It was likely flagged. Anti-Google stories don't do well on HN. There's a very strong bias against anti-Google stories, but a strong bias for anti-MS stories.
Don't know about you, but as web dev/designer who codes html emails and websites, I curse Microsoft on a daily basis!
Thankfully ie6 is no longer and issue and there are many frameworks that making building websites for ie7/8 along with the others a snap. Wish there was something for html emails cause i was just cursing microsoft and wishing they'd hurry up and go extinct.
You do realize that IE6 is more than 11 years old. Microsoft wishes everyone used IE10 probably more than you do.
Do you curse Apple because of Safari 1? Which is actually newer than IE6?
Microsoft's greatest fault here is that they haven't been able to get people to upgrade their OS fast enough. An odd reason to curse them. And an odder reason still to flag their articles and push Google articles.
I get that everyone will have some bias, but the amount of bias doesn't seem justified, IMO.
If anything the amount of bias is way to low, MS singlehandedly crippled progress on the web for many many years and would deserve to be burned to the ground by an angry mob of webdevs for it.
You can develop in Chrome and it just works in Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc., but without fail things are always broken in IE (yes also in 6+ versions). Any webdev could tell you about the horrors.
IE versions have always been DOA compared to what’s possible in competing browsers at the time. Microsoft's fault of not getting people to upgrade is their own doing by not anticipating and adequately reacting to the problem… or frankly just not giving a shit™. Others don’t have these upgrade problems.
Also, we can be very thankful that they failed in their ploy to make the whole web IE-specific, but we should not forget and it’s to soon to forgive.
Do you not remember how much of a giant leap forward IE6 was when it was introduced? Or how massively far ahead of Netscape 4.x IE 5/5.5/6 were? IE5 gave us AJAX, and its CSS support was light-years better than the competition when it was released.
I've been a die-hard Microsoft hater since I was a teenager. Even so, there was a period from 2000-2004 when I used IE, because it was so clearly better than any other browser on the Internet. I gave up Netscape reluctantly, but when it just hung on half the sites of the Internet because it was so buggy, it was time to switch.
I take it you don't remember coding <layer> tags and working with Netscape's broken & nonstandard DOM implementation either, nor laying everything out with tables and spacer GIFs because it didn't support CSS. It used to be we'd get our pages to work in IE first, and then the boss would grudgingly say "And you've gotta make it work in Netscape too." (That was actually what got me my first full-time job...they called me in for an interview and during it I worked around a nasty layers bug that they hadn't been able to figure out.)
Was IE6 really all that much of an improvement over the mozilla browser (Not Netscape, precursor to phoenix -> firebird -> firefox ) at the time? I can't remember a time were I found IE to be actually better, or even comparable until recently.
Yes Netscape was having problems around that time, good luck trying to finance the development of a complex commercial software project when your competitor is abusing its monopoly by bundling a free alternative with its operating system. You are right about the ancient history timeframe but my points are valid for everything that happened with and after version 6, you know… the point when the web and broadband really started to take off.
And you could have used Opera or the Phoenix/Firebird Firefox-precursor instead of IE6.
With IE 4/5/6, MS also made a browser that was light-years ahead from a user's point of view than the competing browsers at the time from a speed and usability perspective.
At the time, Netscape 4 was a bloated, buggy joke, and was happily doing stupid stuff like re-downloading the content it was displaying when you resized the main window because its caching was so atrocious. And this was in the days of 28.8k / 56.6k modems, so if you resized the window, you'd probably be waiting 30+ seconds for the webpage to redownload and redraw, during which Netscape would either lock up or display a blank page, whereas in IE it could instantly resize with the content it had locally. That meant a huge amount in those days.
If microsoft had not shipped a couple of hundred million graphics terminals the web would have never taken off.
Arguably windows was one of the key ingredients in the soup that allowed the web to take off (the others: universal access to the net, Peter Tattam's trumpet winsock, the mosaic browser and ncsa httpd).
Right, because Microsoft invented it all (OS-tech) and nobody else would have been able to produce a graphical OS in it’s place… there is a difference between actually innovating and making a difference and simply being there because you were able to dominate the market trough shady practices. As I pointed out these things rather happened despite Microsoft than because of it.
Look, I'm about as anti MS as is possible, on a scale of 0 to 100 I'm stuck near the 100 end and nothing Microsoft or Bill Gates will do can change this. They're beyond redeeming themselves as far as I'm concerned. I routinely return mail to sender because people insist on sending me something that only a proprietary reader or application can open. I'd rather use linux and bloody open-office (or libre office or whatever they decide to call it today) because I very well remember the tricks that Microsoft pulled.
And yet, in spite of all that I have no problem with crediting them with those things they actually did.
I did not claim Microsoft invented it all, I did not say that nobody else would have been able to produce an alternative, I did not say it was very innovative, nor did I claim they got there in an ethically sound way.
But they did what they did and no amount of living in denial is going to undo that.
You are living in denial when you claim that the web would have never taken off were it not for Microsoft, especially when it was/is probably the biggest threat to the open web we now know. Every possible alternative OS would have been at least as capable of propelling the web, probably more so as katbyte points out.
Your argument is about the same as telling North Korean citizens they have to thank the Dear Leader for the good things they have. Technically correct but horribly lacking in perspective.
Like it or not, Microsoft totally dominated the home computer market in the 1990's, which is when the internet began to take hold. I'm no Microsoft fan, but to deny that they has a significant impact on the adoption of the web as we know it today is extremely short sighted. I suppose that you may be too young to remember of course...
Without a doubt MS used anti-competitive measures, but I grew up and was using their stuff during the time (late 90s), and I'm still not convinced bundling a browser made that much difference for the average person who was buying a new computer at the time.
I say this because I used to help out a lot of family/friends with their computer issues, and the vast majority of them during the time were using AOL or Compuserve for their internet access which had its own browser and didn't use IE at all (until several years later when they started using it).
Similarly, packages from BT (in the UK, the main phone line provider) shipped installs of Netscape, and to use it, the average user would have to use that (because they couldn't cope with the Dial-up-networking part of Windows as it was too complicated). They'd just double-click the "BT Internet" icon on the desktop, which would start Netscape and automatically dial up to their ISP.
In fact, I distinctly remember trying to convert several people from Netscape to IE, and this was with Windows 98. (I remember showing them active desktop).
Or we might be in a better place if superior graphical OS's (like OS/2) had been allowed to flourish instead of being killed off though business tactics rather then by having a better product.
The same could be said for IE6. They again pushed a inferior product to market through questionable business tactics making a purposely broken browser the dominant player for a very long time. Its interesting to imagine where the web and personal computing would be today if neither of those two things had happened...
> They again pushed a inferior product to market through questionable business tactics making a purposely broken browser the dominant player for a very long time.
That's not true. You have false memory of things that never happened. When IE6 came out, it was nothing short of incredible.
Are you sure? It was some time ago but I remember Mozilla being a better browser overall and far more secure. Maybe I am just remembering wrong, or I'm a few years off but I don't remember IE ever being comparable in quality to Mozilla, now Firefox, until fairly recently (IE8/9).
Even the wiki page for IE6 states (among many other negative things):
"This version of Internet Explorer is currently widely criticized for its security issues and lack of support for modern web standards, making frequent appearances in "worst tech products of all time" lists, with some publications labelling it as the "least secure software on the planet."
However it is wiki, so please do tell, what exactly made the release of IE6 so incredible when compared the the other browsers of its time??
When Firefox came out in 2003/2004, that was impressive and better than IE. Before then, Netscape and Mozilla were slow and very buggy.
IE6 was released in 2001, and at the time it was great. The fact that MS stopped working on it and the fact that most corporate IT networks stayed on it so long when the rest of the world had moved on are what gave it a bad name in the years since. But when it was released, it was great.
wow long thread here and most in regards to coding websites for legacy IE.
Well again my angst isn't about legacy IE cause indeed MS has moved forward in this regards & frameworks (i.e. boilerplate) make it easy to code for ie7 on up, but their outlook clients uses a form of MS Word to render html emails. Prior to 2007 they didnt use MS Word and older outlook clients are more simple to deal with in rendering your HTML emails perfectly. Though why in 2007 did they switch to a worse and more complicated rendering technology and then in 2010 stick with the same crap and then the latest 2013 remain sticking with the same crap rendering engine? It's all about money I am sure but in the end it only hurts them, as us techies loathe them and we are the innovators and early adopters.
That's because some posts get flagged by folks who either think it doesn't belong on HN, or that it spam/offtopic/flame and the posts move downwards.
However, sometimes people seem to flag posts because they don't want them see by HN readers. I've seen this happen to a lot of links to stories that aren't charitable to Google/Apple or are friendly to Microsoft even if they're legitimate news stories or even just announcements.
Also wanted to mention that lately I've seen even some Apple news and announcements get flagged a lot. I speculate Google/Android fans/employees/shareholders are going a bit overboard. :)
