at Microsoft

jordanmoore_• 13 years ago

Microsoft's design uses a mobile first approach with media queries and other techniques to make it a ubiquitous experience regardless of device. The others don't. That's why it looks the worst in an ancient browser, although it arguably looks better than the other examples if you were to open the same page on an array of devices with differing dynamics.

katherineparker• 13 years ago

Thanks for explaining this :). There had to be a good reason as to why Microsoft would approach IE5 this way and I was wondering why.

ultimoo2• 13 years ago

I like how wikipedia presents its contents in a usable way on IE5.

This is awesome and most likely a part of their mission to make knowledge as accessible as possible. 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!

ibrahima• 13 years ago

I think it's more likely that they simply haven't felt the need to update their styling much in the past decade or so. And last I checked the home page uses tables for layout, so it would make sense that it works on IE5, since that's what everyone did back then.

TazeTSchnitzel8• 13 years ago

Actually, they did do a big styling change a year or two ago.

futhey• 13 years ago

I feel like this is a more sufficient explanation than the one provided by the author. The front-end people at wikipedia probably remember the hoops they jumped through to work within IE5's quirks, and developed best practices that still happen to work out in that context.

nu2ycombinator• 13 years ago

Irony worst looking website out of the list is Microsoft.com

mistercow• 13 years ago

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.

TazeTSchnitzel8• 13 years ago

Indeed. They also have Wikipedia Zero, a program to get phone networks in some developing countries to remove mobile internet charges when accessing Wikipedia on phones.

dkrich• 13 years ago

Aw I really wanted to see how Craigslist would appear to see if there is any discernible difference, whatsoever.

warfangle5• 13 years ago

For what it's worth, Google is still usable in lynx.

TazeTSchnitzel8• 13 years ago

Most sites are. Lynx is just the web without CSS or JS.

warfangle5• 13 years ago

Most sites these days are inoperable without JS.

chrismorgan• 13 years ago

The sad thing is that I was actually needing to use IE5 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.

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.

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.)

yuhong11• 13 years ago

The IE6 SP1 installer is still available from MS:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=1

Of course do be warned that you are using unsupported software that had not received security updates since July 2010.

eru2• 13 years ago

Why did anyone bother to press that ancient machine back into service? And why did they not just wipe the hard disk and put up a new copy of the OS on it, especially if there's malware on it?

jeromeparadis• 13 years ago

Now let's fire up lynx which I haven't used since before IE 4.

eru2• 13 years ago

I recommend links for text-mode browsing.

DigitalSea• 13 years ago

I love how Google doesn't really look different at all. Looks the same on IE5 basically as it does in IE10, ha.

mwsherman• 13 years ago

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.

dherken2• 13 years ago

This would be fun, I'll try to get Netscape Navigator 4.5 and AOL Explorer 1.? running...

TheAnimus• 13 years ago

Didn't AOL switch to hosting an IE object around IE4 time?

usablebytes• 13 years ago

Wikipedia stood good there. I'm sure with Netscape's then version, the scene would have been even worse.

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.

drucken• 13 years ago

It is not really enough to just compare looks.

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.

I suspect the only sites that actually work on that list without significant issues are Google and Wikipedia, both optimized to be highly compatible.

jwatzman2• 13 years ago

About a year ago I did the same thing with IE 5.1 for Mac, which was Microsoft's couterpart from this era.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150673019866971....

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.

yuhong11• 13 years ago

*IE 5.1 for Mac

jwatzman2• 13 years ago

Arg stupid typo, fixed, thanks.

dolphenstein• 13 years ago

I remember the bad ol' days of having to support that browser. It wasn't compatible with it's windows counterpart and the 0.5% userbase were highly vocal if anything broke.

yuhong11• 13 years ago

Ah, Tasman. Later MS did develop much better versions, but unfortunately new versions of IE for Mac ended when Apple moved to Safari/WebKit.

ZeroMinx• 13 years ago

"Back in the year 1999 Microsoft released it's"

its

protolif• 13 years ago

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!

sesqu• 13 years ago

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.

hatu• 13 years ago

I wish they had showed the feed instead of the unlogged landing page of Facebook. It explodes pretty hilariously on my VM IE 6 at least.

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