Top all-time · #1172
Chris Zacharias
Personal blog · blog.chriszacharias.comstartupsprogrammingweb
Chris Zacharias's personal blog at blog.chriszacharias.com covers startups, programming and web. Since 2012, 61 different Hacker News readers have linked it 76 times, most often “A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019)”. The last post was in 2023, but the archive is still widely read.
Chris Zacharias | Founder of imgix. YCombinator alum. Ex-YouTuber. Studied New Media at RIT.
Most-linked posts?
- A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019)26 people · 28 mentions · first linked 2019-08-10
- Page Weight Matters16 people · 21 mentions · first linked 2012-12-23
- Page Weight Matters (2012)14 people · 17 mentions · first linked 2021-09-22
- Cruise Ships2 people · 2 mentions · first linked 2013-02-06
What Hacker News says?
I've wanted to play around with some similar ideas for a while too, actually. I have a few loose high-level ideas - I know I want it to feel like an app, but I want to use plain JS; I want to leverage everything modern browsers can support, while remaining backward-compatible (!); I want to try odd things like using Lua inside nginx for everything (or even writing my own web server), or programmatically reorganizing…
Comment linking /page-weight-matters
on “The web sucks if you have a slow connection”Submitted A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 as a story · 2195 points
HN discussionPage Weight Matters by Chris Zacharias. http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
Comment linking /page-weight-matters
on “The web sucks if you have a slow connection”Submitted Page Weight Matters as a story · 717 points
HN discussionI think this is the same anecdote: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
Comment linking /page-weight-matters
on “The web sucks if you have a slow connection”Submitted Page Weight Matters (2012) as a story · 556 points
HN discussionYou are saying this as if these companies don't care about CVR or compatibility at all. The reality is that most companies are extremely conservative about pushing you to change your authentication method. Here are my observations, as both a user and an industry insider: 1. Many services have old users with passwords that predate password-strength meters (or their ill-conceived brethren: password complexity rules).…
Comment linking /a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
on “Passkeys are a trap”Submitted A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019) as a story · 236 points
HN discussion> IE6 will hang around for a few years, but may die very rapidly in workplaces when some killer enterprise web application stops supporting it. Turns out the “killer enterprise web application” was YouTube :) https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
Comment linking /a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
on “Ask HN: A New Decade. Any Predictions? (2010)”Submitted A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019) as a story · 212 points
HN discussionThe original point I made -- that Chrome's dev tools can simulate a slow network connection -- got nit-picked by people saying it can't figure out which CDN serves which ad bundle. This is not a useful, relevant or even coherent reply. Public web sites that only work for "first world internet" customers shouldn't be a thing. Sites that load 100MB of ads and trackers and fifty different JS frameworks to display a few…
Comment linking /page-weight-matters
on “A letter about Google AMP”Submitted A conspiracy to kill IE6 (2019) as a story · 185 points
HN discussionFound it! https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
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on “How we got to LiveView”Submitted Investors as a story · 153 points
HN discussion> This is not really evidence-based reasoning, it’s just “I can imagine something evil that Google might do.” Please read Mozilla's story on how Google sabotaged them: https://archive.is/tgIH9 Oh. And they very literally killed Internet Explorer: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6 Oh. And Google's mobile apps always conveniently forget the setting of "always use system browser and never ask me"…
Comment linking /a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
on “Cloudflare is sponsoring Ladybird and Omarchy”Submitted Page Weight Matters (2012) as a story · 137 points
HN discussionThat reminds me of a story where in 2009 some rouge youtube employees put up a warning that IE6 would be deprecated: https://blog.chriszacharias.com/a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
Comment linking /a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
on “Internet Explorer 11 (IE11) to be retired on June 15, 2022”Submitted Page Weight Matters (2012) as a story · 82 points
HN discussionThere is this post about a experiment on google where they reduced the page weight and the traffic went up instead of down. That was because it open the site to countries with low internet bandwidth https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
Comment linking /page-weight-matters
on “It's time for modern CSS to kill the SPA”Submitted Page Weight Matters as a story · 9 points
HN discussionOnly sort of related, but one time some of the YouTube engineering team made a code change to kill off usage of Internet Explorer 6 by bypassing the usual code screening process to circumvent management. Their boss reprimanded them but eventually got in on it, without going through the appropriate channels. Then the Docs team saw the banner they showed YouTube users, thought they had actually received approval from…
Comment linking /a-conspiracy-to-kill-ie6
on “Engineer says Google fired her for notifying co-workers of right to organize”Submitted Cruise Ships as a story · 7 points
HN discussionAll web developers should be forced to spend a full week using their site on each of LTE, 3g, and 2g. If your website takes more than 10 seconds to load on an ad-block free LTE device you're fired. Relevant: Page Weight Matters (2012) http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
Comment linking /page-weight-matters
on “Web fonts, boy, I don't know”Submitted A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 at YouTube as a story · 5 points
HN discussionPersonally I think frameworks like Electron lead to huge bloat in terms of download size, disk space, and system ram. However there is no doubt that it increases the accessibility of developing applications for multiple platforms. I think the following is a great narrative on why it can matter though: http://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
Comment linking /page-weight-matters
on “Electron 1.0 is here”Submitted A Conspiracy to Kill IE6 (2019) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionDetails matter, as they learned when making things faster made their metrics slower - https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
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on “Moving from React to htmx”Submitted Page Weight Matters (2012) as a story · 3 points
HN discussionold tech blog about improving youtube page weight -- it paradoxically worsened their long tail stats once they sliced it geographically, they found that the increase was all in places like siberia where previously the site was unusable https://blog.chriszacharias.com/page-weight-matters
Comment linking /page-weight-matters
on “Test your product on a crappy laptop”Submitted Page Weight Matters (2012) as a story · 2 points
HN discussion
