7 ms·
Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5
- pinko 13y agoYou've got to appreciate the irony of microsoft.com being among the worst of the ten (if not the very worst) to render.
- evanbriggs 13y agoHaha, I was just thinking that myself.
- smoyer 13y agoAnd 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.
- ajross 13y agoThat'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.
- smoyer 13y agoWell ... 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).
- bashinator 13y agoBut 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.
- mhurron 13y ago> 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.
- LekkoscPiwa 13y agoI 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.
- magic_haze 13y agoAgreed, but... the standards themselves have changed since 1999.
- LekkoscPiwa 13y agoYeah, 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.
- yuhong 13y agoWell the main competitor was Netscape 4, which was even worse.
- guard-of-terra 13y ago"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.
- warfangle 13y agoJust 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colossus_computer
- guard-of-terra 13y agoYour 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.
- to3m 13y agoYou 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.)
- guard-of-terra 13y agoGUI-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.
- mbell 13y agoWindow'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.
- jpswade 13y agoNo. 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.
- speiler 13y agoI'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.
- yuhong 13y agoWell, IE5 is out of support now.
- olegbl 13y agoI 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).
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- eksith 13y agoTrue. And I think they went with the bare minimum necessary to display a functional web page (Google's extra junk is mostly analytics); the side-effect being a more usable page on older browsers.
- hrayr 13y agoAlso probably because Google and Wikipedia's design wen't largely unchanged in the past 13 years.
- mmuro 13y agoThis has nothing to do with CSS3. Wikipedia still looks good because it uses tables for layout. It's worthy of IE 5.5's good graces at that point.
- monsterix 13y agoBelieve 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]
- majke 13y agoYes, I'd like to see some chinese sites on the list. For what I can test http://www.alibaba.com/ http://www.alibaba.com/ looks decent in IE6. One in four browsers in china are IE6. Source: http://www.ie6countdown.com/ http://www.ie6countdown.com/ (can someone check baidu.com, qq.com, sina.com.cn, csdn.net, alibaba.com in IE5?)
- melling 13y agoJust depends on the source. According to this, active users is less than 5%: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201203-201303 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201203...
- dherken 13y agoAll 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...
- infinita740 13y agoLook 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)
- sliverstorm 13y agoI 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoNo, that's recognisably the more basic version they serve to older browsers.
- blktiger 13y agoI 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.
- mynameisvlad 13y agoDoesn'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/ 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.
- udp 13y ago> 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.
- yuhong 13y agoThe 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.
- derleth 13y agoIt 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.
- ultimoo 13y agoAlthough 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.
- bicknergseng 13y agoIE5 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.
- yuhong 13y agoNative JSON support was only added in IE8.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- robin_reala 13y agoAnyone 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#L523 https://github.com/jquery/jquery/blob/1.9-stable/src/core.js...
- greghinch 13y agoWhat % 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.
- burntsushi 13y agoRTFA. It clearly states that this is an exercise in fun, not in judgment or criticism.
- sharkweek 13y agoI bet Hacker News would look fantastic in IE5, tables and all
- yuhong 13y agoAnd they can make the up/down arrows work in even older browsers by using document.images instead of document.getElementById.
- stfu 13y agoAnd 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.
- scottrblock 13y agoThat seems to be the goal of the Universal ie6 [0] project, albiet for ie6! [0]- https://code.google.com/p/universal-ie6-css/ https://code.google.com/p/universal-ie6-css/
- nwh 13y agoYep, in IE 5.5 it looks peachy. http://i.imgur.com/XulRdv4.png http://i.imgur.com/XulRdv4.png
- bicknergseng 13y agoAnd for my next magic trick, popular modern video games rendered in 256 bit color.
- alan_cx 13y agoSort 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.
- ijk 13y ago256 colors? Why so high? And not, say, running on a monochrome text terminal? http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/ http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- Samuel_Michon 13y agoI think you mean 8-bit, which allows for 256 colors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_depth
- malkia 13y ago20 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!!!
- Moto7451 13y agoProbably not too far off: Doom 3 on a VooDoo 2 SLI setup: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUVXAl0dgYY http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUVXAl0dgYY
- alexvr 13y agoI laughed out loud at Microsoft
- jordanmoore_ 13y agoMicrosoft'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.
- katherineparker 13y agoThanks for explaining this :). There had to be a good reason as to why Microsoft would approach IE5 this way and I was wondering why.
- ultimoo 13y agoI 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!
- ibrahima 13y agoI 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoActually, they did do a big styling change a year or two ago.
- futhey 13y agoI 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.
- nu2ycombinator 13y agoIrony worst looking website out of the list is Microsoft.com
- mistercow 13y agoI 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.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoIndeed. 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.
- dkrich 13y agoAw I really wanted to see how Craigslist would appear to see if there is any discernible difference, whatsoever.
- warfangle 13y agoFor what it's worth, Google is still usable in lynx.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoMost sites are. Lynx is just the web without CSS or JS.
- warfangle 13y agoMost sites these days are inoperable without JS.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoNot really. Name me a major site that doesn't work at all without JS.
- fabriceleal 13y agoDropbox - https://www.dropbox.com/ 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]
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoWell, Dropbox is an interesting example. If you have no JS, you probably can't download much either.
- fabriceleal 13y agoWhy 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-using-javascript-jquery http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-usi...
- chrismorgan 13y agoThe 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.)
- yuhong 13y agoThe IE6 SP1 installer is still available from MS: http://www.microsoft.com/en-ca/download/details.aspx?id=1 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.
- eru 13y agoWhy 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?
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- jeromeparadis 13y agoNow let's fire up lynx which I haven't used since before IE 4.
- eru 13y agoI recommend links for text-mode browsing.
- DigitalSea 13y agoI love how Google doesn't really look different at all. Looks the same on IE5 basically as it does in IE10, ha.
- mwsherman 13y agoSimilarly 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.
- usablebytes 13y agoWikipedia 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.
- drucken 13y agoIt 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.
- jwatzman 13y agoAbout 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.10150673019866971.379044.730116970&type=1&l=40814c5b72 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.
- yuhong 13y ago*IE 5.1 for Mac
- jwatzman 13y agoArg stupid typo, fixed, thanks.
- dolphenstein 13y agoI 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.
- yuhong 13y agoAh, Tasman. Later MS did develop much better versions, but unfortunately new versions of IE for Mac ended when Apple moved to Safari/WebKit.
- ZeroMinx 13y ago"Back in the year 1999 Microsoft released it's" its
- protolif 13y agoSince 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!
- sesqu 13y agoI 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.
- hatu 13y agoI 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.