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Show HN: Internet Explorer Stole My Life

iestolemylife.com

15 pointsrosary12 comments

Had an idea on my lunch break Friday, and 12 hours later a friend and I had a made it a rough reality:

Internet Explorer Stole My Life. From the site: "Simply put, Internet Explorer is the bane of every web designer and programmer's existence. It's seen masterpieces ripped to shreds, and countless hours wasted simply attempting to get it to play nice. This site is a tribute to all those days gone because Internet Explorer refuses to adopt proper web standards. Take a moment to mourn your lost time and send a message: enough is enough."

What you see here is the first public iteration of the site. I'd love to get any feedback to see where we need to go from here.

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Alternate title: Internet Explorer created my industry.

Say what you want about Microsoft and their products, but you have to admit that we're all a lot wealthier because of them. In 1994, when I graduated from school, "computer programmer" was a low-paid position writing accounting software for a big company, with no real hope for advancement. Today, it's a license to print money.

I put a lot of the credit for that down to MS forcibly placing desktop PCs in the hands of pretty much everybody, and (debatably with evil intent) standardizing things to the point where you can get all those computers on the Internet.

So no, I hold no bitterness for them. IE takes up my time, because it's my job to have my time taken up writing software that works with web browsers. The fruit of that time spent has thus far been a good amount of wealth, and the flexibility to do pretty much whatever I want with it.

Not a bad trade, if you ask me.

1027 / 80 = 12.8 human lifetimes or so.

At my last workplace Windows XP took over 5 minutes to boot, just the correct amount of time that you couldn't really do any other task with it. Ubuntu took a maximum 40 seconds on the same machine. So take the 4 minute 20 second difference, every day (300 days a year let's say), times every office worker in a similar situation (less low ball it massively with 100 million), times just 5 years.

300 x 5 = 1500 days

1500 x 100 million = 150,000,000,000

((((150000000000 / 4.333) / 60) / 24) / 365.24) / 80 = 822.8 human lifetimes. Expand it beyond the 100 million and 5 years and weep.

At least a whole generation of a small country town worth of human experience extinguished, or converted into paper-shuffling and wall-staring, because of a team of programmers at MS didn't optimize. Exaggerated impact? Maybe, but it seems like there was quite a bit of headroom/low hanging fruit for others to have gotten it so fast.

  import urllib
  params = urllib.urlencode({'days_wasted': 99, 'hours_wasted': 999, 'minutes_wasted':999})
  for x in range(999):
      f = urllib.urlopen("http://www.iestolemylife.com/save", params)
      print f.read()

tl,dr: don't let one IP submit more than 10 times the maximum recorded life expectancy of a human

At least, from the previews, it seems IE9 is fitting much more to the standards and getting really good results on ACID tests.

Anyway, adapting websites for IE6 was really disturbing... strange margins, propietary parameters and a large etcetera that could really help make your life unpleasant.

Hope IE9 really does as good as it seems from reviews.

IE was – if not the main reason – one of the main reasons I quit my job as a front-end developer. (I still do front-end developing, but as my own boss, I can charge the true costs of extra work needed by IE + compensation for my mental suffering.)

I haven't done any web development for a couple months now and I still entered in 2 hours for time spent dealing with clunky sites that don't work in any browser other than IE6.

I prefer this; http://www.saveie6.com/

If only showing something like this to the IE dev team would make them feel guilty enough to finally give up on their failed attempt to make a browser that works and put their development skills to work for something more useful.

sigh

Have you ever worked on a product team?

I can almost guarantee you the developers had very little to do with the lack of standards support. That's a feature, and features are decided on by PMs, who are usually on the short leash of middle/upper management.

No, I clearly haven't. The comment was meant to be tongue-in-cheek but I guess it didn't come across that way.

I guess what I was getting at is that no other browser has websites dedicated to its demise, logging the number of hours lost, or the like. Although I realize that much of this comes from earlier versions of the browser that is supposedly going to be addressed in the IE9 which is currently scoring a 95 on the ACID3 in the most recent release, it took awhile to get there.

Also, that seems surprising to me that standards support is considered a feature. Now with the full disclosure that I have absolutely no experience developing a browser or anything nearly on that scale it seems surprising that developing something the way it is laid out by an organization such as the W3C (say what you will about html5) would be considered highly optional, and in that case upper/middle management should prioritize this.

The fact that things like the IE=EmulateIE7 meta tag even exist shows that there is something inherently broken.

I guess devs was the wrong word to use, what I meant was that MS should seriously take a look at the browser landscape and figure out what it can do to help its developers. Every time I work on a front end and I get frustrated by IE inconsistencies, that's one more time that I'm cursing Microsoft... and that is not good for business.

Or then they will proudly see what lengths developers will go to to support their software.

Indeed. One can hope :-/

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