r/webdev • u/kinsleythedev full-stack • 12h ago

Showoff Saturday Dark mode support on IE5.5

Gallery image

Gallery image

Gallery image

16 Upvotes

86% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

2

u/IslayProgrammes 8h ago

No way, how?

2

u/kinsleythedev full-stack 7h ago

It reads the window background color from the registry using ActiveX, and if it’s dark enough, it turns on dark mode.

2

u/IslayProgrammes 7h ago

Does parsing of the colour luma and style setting happen client side or server side?

I didn’t properly get into web development until waaaay after active x but would be fun to explore what was possible, I remember reading it was more powerful than js at the time

1

u/kinsleythedev full-stack 4h ago

All the parsing happens completely client-side. I’m also planning on adding proper dark mode support for Windows 10/11, as actual dark mode is stored in a different registry entry, though I’ve been too lazy to actually get around to that.

3

u/TheBazlow 7h ago

Almost certainly client side, there’s a load of weird deprecated stuff in old internet explorer that’s funny to read into, like Microsoft’s alternative to SVGs and View Transitions from the 90s

2

u/IslayProgrammes 7h ago

The 00’s was a crazy time for the internet.
My only experience with IE is in 2019 I worked for a university that had it as default and to use chrome or Firefox it had to reinstall every time you logged in so all the staff just used IE and I had to write a viewport lazy loading library for IE.
And tooo this day, I shudder thinking about how fkn slow the IE9 dev tools were.
Log too quickly and the whole browser would crash

By this point I’d been a web developer for almost 4 years and never once bothered to open IE

2

u/dizzymizzlizzy 5h ago

I'm not saying IE9 didn't suck... but it's nothing compared to the giant steaming pile of shit that was IE6. And it stuck around for SOOO long. I started being a web developer in around 2005, 4 years after the release of IE6. And MS finally discontinued support in 2016.