Show HN: Quik – Internet Explorer as a Service | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Quik – Internet Explorer as a Service

quik.dev

36 pointsmrskitch10 comments

Hey folks, Joel here (creator of Quik + browserless.io). Quik came about as an attempt to stop spending time on IE support... but still support it when you have to. A vast amount of my "frustration" time as a developer was getting VM's to run IE to even test the site, let alone do the required repairs. Huge time-sink.

Anyways, happy to answer questions or talk more about it. Pretty fun/novel way of solving this problem!

Huge fan of Quik. I build https://terusama.com using modern development practices, and hit the point where _not_ supporting internet explorer was _not_ an option. We build software for the logistics industry, so freight brokers can schedule trucks at warehouses. Some people who need access to my scheduling website, were accessing our site through ancient Citrix VM's. "Just install chrome", wasn't even in the realm of possibility. If I make concessions to manually schedule appointments for these people, it's an incredibly slippery slope of making other concessions. Our value proposition of being entirely automated and saving people time also starts to lose its value.

Quik is insane, because I don't have to do anything, and am now compatible with Internet Explorer, in a secure way. Being able to take a modern web stack, and have, "IE compatibility" as a feature, is totally attractive to old-school enterprises, when that's your target clientele.

The is the simultaneously the silliest and best solution to the problem I've seen.

I would’ve called it: Nearly headless quik

Support the Browser That Must Not Be Named

On the one hand, this looks like an amazing solution. But because there's a VM on the other side, I'm worried about pricing. If my site becomes popular, won't this become expensive?

Is it like GeForce now but for webpages?

Yeah, you can definitely think of it like that

I tried browserless.io, it sends every frame as picture from the backend to the browser. I suppose quik will use the same technology?

While supporting IE without any developer work is very impressive, I think quik has some limitions: 1. requres a lot of bandwidth, a place using IE has a high chance don't have a modern internet infrastructure, thus limiting concurrent users. 2. Playing video is basically impossible because intraframe compression is just not efficient enough even on a good network.

Hey it’s looking good! I wonder how much of my idea was used in the final product :)

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