[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.