
Show HN: Quik – Internet Explorer as a Service - mrskitch
https://www.quik.dev
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mrskitch
Hey folks, Joel here (creator of Quik + browserless.io). Quik came about as an
attempt to stop spending time on IE support... but still support it when you
have to. A vast amount of my "frustration" time as a developer was getting
VM's to run IE to even test the site, let alone do the required repairs. Huge
time-sink.

Anyways, happy to answer questions or talk more about it. Pretty fun/novel way
of solving this problem!

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adenta
Huge fan of Quik. I build [https://terusama.com](https://terusama.com) using
modern development practices, and hit the point where _not_ supporting
internet explorer was _not_ an option. We build software for the logistics
industry, so freight brokers can schedule trucks at warehouses. Some people
who need access to my scheduling website, were accessing our site through
ancient Citrix VM's. "Just install chrome", wasn't even in the realm of
possibility. If I make concessions to manually schedule appointments for these
people, it's an incredibly slippery slope of making other concessions. Our
value proposition of being entirely automated and saving people time also
starts to lose its value.

Quik is insane, because I don't have to do anything, and am now compatible
with Internet Explorer, in a secure way. Being able to take a modern web
stack, and have, "IE compatibility" as a feature, is totally attractive to
old-school enterprises, when that's your target clientele.

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cheez
The is the simultaneously the silliest and best solution to the problem I've
seen.

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ciustuc
I would’ve called it: Nearly headless quik

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vnchr
Support the Browser That Must Not Be Named

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Reubend
On the one hand, this looks like an amazing solution. But because there's a VM
on the other side, I'm worried about pricing. If my site becomes popular,
won't this become expensive?

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Pegasis
Is it like GeForce now but for webpages?

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mrskitch
Yeah, you can definitely think of it like that

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Pegasis
I tried browserless.io, it sends every frame as picture from the backend to
the browser. I suppose quik will use the same technology?

While supporting IE without any developer work is very impressive, I think
quik has some limitions: 1. requres a lot of bandwidth, a place using IE has a
high chance don't have a modern internet infrastructure, thus limiting
concurrent users. 2. Playing video is basically impossible because intraframe
compression is just not efficient enough even on a good network.

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o-__-o
Hey it’s looking good! I wonder how much of my idea was used in the final
product :)

