Is Chrome the New IE? (2023)

I see so many ideological arguments around "X is the new IE" that neglect one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation. Working around all of its quirks and non-standard behavior had an extremely long half-life; the venn diagram of things that worked correctly across all major browsers at the time was very complex and messy. Even with the release of IE7 it took many years for people to adopt it, and IE7 was hardly a saint either.

There's a part of my brain I'll never get back devoted to all of these workarounds. So many hours lost to weird corporate networks that had quirks mode enabled, different box models (before the advent of the `box-sizing` CSS attribute), random omissions of standards (no `:hover` on elements besides `a`), etc.

> one of the worst pieces of IE 6's reign of terror: the stagnation.

This is the thing that I think developers today don’t seem to be able to get their head around. There was a fourteen year time period between Internet Explorer 6 being released and when it dropped out of usage worldwide. Even if you only had to support the USA, it was still eleven years. People could go their entire careers without ever knowing what it was like not having to support it. It paralysed front-end development for more than a decade.

Deprecating it if your site had much traffic was like pulling teeth! I worked at a company that had IT professionals as its main demographic in 2011 and it was a constant struggle. Lots of corporations were locked into IE6 because they had developed internal applications that relied on ActiveX controls or other non-standard APIs. IE7 was still pretty terrible, and it took even longer to drop support.

CSS was pretty bad but at least well-documented; debugging JS was a whole other hell. There was no such thing as dev tooling, and you got a small alert in the status bar when the page had errors, which opened a pop up that gave you the line number and very little other information. Supposedly you could connect it to VisualStudio and get a full debugging experience, but I never had the luxury. Lots of guessing and checking. Firebug was a huge deal when it launched.

Oh man, the days of no dev tools. Man it really is incredible to think how far things have come.