

Popular Websites Displayed in IE 5 - dherken
http://cross-browser.org/Blog/post/2013/04/29/How-10-Popular-Websites-Are-Displayed-in-IE-5.aspx

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ultimoo
I 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
I 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
Actually, they did do a big styling change a year or two ago.

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pinko
You've got to appreciate the irony of microsoft.com being among the worst of
the ten (if not the very worst) to render.

~~~
smoyer
And 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.

~~~
guard-of-terra
"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.

~~~
com2kid
> MS did a lot to turn their lame "DOS command prompt" into a command line
> terminal; not enough, but a lot.

Then they made PowerShell, which removes any complaints one might have!

~~~
guard-of-terra
Well, not any. For example, still no built-in decent package manager able to
download and install software along with dependencies.

~~~
kalleboo
I didn't know bash or zsh had a built-in package manager!

~~~
guard-of-terra
I didn't know "command line terminal" equals "bash or zsh"!

Of course I'm talking ecosystem here.

~~~
shadowfox
You may be moving your goal posts here a bit.

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mistercow
I 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
Indeed. 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.

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chrismorgan
The 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
The IE6 SP1 installer is still available from MS:

<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.

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sharkweek
I bet Hacker News would look fantastic in IE5, tables and all

~~~
stfu
And 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
That seems to be the goal of the Universal ie6 [0] project, albiet for ie6!

[0]- <https://code.google.com/p/universal-ie6-css/>

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monsterix
Believe 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
Yes, I'd like to see some chinese sites on the list.

For what I can test <http://www.alibaba.com/> looks decent in IE6.

One in four browsers in china are IE6. Source: <http://www.ie6countdown.com/>

(can someone check baidu.com, qq.com, sina.com.cn, csdn.net, alibaba.com in
IE5?)

~~~
melling
Just depends on the source. According to this, active users is less than 5%:

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-
monthly-201203...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-
monthly-201203-201303)

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infinita740
Look 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)

~~~
mynameisvlad
Doesn'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/>
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
_> 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.

~~~
mynameisvlad
Windows XP supports up to IE8, Vista IE9 and 7 IE10. There's only so much you
can do when an OS is on life support, and making sacrifices just to give an OS
another version of IE is just stupid.

~~~
udp
The very latest versions of Firefox and Chrome don't seem to have a problem
supporting older versions of Windows.

Can you tell me more about these sacrifices that would have to be made? I'm
genuinely interested.

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bicknergseng
And for my next magic trick, popular modern video games rendered in 256 bit
color.

~~~
ijk
256 colors? Why so high? And not, say, running on a monochrome text terminal?
<http://www.jfedor.org/aaquake2/>

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mwsherman
Similarly 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.

~~~
dherken
This would be fun, I'll try to get Netscape Navigator 4.5 and AOL Explorer 1.?
running...

~~~
TheAnimus
Didn't AOL switch to hosting an IE object around IE4 time?

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drucken
It 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.

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usablebytes
Wikipedia 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.

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dkrich
Aw I really wanted to see how Craigslist would appear to see if there is any
discernible difference, whatsoever.

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warfangle
For what it's worth, Google is still usable in _lynx_.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Most sites are. Lynx is just the web without CSS or JS.

~~~
warfangle
Most sites these days are inoperable without JS.

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Not really. Name me a major site that doesn't work at all without JS.

~~~
fabriceleal
Dropbox - <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
Well, Dropbox is an interesting example. If you have no JS, you probably can't
download much either.

~~~
fabriceleal
Why 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-
usi...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3749231/download-file-using-
javascript-jquery)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
I just mean users without JS usually aren't ones who are downloading files.
Lynx is possibly an exception, though, since it's sometimes used by server
admins like myself to grab packages.

~~~
fabriceleal
Ah ok. But is there some reason for Lynx not to support JS? Is this by design?
I also found out about links [1] and elinks [2] but seems that their JS
support is marginal or requires compiling with certain flags [3]. Haven't
anyone tried to incorporate V8 yet?

[1]: <http://links.twibright.com/>

[2]: <http://elinks.or.cz/index.html>

[3]: [http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353519/lynx-with-
javascr...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9353519/lynx-with-javascript)

~~~
TazeTSchnitzel
Implementing JS would be a huge undertaking (they'd have to implement lots of
APIs and the DOM, for starters). Such text-mode browsers are usually light on
resources, too, and this would change that. Also, JS is usually used with the
assumption graphics support is there.

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protolif
Since 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!

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greghinch
What % 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
RTFA. It clearly states that this is an exercise in fun, not in judgment or
criticism.

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sesqu
I 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.

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jwatzman
About 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....](https://www.facebook.com/media/set/?set=a.10150673019866971.379044.730116970&type=1&l=40814c5b72)

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.

~~~
dolphenstein
I 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
Ah, Tasman. Later MS did develop much better versions, but unfortunately new
versions of IE for Mac ended when Apple moved to Safari/WebKit.

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jeromeparadis
Now let's fire up lynx which I haven't used since before IE 4.

~~~
eru
I recommend links for text-mode browsing.

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hatu
I 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.

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yuhong
The 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.

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alexvr
I laughed out loud at Microsoft

~~~
jordanmoore_
Microsoft'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
Thanks for explaining this :). There had to be a good reason as to why
Microsoft would approach IE5 this way and I was wondering why.

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nu2ycombinator
Irony worst looking website out of the list is Microsoft.com

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DigitalSea
I love how Google doesn't really look different at all. Looks the same on IE5
basically as it does in IE10, ha.

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ZeroMinx
"Back in the year 1999 Microsoft released it's"

 _its_

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derleth
It 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.

~~~
bicknergseng
IE5 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
Native JSON support was only added in IE8.

