Yet another Hacker News

24 points robin_reala 4 hours ago 11 comments

meerita 1 hour ago | parent

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!

robin_reala 1 hour ago | parent

Out of interest, how do you define “old”?

meerita 1 hour ago | parent

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.

robin_reala 36 minutes ago | parent

Sounds about right. Looking back I’d already moved IE7 to “functional” support in late 2016[1] and was planning to do the same to 8 and 9 in the not too distant future.

[1] https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/10/21/gaining-understand...

nottorp 1 hour ago | parent

> we don't need to deal with such hacks and vendor-specific things anymore

Unfortunately that means everyone targets chrome.

Then you end up with shit performance or broken sites in Firefox [1].

You'd think with "AI" they could generate js/css that works in both browsers...

[1] Which is the only browser that can still run proper ublock origin...

Edit: someone pointed below that the compatibility problem's magnitude is much smaller. Seems flagged and dead for unknown reasons.

The magnitude is probably much smaller, but that makes it worse, because people will just forget about FF.

vladde 58 minutes ago | parent

funny how almost all of these are just related to Internet Explorer haha

ryanschaefer 52 minutes ago | parent

If anything is worthy of the title “load-bearing” it’s IE…

I wonder how many collective years of developers’ lifespans were dedicated just to addressing its quirks.

mike_tyson 17 minutes ago | parent

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.

mike_tyson 23 minutes ago | parent

miss those days.

i was seen as a genius at work for understanding quirks mode and how JScript differed from javascript/ecmascript

Cyykratahk 11 minutes ago | parent

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...)

sbarre 9 minutes ago | parent

Surprised there was no mention of the old system theme colours (that I think still work in some browsers but are long-deprecated):

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...

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.