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Comment by ryanschaefer | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

Here's an archive of their momentous blog post:

https://forums.anandtech.com/threads/ie-update-to-debut-ahea...

They shipped a beta later that year, but the full release arrived in late 2006. That was 4 years since their prior release, an eternity in those days!

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.

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