Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5 | Hacker News Reader

Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5

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193 pointsdherken115 comments

I like how wikipedia presents its contents in a usable way on IE5.

This is awesome and most likely a part of their mission to make knowledge as accessible as possible. I have seen old, low-end donated PCs that are rife in elementary education in rural India and I'm sure in other developing countries as well. I am sure that these machines will be able to render wikipedia just fine!

I think it's more likely that they simply haven't felt the need to update their styling much in the past decade or so. And last I checked the home page uses tables for layout, so it would make sense that it works on IE5, since that's what everyone did back then.

Actually, they did do a big styling change a year or two ago.

I feel like this is a more sufficient explanation than the one provided by the author. The front-end people at wikipedia probably remember the hoops they jumped through to work within IE5's quirks, and developed best practices that still happen to work out in that context.

You've got to appreciate the irony of microsoft.com being among the worst of the ten (if not the very worst) to render.

Haha, I was just thinking that myself.

And yet you still have a "command prompt" so that you can run your DOS programs as well as "compatibility mode" so that older applications can run on the post-XP systems.

That's backwards, though. MS wants to enable new systems to run old software, and they do this very well. The case in hand is running old software against new content, which they don't care about. The relevant comparison would be running IE10 against a cached copy of some website from 1999. I suspect that test would work rather well.

Well ... I do agree that both the standards and best-practices for creating web content have changed, but I'm pretty sure the most recent version of Excel will open a document I created in the '90s. You could argue they have complete control of both the software and the document format in that instance, but the IE browsers never bothered to be standards compliant anyway ("older IE browsers" - I've been pleasantly surprised by IE9 and IE10).

But the point is that a '90s copy of Excel running would not remotely be able to consume and display a modern .XLSX data file. Going back to the original point, this is why it's impressive that Wikipedia are able to display their site to such an old browser, and ironic that MS doesn't.

> I'm pretty sure the most recent version of Excel will open a document I created in the '90s.

Backwards compatibility is not the same as forwards compatibility, you seem to be confusing them.

You expect an application like Excel to open something made before by an earlier version. MS knows how to handle that format. However, you do not expect Excel 95 to open a xlsx file, it was a format that did not exist when Excel 95 was created.

I think that you are confusing backwards/forwards compatibility with the point the OP seemed to be making: Microsoft never bothered to follow the web standards.

Agreed, but... the standards themselves have changed since 1999.

Yeah, it seems Microsoft always has had good excuses. I wonder if other browsers from that period would have as poor results as IE5 does. I seriously doubt it.

Well the main competitor was Netscape 4, which was even worse.

What exactly was worse in Netscape? Because I just loved using it.

It's extremely bad and buggy CSS support, which was even worse than even IE4, let along IE5.

Unfortunately Microsoft has disabled or removed quite some import filters. e.g. you can't open a PowerPoint 4 file anywhere anymore. They also disabled Works and Word Perfect filters. Probably a victim of the secure coding guidelines: Might have bugs ==> remove feature

It is because of security issues with old code that probably mostly dates back to Office 97 or older. How often do you receive Word 6.0 documents via email nowadays?

How one receieves such documents is irrelevant. Some years ago a relative passed away, leaving hundreds of such documents on her antique computer. Luckily there was free software available that would still allow us to take part of her legacy. But of course, we could just as well have burnt her computer to ashes, as something so ancient must obviously be a security issue.

These files came from a source that can be trusted and are much different from random email attachments. Look up "spear phishing" for example. Most of the converters that still exist can be reenabled in the registry in case you still need to open these files. Office 2010 even provides UI for these options.

"Command prompt", i.e. terminal, is what makes you toy a computer. If you don't have one, it's still a toy.

MS did a lot to turn their lame "DOS command prompt" into a command line terminal; not enough, but a lot.

So no, "command prompt" has nothing to do with DOS. You can run DOS programs from the GUI as well.

Just because the computer in my microwave doesn't have a GUI or a CLI doesn't mean it isn't a computer.

The first computers dealt with input via switches and levers. I don't think anyone would call the Colossus[0] a toy, and it had nothing resembling the command prompt that we know today.

0. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer

Your computer in microwave is not a computer. You can't run custom programs on it, it's not turing complete for you in this sense.

To run custom programs on it, you'll need to add a terminal to it or succumb to the sin of batch processing.

Colossus wasn't actually turing complete. It wasn't a computer except in historic sense.

You can use a GUI-based programming system. An example might be Devpac (68000 assembly language editor/assembler/debugger) on the Atari ST.

(You could get command shells for the ST, because it was a programmable computer, so of course you could make it do pretty much whatever you wanted if you were willing to put the effort in. But the system didn't ship with a command line interface and (as I recall...) most of the programming environments - at least the ones popular in Europe - didn't include one either.)

GUI-based system still needs command shell or it will lose a lot of flexibility arising from being able to evaluate small bits of code and therefore code incrementally.

"Immediate mode" counts.

Command shell, GUI, it's all software. If you have an x86 machine without an operating system on it, is it a computer?

Is an iOS device not a computer because it doesn't have a CLI?

What about a hypothetical computer that uses your brain as input - would that have a CLI? CLI/GUI/etc is irrelevant to the definition of computer.

Unless you're just being a pedantic troll, in which case kudos :)

"If you have an x86 machine without an operating system on it, is it a computer" No, it's a pile of iron and silicon.

"Is an iOS device not a computer because it doesn't have a CLI?" Not after you buy it, you have to turn it into a computer.

"What about a hypothetical computer that uses your brain as input - would that have a CLI?" It sure will, how else will you use it?

It's not pedantism. Pedantism is about meaning of words. My rant is about meaning of concepts. If you hit nails with your microscope, it's not a microscope for you but rather a lame hammer.

Your computer in microwave is not a computer.

> MS did a lot to turn their lame "DOS command prompt" into a command line terminal; not enough, but a lot.

Then they made PowerShell, which removes any complaints one might have!

Well, not any. For example, still no built-in decent package manager able to download and install software along with dependencies.

I believe he/she was being sarcastic there :)

I didn't know bash or zsh had a built-in package manager!

I didn't know "command line terminal" equals "bash or zsh"!

Of course I'm talking ecosystem here.

You may be moving your goal posts here a bit.

My main complaint with PowerShell is that you can't pipe one command to another.

What do you mean? You can do stuff like this:

ps | where { $_.name -like "*host" } | foreach { $_.id | out-host }

Wow, you must be some sort of L33T H4X0r or something. You're the real deal. Everyone else is just playing with toys.

Window's console app has nothing to do with the ability to run DOS applications and the bit that actually does, the DOS virtual machine, doesn't exist on 64-bit versions of windows.

No. MS-DOS programs won't run on Windows. CMD isn't DOS.

You need something like FreeDOS or DOSbox to run the old DOS programs these days.

I'd argue that they have the most incentive for the users to move off of ie5. That being said a message that tells users how to update would be much better then a partially rendered mess.

Well, IE5 is out of support now.

I think it makes sense. They have the most incentive for people to stop using their outdated product (it's hard restoring the image of software like IE).

I think it's doing Wikipedia a disservice to say that it looks good because it's "minimalist" or "static content". There has obviously been a lot of work put into making Wikipedia work well in every browser.

Indeed. They also have Wikipedia Zero, a program to get phone networks in some developing countries to remove mobile internet charges when accessing Wikipedia on phones.

The sad thing is that I was actually needing to use IE5 in February. A Windows 2000 Server machine in India which had been unused for a few years but was being pressed back into service. And Windows Update seemed to need IE6 to be able to install IE6. With a separately-sourced IE6 installer, I did finally get it up to IE6, but I couldn't manage to get it up to IE6 SP1 even then.

IE5 was certainly rather painful to use. Google did not work correctly under it. Microsoft's sites were just about the most painful to browse.

Owing to some malware on the system hijacking some DNS things and some further DNS misconfiguration I couldn't even get Firefox for a while... but I did eventually restore order to the machine and get Firefox 10 ESR installed on it. (The latest supported version to work on Windows 2000.)

The IE6 SP1 installer is still available from MS:

http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=1

Of course do be warned that you are using unsupported software that had not received security updates since July 2010.

Why did anyone bother to press that ancient machine back into service? And why did they not just wipe the hard disk and put up a new copy of the OS on it, especially if there's malware on it?

I bet Hacker News would look fantastic in IE5, tables and all

And they can make the up/down arrows work in even older browsers by using document.images instead of document.getElementById.

And rightfully so!

I would love to see more websites offering a no-frills version for older browsers, mobile browsers, smaller screens, etc.

Once I know that a site provides a specific value to me I really don't care about design and usability anymore.

That seems to be the goal of the Universal ie6 [0] project, albiet for ie6!

[0]- https://code.google.com/p/universal-ie6-css/

Yep, in IE 5.5 it looks peachy.

http://i.imgur.com/XulRdv4.png

Believe it or not, in my previous company people were happy with IE4/5/6. I mean really happy with the blue icon in the middle of their screen. They did not want to move to IE7 even because it was simply "enough" for them. Happy married life, complete in all respects. And this was year 2011, not very far back.

Even in China, they say, a significant percentage of population lives happily with IE6 or below. Don't know the latest stats, but I am sure not much has changed there for good. If captain Jack Sparrow needs a broken compass for navigation, then broken compass is exactly what he'd use for navigation. What can anyone do about it?

[Edits: Jack Sparrow]

Yes, I'd like to see some chinese sites on the list.

For what I can test http://www.alibaba.com/ looks decent in IE6.

One in four browsers in china are IE6. Source: http://www.ie6countdown.com/

(can someone check baidu.com, qq.com, sina.com.cn, csdn.net, alibaba.com in IE5?)

Just depends on the source. According to this, active users is less than 5%:

http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201203...

All 5 pages render fine on IE 5 (I cannot read the text though). Only baidu gives me a JS error message, but seems to work regardless...

Look way more decent than I thought, google is apparently the only one really supporting ie5 as their interface seems absolutely unchanged.

Also noticed the irony of microsoft.com being the worst, maybe it shows that the company wants to move forward, maybe it's just lazyness/rationalisation.

Also it's kind of abvious that amazon works well, they don't want to lose potentials customers (maybe same for google)

I doubt Google "supports" ie5, their home page is just ultra-stripped down. Before they added that toolbar at the top, it was a text box and three or four links. Not much to mess up.

No, that's recognisably the more basic version they serve to older browsers.

I absolutely love the irony there. Then again, I can't really knock them for not making their website work on IE 5 since they don't support that browser any more.

Doesn't shock me. They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers. They created http://www.ie6countdown.com/ after all.

It's also probably near impossible to get their current site working on IE5, and to make a completely separate site just for them (and it's a really really small percentage of worldwide users) would be highly cost prohibitive.

> They're one of the biggest proponents of trying to get people to update their browsers.

Oh, so that's why they wanted my grandma to buy a new version of Windows (and a new computer to meet the system requirements) just to update Internet Explorer.

Windows XP supports up to IE8, Vista IE9 and 7 IE10. There's only so much you can do when an OS is on life support, and making sacrifices just to give an OS another version of IE is just stupid.

The very latest versions of Firefox and Chrome don't seem to have a problem supporting older versions of Windows.

Can you tell me more about these sacrifices that would have to be made? I'm genuinely interested.

It looks like the microsoft site is "feature detecting" at some level, and serving up a really basic mobile-oriented site. Think feature phone web browser.

And for my next magic trick, popular modern video games rendered in 256 bit color.

Sort of....ish....

Have a look what the Far Cry 3 people have created with Blood Dragon. Dont have to buy it, just have a look on youtube.

256 colors? Why so high? And not, say, running on a monochrome text terminal? http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/

I think you mean 8-bit, which allows for 256 colors.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth

20 or so years ago, I've got a Hercules card for my dear old 386 machine - Good resolution at the time, but just two colors. There are couple of good games - Star Control II, Trolls, etc. that I've liked and what I did was first to disable the VGA detection, second was to find where the back buffer was in the game, and if there was none (Star Control II), point to my allocated.

Then on the fly convert 320x200x256 colors to monochrome - I mean it was very silly - just pick one of the bits - and with some experiments it worked (no, it's not the way to go in general - but I was able to play).

That was dog slow, but it felt like smoking something, getting high - it didn't matter that the game was unplayable (10fps or less) - it was the fact that it worked!!!

Probably not too far off:

Doom 3 on a VooDoo 2 SLI setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUVXAl0dgYY

Similarly interesting would be the rendering of these sites with IE5’s competitors, i.e. the major browsers available in 1999. This would have been Netscape 4.5 and some version of AOL, presumably.

This would be fun, I'll try to get Netscape Navigator 4.5 and AOL Explorer 1.? running...

Didn't AOL switch to hosting an IE object around IE4 time?

It is not really enough to just compare looks.

For example, even Amazon sites on Firefox 3.6.* browsers in the last couple of months show extremely inconsistent behaviour, e.g. inability to submit new searches after an existing search.

I suspect the only sites that actually work on that list without significant issues are Google and Wikipedia, both optimized to be highly compatible.

Wikipedia stood good there. I'm sure with Netscape's then version, the scene would have been even worse.

But this is only visual aspect, which I believe, is the only part that's easy to measure. It would be interesting to think on how to make it 'easy' to add other dimensions like Functionality, SEO, Accessibility etc. to the list.

Aw I really wanted to see how Craigslist would appear to see if there is any discernible difference, whatsoever.

For what it's worth, Google is still usable in lynx.

Most sites are. Lynx is just the web without CSS or JS.

Most sites these days are inoperable without JS.

Not really. Name me a major site that doesn't work at all without JS.

Dropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/

In Firefox 20.0.1, with Javascript disabled, after the login the home listing has a "The Dropbox website require JavaScript" text.

[EDIT: Clickable, more info]

Well, Dropbox is an interesting example. If you have no JS, you probably can't download much either.

Why not? As it seems, JS is not doing anything that isn't do-able with a <a href="...file..." target="_blank"> - as soon as the browser gets a file that it cant render (.zip, ...), it will download it.

The magic is in the server, which must set the MIME type to application\octet-stream or something similar, so the browser doesnt try to render certain browser-rendable files (.htmls, .pdfs, ...)

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-usi...

I just mean users without JS usually aren't ones who are downloading files. Lynx is possibly an exception, though, since it's sometimes used by server admins like myself to grab packages.

Ah ok. But is there some reason for Lynx not to support JS? Is this by design? I also found out about links [1] and elinks [2] but seems that their JS support is marginal or requires compiling with certain flags [3]. Haven't anyone tried to incorporate V8 yet?

[1]: http://links.twibright.com/

[2]: http://elinks.or.cz/index.html

[3]: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353519/lynx-with-javascr...

Implementing JS would be a huge undertaking (they'd have to implement lots of APIs and the DOM, for starters). Such text-mode browsers are usually light on resources, too, and this would change that. Also, JS is usually used with the assumption graphics support is there.

Since you're OK with poking fun at other people's software, I'll point out that your left margin vanishes at 990px viewport, and readers need the left-right scrollbar to read below 750px viewports. Not a great reading experience (in Safari 6 on Lion). Cheers!

What % of their revenue does traffic from IE 5 represent? Now, what would the cost in internal resources to maintain browser compatibility on the scale of these sites? (hint: it's a lot) The math is pretty clear.

RTFA. It clearly states that this is an exercise in fun, not in judgment or criticism.

I was surprised at the size of the screenshots - 750x340. Not 800x600, not even 854x480, but 22:10. Given that layouts tend to break vertically, I was expecting the shots to be at least to the fold.

About a year ago I did the same thing with IE 5.1 for Mac, which was Microsoft's couterpart from this era.

https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150673019866971....

It had its own set of insane quirks, even worse than Windows IE5. It was the default browser on Mac OS for a long time, until Safari I think.

*IE 5.1 for Mac

Arg stupid typo, fixed, thanks.

I remember the bad ol' days of having to support that browser. It wasn't compatible with it's windows counterpart and the 0.5% userbase were highly vocal if anything broke.

Ah, Tasman. Later MS did develop much better versions, but unfortunately new versions of IE for Mac ended when Apple moved to Safari/WebKit.

Now let's fire up lynx which I haven't used since before IE 4.

I recommend links for text-mode browsing.

I wish they had showed the feed instead of the unlogged landing page of Facebook. It explodes pretty hilariously on my VM IE 6 at least.

The funny thing is that MS supported IE 5.01 on Windows 2000 until 2010, unlike other versions of IE 5.x. If I remember correctly, even MS's own Windows Update v6 released in 2005 had problems displaying in that browser such that they had to put up a warning message.

I laughed out loud at Microsoft

Microsoft's design uses a mobile first approach with media queries and other techniques to make it a ubiquitous experience regardless of device. The others don't. That's why it looks the worst in an ancient browser, although it arguably looks better than the other examples if you were to open the same page on an array of devices with differing dynamics.

Thanks for explaining this :). There had to be a good reason as to why Microsoft would approach IE5 this way and I was wondering why.

Irony worst looking website out of the list is Microsoft.com

I love how Google doesn't really look different at all. Looks the same on IE5 basically as it does in IE10, ha.

"Back in the year 1999 Microsoft released it's"

its

It would be interesting to know how those pages function in IE5. Does anything they do rely on JS IE5 doesn't understand? CSS IE5 can't process? eBay, Amazon, and Facebook especially might become worthless even though it looks like they render in a usable fashion.

Although I am not certain about it, the way browsers are expected to handle encryption may have also changed in 14 years -- making payment gateways on these websites wither unusable or risky.

IE5 had XHR, but didn't have native JSON support and a number of other features. I think it was on ECMA 1 or 2 until IE5.5, which had 3.

I wager no one uses JSON shims anymore. I don't really know what would happen when you try to use JSON in ECMA 1 or 2.

Native JSON support was only added in IE8.

Anyone that uses jQuery’s (<=1.9) JSON functionality is using a JSON shim:

https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/1.9-stable/src/core.js...

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