[klodolph]

> It's like living with IE6 again

There is a CSS bug.

CSS bugs are dirt common. It's a miracle that there are as few CSS bugs as there are. However, I remember IE6. IE6 was a total fucking mess. Everything was broken on IE6. It wasn't just a bug, it was a complete support nightmare.

I routinely encounter problems with CSS that reveal maddening differences between Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. That's just for desktop. But it's still way better than dealing with IE6.

[Turing_Machine]

> However, I remember IE6. IE6 was a total fucking mess. Everything was broken on IE6. It wasn't just a bug, it was a complete support nightmare.

Indeed. While Safari does have its problems, it is a long, long way from being as bad as IE used to be. I recall one project where making it work on IE required that about 30% of the code be rewritten.

[simondotau]

And that’s not even the worst part. The worst was all of the corporate sites that were built to run exclusively on IE6 and straight up couldn’t be used in alternative browsers. I’m talking scripts written in VBScript rather than JavaScript. ActiveX plug-ins rather than something cross-platform.

[acomjean]

When I worked at the radar company we would have to go to a Unix machine on a different network and do our time cards. It was Firefox.

Then the time card website upgrade, which only worked in ie.

So now log onto Unix, use a VPN (Citrix) to log onto a windows NT machine, then use IE. It had to be done daily and wasn’t fun.

[berkes]

There were many websites that used just HTML, CSS and some JS and none of the "proprietary VBScript or ActiveX (or Flash)" that would not work on anything except IE6.

Most competing browsers chose to implement IE6 rendering (border box model, quirksmode etc), bug-by-bug. To at least have some of those "built for ie6 only" websites functioning and looking OKish.

But when those quirks would break the website on anything but IE6, many webmasters (is that still a function-title in 2021?) would not care, or not get budget to fix it: "96% of our users use IE6, why spend time for those 4%?". (which also begs the question: what are those 4% doing on a website that doesn't work at all for them? Shouldn't that be 100%/0%)

[matwood]

The browser landscape was very different when IE6 was new. In many cases the only way to write a performant, complex web app was to use ActiveX (or Flash). The problem is those apps were never updated as web technologies rapidly moved forward.

[protomyth]

I bet a lot of corporations would have loved for Microsoft to launch a sandboxed version of IE6 that had enough "knobs" for the sysadmins to only allow it to work on an intranet or going to specific sites. Saves a lot of investment, but becomes the new COBOL.

[chrismorgan]

Most CSS bugs just make things a bit uglier, rather than completely breaking your entire site.

[FpUser]

On one of my sites it had made most important button "add to cart" unclickable

[reaperducer]

You might be surprised how often a CSS bug will break an entire site. I've seen it many times in my decades.

[Eric_WVGG]

Oh, I’ve got a good one about this.

Back in 2000, I was living in a new city, and cold-calling graphic design firms. At the time, most of the web looked like utter ass, and my feeling was that it made more sense to try to be the in-house developer for designers, rather than try to bring design to web development firms.

So I put together a resume with my personal URL placed prominently across the top, and knocked on the door of every graphic design firm in Portland. I met a bunch of confused designers, and didn’t get a single call or email back. I noticed in passing — and importantly to this story — that the whole industry was still wedded to Macs running the non-memory-protected OS 8. Months passed and my savings trickled away.

Eventually out of desperation I took a job at a shipping company that was rewriting their in-house software suite. I noticed that they had a couple dusty Macs in the corner for browser testing that they never bothered doing, and thought it might be amusing to see how my site loaded.

It turned out that there was an error in the CSS engine in MSIE Mac that crashed the system. Not the browser, the entire computer. Click, smash. I realized with horror that I had spent months crashing the computers — along with the unsaved work — of every graphic designer in Portland.

[tomxor]

Similar story, I made an IE6 PNG transparency "fix" that used some IE specific image filter language (I can't even remember what anymore).

On some computers without enough memory the "fix" crashed the entire OS with a bluescreen (no idea what the bug was because I didn't have windows, and because... well it's windows, I think I developed it in WINE!). I only found this out through a client complaining about their clients computers bluescreening when visiting their site... this was probably 2008-ish, so not exactly peak IE6, but it was the phase where a bunch of orgs still forced everyone to use it under the ridiculous premise of "security".

[kalleboo]

That's fantastic! I have the opposite story - we sold opinionated Mac software bundles, and one of the perks was we could use the latest Apple-only Safari CSS tricks (this was before Chrome forked from WebKit and Safari was actually leading the way with stuff like CSS transitions/animations and Canvas). Microsoft released free VMs for browser testing in IE and I tried it for kicks, and indeed, our page would literally crash IE when loaded (of course Windows had protected memory so the OS wouldn't crash). We wore it as a badge of honor.

[chrismorgan]

Oh, it can definitely happen. In earlier drafts of the current iteration of my website, I used `mix-blend-mode: multiply` liberally (most significantly for the left sidebar), and discovered that in Chromium under Windows anything you used it on would stop rendering after a few thousand pixels (4096 or 8192 or something, my memory’s fuzzy and I don’t have the bug IDs handy), meaning that most of some of my articles were just missing. And that wasn’t even the only debilitating bug I found in Chromium in the process. So I regretfully removed some of the clevernesses that did produce better results in Firefox, because I found Chromium so terribly buggy in some of the slightly-newer stuff. (My general experience and impression is that Chromium ships fast with lots of bugs that tend to linger, and Firefox ships more slowly with decidedly fewer bugs.)

But still, most CSS bugs aren’t so severe.

[missblit]

Your bug reported 16,384px after accounting for device scale: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=992398

I knew it'd be this number right away, because it's also the maximum screenshot height thanks to being the maximum height of a surface in Chromium (Actually last I checked this technically depends on the GL backend used, but 16kpx seems common)

[wffurr]

4096 was a common max GL texture size on low end hardware.

[frou_dh]

Most Safari comment threads have people looking for an excuse to use the phrase "The new IE" as if it's a zinger they came up with.

[tomxor]

Safari regresses more commonly, and those regressions are often more fundamental vs edge cases, and then they take ages to fix. Sometimes they don't even bother until the next major release which is maddening... Anyone remember how they completely broke iframe sizing on iOS some version or other back and then just left it there?

We were pretty much stuffed due to depending on iframes. Some users are stuck on that version of iOS because their device is "too old" for Apple's liking and we have to tell those users we can't support it, which is horrible because we are effectively being used by Apple to coerce those users to throw their devices away...