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IE was such a scourge, a drain on humanity (at least the slice of humanity that made websites). One of Microsoft's great evils - they let the product stagnate for years once they had the market cornered.
Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.
Besides vendor tricks, I'd like to see a showcase or article about the evolution of page layout patterns over time. That is, the underlying techniques, not the aesthetics; tables, fixed image sizes, float/clear, flex, etc. I'm finding https://code-literacy.medium.com/css-layout-evolution-detail... but it's quite skeletal and incomplete. Has anyone here come across a more complete write-up?
I last heavily worked with CSS in 2010/2011. These still don't feel old to me.
There came a point where if you wrote good HTML/CSS that passed the W3C validator, you were golden on pretty much any device. This still rings true today.
Passing the validator never saved me at 3am. Valid markup just meant it was legal, not that it rendered. What broke was always some kiosk or ancient Android browser nobody had tested on. Still true today, honestly.
When working in the public sector in 2016 I had a person seriously annoyed with me for dropping IE6 support when all their libraries (as in buildings with books) were still on it.
I was having a peaceful day until these CSS curiosities brought back memories of my painful days. It's really good that we don't need to deal with such hacks and vendor-specific things anymore. The last time I participated in a project that targeted an old browser was in 2018!
> Then you end up with shit performance or broken sites in Firefox
I work for a large corporation. A few years ago, they removed FF as a browser people could use at the company and removed it from the internal app store. Then, if you had a version, they forcibly uninstalled it.
As someone who's a developer, I needed access to be able to test on. Never forget going into the tech support office and saying I need this installed to be able to test my code. Support guy says, "Yeah sure mate, let's get that reinstalled for you." Tech guy downloaded it, started the install, and suddenly got a pop-up warning him it was against company policy to have this installed on your machine. It then auto-removed the app files he just downloaded. We sat there dumbfounded. "I guess we're going to have to escalate this mate." he said with a confused look on his face.
Almost four months later, support finally relented, but put in so many barriers to get installed that only a handful of devs have it on their machines now. I get emails almost daily, "Mate, I need you to test this in FF." or "Is this breaking in FF?"
I guess the reason given was FF lags in updating their certs, making a prime target for malware attacks so they just killed it so they wouldn't have to deal with it.
Just kind of strange that my entire career I was constantly told I needed to test this on any and all browsers available because they all have their nuances and you never know what might break something. To moving to a time where I'm testing on a single browser and calling it good? Man, times they are a changing.
It's easy nowadays to make websites that function perfectly and look beautiful on all devices, browsers, and systems from 10 years ago until today. If somebody cannot deliver that, they should be fired from their job.
That is not quite the same problem. Modern browsers are vastly more standards-compliant than they were in the IE era, and most CSS/JS works across Chrome, Firefox and Safari without browser-specific hacks.
There was a time when we routinely did browser sniffing, maintained IE-specific code paths, used vendor prefixes everywhere, and sometimes shipped completely different fixes depending on the browser. That largely disappeared as browsers converged on standards.
Chrome-first development can still cause bugs elsewhere, but that's usually a "testing/implementation problem" rather than the same compatibility mess we had back then.
We got bitten by this a couple years back. Cheap fix was running the same Playwright suite against chromium, firefox and webkit in CI. Webkit caught more breakage than Firefox did, honestly. Took maybe an hour to set up, and it's the closest thing we have to a safety net for the Safari stuff too.
The magnitude might be greater in specific sub areas, for example if you are doing chrome first, how is your accessibility on Safari? I don't know myself, but I think there are holes people don't notice with this approach.
Also I agree the thing about Meerita's post being flagged and dead seems wrong. There is evidently nothing wrong with the post and it should not be.
Mostly Internet Explorer 7 and 8, some Mozilla Firefox builds. That’s what I had in mind when I said “old browsers.” The last project I worked on that still had to support browsers from that era was in 2018.
When I took web design courses they basically told us you effectively have to make two websites - one for IE6, and one for all the other browsers. It came down to a bunch of crazy hacks and conditionals you had to bake in.
I remember when in a past life we were allowed to bump the minimum supported IE version of our SPA framework from 6 to 8. It was a joyful day – but we soon realized that it didn’t really buy us that much because 8 was almost as quirky…
I wonder how many trillions in GDP we missed out on due to them building a monopoly in the browser space and then abandoning it. You can't imagine how happy I was in 2005 when Microsoft announced they were resuming development on IE. I was already a fan of Firefox by that point, but a lot of web dev was such a drag because you couldn't just use modern browser features--you had to accommodate all the users still browsing with that dinosaur.
It's not just that it had quirks, it's that your feedback loop was longer in IE compared to Firefox with Firebug and Chrome. IE 7 did not, to my recollection, have a way to open developer tools and tweak CSS values until it looked right, or even to see what the effective CSS on an element was. So you had to save and refresh. Sure, that's not a super long cycle time compared to, say, compiling a binary and flashing to a ROM, but it's longer than the other browsers I was working with at the time.
it was frustrating but i preferred it to dealing with stuff like node, tooling, mobile and tablet views, that stuff really burned me out in a way that IE 6 never did.
The funny thing about old IE versions is that they did in fact get one thing right in retrospect; the box model used was a lot more intuitive than the one used by 'default' in standards compliant browsers. Why would border and padding be outside the main element's width? That doesn't match how anyone thinks of a box...
Either way, the end result was that everyone started using box-sizing: border-box when it was added, and now even the folks at the W3C regret the old box sizing model being used at all.
Surprised how many of these I didn't remember though. Filters, yes. Syntax hacks to trick IE into using one CSS value while compliant browsers used another, sure. But I don't think I ever came across 'HTML Components' before reading this article.
I used these CSS styles in the late 90s to make internal browser-based apps for our call centre agents that looked & felt more like native Windows desktop apps.
The really funky part of the IE6 PNG fix was that the URL of the image in the expression was always relative to the current page URL, not the CSS file that the declaration was in.
I remember having to use Javascript to generate the image path (I cannot quite remember why absolute or root-relative URLs were not an option for us though...)
I built a mildly responsive site in 2007 using transparent PNGs overlaying a photo in the header, only for it to turn out that the client’s IT policy blocked the PNG loader. In the end I had to explain to them that everyone else would see the site normally, and they’d have to put up with it until IE7 launched.
As far as I remember, that came from the AlphaImageLoader filter itself resolving src against the document, not from expression(). My guess on why absolute paths weren't an option: staging and production often lived under different subpaths, and hardcoding either one broke the other. I never confirmed that, though.
Remember rounded corners? It was a real pain, there were so many hacks to achieve something simple as
border-radius: 16px;
My other favorite was sIFR font loading :) Because font support was... patchy, a technique was invented to replace headers with Flash embeds which rendered the desired font:
...and that was a grand improvement over having to make a "tic-tac-toe" table where you'd be putting things in the particular surrounding cells to fake these fancy border-types.
I was described by a slightly mad client as “the Harry Potter of front-end development” after I’d pulled off a particular effect my designer had come up with. (They then proceeded to give the entire dev team Harrods hampers and failed to pay the company when we sent an invoice.)
Missing the whole IE quirks mode vs standards mode thing, but nice.
Some of those hacks were specifically for IE, and there was a debate on staying quirks vs going standards mode. Each had its own drawbacks and choices.
> Internet Explorer had a number of iffy behaviours and lagged behind other browsers for many visual effects, even regarding basic properties like opacity. Thus, Microsoft brought in bespoke filter functionality.
That's not accurate at all. At the time IE4 launched, it was ahead of the competition. It also had quite a lot of non-standard extras as part of Microsofts strategy to embrace, extend and extinguish. IE4 was extend. In other cases the strategy worked, but not for the web.
The DirectX filters weren't used pretty much anywhere until it turned out it could do things that were specced and implemented by others years later.
How come when Microsoft does it, it's EEE, but when Google does it, it's just progress? Nobody stopped other browsers from implementing things the Microsoft way.
I see. Although filters were implemented in IE4, DirectX filters came about in IE5.5
However, the extend phase wasn't just IE4. They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6. By the time IE7 came out, it was clear the web is here to stay.
The lock-in stopped but the bill didn't. We ran a small SaaS around 2009 and IE6 was still about 15% of our signups, mostly corporate machines tied to ActiveX intranet apps. Supporting it ate maybe a fifth of our front-end time. Nobody could upgrade without breaking some internal tool.
> They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6.
IE6 also stuck around a lot longer than previous versions. It was released in 2001; IE7 didn't show up until 2006, and was an optional update which many users skipped.
Both not tricks, and I can't say I miss them, because I didn't work as web dev at the time. I only witnessed the trailing part of the pain, when I started, there were mostly flexbox-related browser inconsistencies.
Anyway:
cursor: hand !indispensable;
seems vastly superior to
cursor: pointer !important;
And I once came across the CSS "script expressions" out of web history curiosity.
Dangerous but appealing idea.
Seems like every web dev (well, those working on server-rendered markup and without AI, at least) would feel a desire for this at some point, but it was doomed at the time.
In some ways, reminds me of Houdini regarding the CSS->JS coupling (the other direction is already normal, sure).
But the intent behind it was probably just to allow maximum flexibility... well
None of them — they were all ugly hacks, and we wasted stupid amounts of time and brainpower testing sites and then researching and applying the hacks.
I still hate Microsoft for 'winning' the browser war and then letting IE stagnate for so many years. So much time and money wasted because of their behaviour. Arseholes.
The Chrome monoculture is just as bad as the previous IE6 monoculture. Back when we had several browsers, all different, that was optimal anti-enshittification.
Still remember adding zoom: 1 to fix hasLayout bugs without anyone knowing why it worked. You just sprinkled it until the box stopped collapsing. Same cargo cult now with translateZ(0) and will-change. Different decade, same voodoo.
Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.