Remember rounded corners? It was a real pain, there were so many hacks to achieve something simple as
border-radius: 16px;
My other favorite was sIFR font loading :) Because font support was... patchy, a technique was invented to replace headers with Flash embeds which rendered the desired font:
Besides vendor tricks, I'd like to see a showcase or article about the evolution of page layout patterns over time. That is, the underlying techniques, not the aesthetics; tables, fixed image sizes, float/clear, flex, etc. I'm finding https://code-literacy.medium.com/css-layout-evolution-detail... but it's quite skeletal and incomplete. Has anyone here come across a more complete write-up?
I last heavily worked with CSS in 2010/2011. These still don't feel old to me.
There came a point where if you wrote good HTML/CSS that passed the W3C validator, you were golden on pretty much any device. This still rings true today.
IE was such a scourge, a drain on humanity (at least the slice of humanity that made websites). One of Microsoft's great evils - they let the product stagnate for years once they had the market cornered.
Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.
I was having a peaceful day until these CSS curiosities brought back memories of my painful days. It's really good that we don't need to deal with such hacks and vendor-specific things anymore. The last time I participated in a project that targeted an old browser was in 2018!
> Then you end up with shit performance or broken sites in Firefox
I work for a large corporation. A few years ago, they removed FF as a browser people could use at the company and removed it from the internal app store. Then, if you had a version, they forcibly uninstalled it.
As someone who's a developer, I needed access to be able to test on. Never forget going into the tech support office and saying I need this installed to be able to test my code. Support guy says, "Yeah sure mate, let's get that reinstalled for you." Tech guy downloaded it, started the install, and suddenly got a pop-up warning him it was against company policy to have this installed on your machine. It then auto-removed the app files he just downloaded. We sat there dumbfounded. "I guess we're going to have to escalate this mate." he said with a confused look on his face.
Almost four months later, support finally relented, but put in so many barriers to get installed that only a handful of devs have it on their machines now. I get emails almost daily, "Mate, I need you to test this in FF." or "Is this breaking in FF?"
I guess the reason given was FF lags in updating their certs, making a prime target for malware attacks so they just killed it so they wouldn't have to deal with it.
Just kind of strange that my entire career I was constantly told I needed to test this on any and all browsers available because they all have their nuances and you never know what might break something. To moving to a time where I'm testing on a single browser and calling it good? Man, times they are a changing.
The magnitude might be greater in specific sub areas, for example if you are doing chrome first, how is your accessibility on Safari? I don't know myself, but I think there are holes people don't notice with this approach.
Also I agree the thing about Meerita's post being flagged and dead seems wrong. There is evidently nothing wrong with the post and it should not be.
It's easy nowadays to make websites that function perfectly and look beautiful on all devices, browsers, and systems from 10 years ago until today. If somebody cannot deliver that, they should be fired from their job.
That is not quite the same problem. Modern browsers are vastly more standards-compliant than they were in the IE era, and most CSS/JS works across Chrome, Firefox and Safari without browser-specific hacks.
There was a time when we routinely did browser sniffing, maintained IE-specific code paths, used vendor prefixes everywhere, and sometimes shipped completely different fixes depending on the browser. That largely disappeared as browsers converged on standards.
Chrome-first development can still cause bugs elsewhere, but that's usually a "testing/implementation problem" rather than the same compatibility mess we had back then.
Mostly Internet Explorer 7 and 8, some Mozilla Firefox builds. That’s what I had in mind when I said “old browsers.” The last project I worked on that still had to support browsers from that era was in 2018.
Sounds about right. Looking back I’d already moved IE7 to “functional” support in late 2016[1] and was planning to do the same to 8 and 9 in the not too distant future.
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…
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.
I used these CSS styles in the late 90s to make internal browser-based apps for our call centre agents that looked & felt more like native Windows desktop apps.
The really funky part of the IE6 PNG fix was that the URL of the image in the expression was always relative to the current page URL, not the CSS file that the declaration was in.
I remember having to use Javascript to generate the image path (I cannot quite remember why absolute or root-relative URLs were not an option for us though...)
> Internet Explorer had a number of iffy behaviours and lagged behind other browsers for many visual effects, even regarding basic properties like opacity. Thus, Microsoft brought in bespoke filter functionality.
That's not accurate at all. At the time IE4 launched, it was ahead of the competition. It also had quite a lot of non-standard extras as part of Microsofts strategy to embrace, extend and extinguish. IE4 was extend. In other cases the strategy worked, but not for the web.
The DirectX filters weren't used pretty much anywhere until it turned out it could do things that were specced and implemented by others years later.
I see. Although filters were implemented in IE4, DirectX filters came about in IE5.5
However, the extend phase wasn't just IE4. They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6. By the time IE7 came out, it was clear the web is here to stay.
Both not tricks, and I can't say I miss them, because I didn't work as web dev at the time. I only witnessed the trailing part of the pain, when I started, there were mostly flexbox-related browser inconsistencies.
Anyway:
cursor: hand !indispensable;
seems vastly superior to
cursor: pointer !important;
And I once came across the CSS "script expressions" out of web history curiosity.
Dangerous but appealing idea.
Seems like every web dev (well, those working on server-rendered markup and without AI, at least) would feel a desire for this at some point, but it was doomed at the time.
In some ways, reminds me of Houdini regarding the CSS->JS coupling (the other direction is already normal, sure).
But the intent behind it was probably just to allow maximum flexibility... well
Missing the whole IE quirks mode vs standards mode thing, but nice.
Some of those hacks were specifically for IE, and there was a debate on staying quirks vs going standards mode. Each had its own drawbacks and choices.
Remember rounded corners? It was a real pain, there were so many hacks to achieve something simple as
My other favorite was sIFR font loading :) Because font support was... patchy, a technique was invented to replace headers with Flash embeds which rendered the desired font:https://www.webdesignmuseum.org/web-design-history/sifr-2004
Besides vendor tricks, I'd like to see a showcase or article about the evolution of page layout patterns over time. That is, the underlying techniques, not the aesthetics; tables, fixed image sizes, float/clear, flex, etc. I'm finding https://code-literacy.medium.com/css-layout-evolution-detail... but it's quite skeletal and incomplete. Has anyone here come across a more complete write-up?
I last heavily worked with CSS in 2010/2011. These still don't feel old to me.
There came a point where if you wrote good HTML/CSS that passed the W3C validator, you were golden on pretty much any device. This still rings true today.
And that point was when the public sector finally abandoned IE6. It has all been peachy since then.
IE was such a scourge, a drain on humanity (at least the slice of humanity that made websites). One of Microsoft's great evils - they let the product stagnate for years once they had the market cornered.
Windows has kinda become that now, a low quality user-hostile product forced on people through inertia and monopoly tactics.
I was having a peaceful day until these CSS curiosities brought back memories of my painful days. It's really good that we don't need to deal with such hacks and vendor-specific things anymore. The last time I participated in a project that targeted an old browser was in 2018!
> we don't need to deal with such hacks and vendor-specific things anymore
Unfortunately that means everyone targets chrome.
Then you end up with shit performance or broken sites in Firefox [1].
You'd think with "AI" they could generate js/css that works in both browsers...
[1] Which is the only browser that can still run proper ublock origin...
Edit: someone pointed below that the compatibility problem's magnitude is much smaller. Seems flagged and dead for unknown reasons.
The magnitude is probably much smaller, but that makes it worse, because people will just forget about FF.
> Then you end up with shit performance or broken sites in Firefox
I work for a large corporation. A few years ago, they removed FF as a browser people could use at the company and removed it from the internal app store. Then, if you had a version, they forcibly uninstalled it.
As someone who's a developer, I needed access to be able to test on. Never forget going into the tech support office and saying I need this installed to be able to test my code. Support guy says, "Yeah sure mate, let's get that reinstalled for you." Tech guy downloaded it, started the install, and suddenly got a pop-up warning him it was against company policy to have this installed on your machine. It then auto-removed the app files he just downloaded. We sat there dumbfounded. "I guess we're going to have to escalate this mate." he said with a confused look on his face.
Almost four months later, support finally relented, but put in so many barriers to get installed that only a handful of devs have it on their machines now. I get emails almost daily, "Mate, I need you to test this in FF." or "Is this breaking in FF?"
I guess the reason given was FF lags in updating their certs, making a prime target for malware attacks so they just killed it so they wouldn't have to deal with it.
Just kind of strange that my entire career I was constantly told I needed to test this on any and all browsers available because they all have their nuances and you never know what might break something. To moving to a time where I'm testing on a single browser and calling it good? Man, times they are a changing.
The magnitude might be greater in specific sub areas, for example if you are doing chrome first, how is your accessibility on Safari? I don't know myself, but I think there are holes people don't notice with this approach.
Also I agree the thing about Meerita's post being flagged and dead seems wrong. There is evidently nothing wrong with the post and it should not be.
It's easy nowadays to make websites that function perfectly and look beautiful on all devices, browsers, and systems from 10 years ago until today. If somebody cannot deliver that, they should be fired from their job.
> If somebody cannot deliver that, they should be fired from their job.
... i haven't been able to download my invoices off the Orange Romania site for months in Firefox. They work perfectly in Chrome.
Somehow I bet the ones that fucked up the functionality got a raise instead of being fired.
That is not quite the same problem. Modern browsers are vastly more standards-compliant than they were in the IE era, and most CSS/JS works across Chrome, Firefox and Safari without browser-specific hacks.
There was a time when we routinely did browser sniffing, maintained IE-specific code paths, used vendor prefixes everywhere, and sometimes shipped completely different fixes depending on the browser. That largely disappeared as browsers converged on standards.
Chrome-first development can still cause bugs elsewhere, but that's usually a "testing/implementation problem" rather than the same compatibility mess we had back then.
Out of interest, how do you define “old”?
Mostly Internet Explorer 7 and 8, some Mozilla Firefox builds. That’s what I had in mind when I said “old browsers.” The last project I worked on that still had to support browsers from that era was in 2018.
Sounds about right. Looking back I’d already moved IE7 to “functional” support in late 2016[1] and was planning to do the same to 8 and 9 in the not too distant future.
[1] https://technology.blog.gov.uk/2016/10/21/gaining-understand...
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…
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.
Surprised there was no mention of the old system theme colours (that I think still work in some browsers but are long-deprecated):
https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/Reference/V...
I used these CSS styles in the late 90s to make internal browser-based apps for our call centre agents that looked & felt more like native Windows desktop apps.
They’re still there for use in forced colors mode. I blogged about this a bit at https://medium.com/flat-pack-tech/ikea-windows-high-contrast...
They exist but don't actually grab system colors (to prevent pages spoofing the system look).
---
Shameless plug:
In neutrino (my webview wrapper), we grab those and inject them as prefixed CSS variables (--neutrino-NameOfSystemColor).
Works on windows/macos/gtk/qt, and except for qt it works live (if the user changes the accent tone, the CSS variable updates automatically).
https://alganet.dev/neutrino/ Screenshot of Mint: https://imgur.com/a/WyjpwsR
The really funky part of the IE6 PNG fix was that the URL of the image in the expression was always relative to the current page URL, not the CSS file that the declaration was in.
I remember having to use Javascript to generate the image path (I cannot quite remember why absolute or root-relative URLs were not an option for us though...)
The DirectX filters weren't used pretty much anywhere until it turned out it could do things that were specced and implemented by others years later.
but that is not about IE4
I see. Although filters were implemented in IE4, DirectX filters came about in IE5.5
However, the extend phase wasn't just IE4. They stopped piling on all sorts of non-standard vendor lock-in stuff after IE6. By the time IE7 came out, it was clear the web is here to stay.
I miss gaudy scrollbars.
Which of these old CSS tricks do you actually miss?
Both not tricks, and I can't say I miss them, because I didn't work as web dev at the time. I only witnessed the trailing part of the pain, when I started, there were mostly flexbox-related browser inconsistencies.
Anyway:
seems vastly superior to And I once came across the CSS "script expressions" out of web history curiosity.Dangerous but appealing idea.
Seems like every web dev (well, those working on server-rendered markup and without AI, at least) would feel a desire for this at some point, but it was doomed at the time.
In some ways, reminds me of Houdini regarding the CSS->JS coupling (the other direction is already normal, sure).
But the intent behind it was probably just to allow maximum flexibility... well
does look quite funny :)I'd love to hear more from people who actually used this.
miss those days.
i was seen as a genius at work for understanding quirks mode and how JScript differed from javascript/ecmascript
It felt like wizardry tbh
funny how almost all of these are just related to Internet Explorer haha
It was the most important browser from roughly 1999 to 2012.
Missing the whole IE quirks mode vs standards mode thing, but nice.
Some of those hacks were specifically for IE, and there was a debate on staying quirks vs going standards mode. Each had its own drawbacks and choices.