I read this post a while back but somehow it won’t burn out. So I’ll throw a little more gas on and add some history.

In 1997 I’d wake up each morning after maybe 5 or 6 hours of sleep, shower and get dressed, wake up my 4 year old daughter, feed her and dress her, and then take her to daycare. Then I’d go to work and one of the first things I’d do is read through the late night checkins. I was Bharat’s manager. Ray’s story is legit.

Bharat had checked in a feature late one night, without a code review, and hoodwinked a junior PM into okaying the “spec”, which I found out later was not much more than a scribble on his whiteboard. First I dropped by the the PM’s manager’s office (who now heads up code.org, and who apparently chewed out the PM after I left him) and then I went to chew out Bharat. That’s just the way it worked - I knew I’d be getting a call (we had phones back then, on our desks) from my manager. Of course Bharat wasn’t there - it was like 930 in the morning.

Eventually I did chase down Bharat later that day. I was unhappy because a) I hated the implementation - it should have been a link-rel or something similar that didn’t invoke an extra http request, b) I knew based on the way he’d leveraged the IE cache to store the .ico file that if the user ever manually flushed the cache the file would get deleted but the cache index would not get nuked -ie. he checked it in with a difficult to fix bug c) the code hadn’t been reviewed (which was stupid, rare, a potential firing offense, but most importantly could get you assaulted by the thugs who lurked in building 26). It was never a problem that he hoodwinked the junior PM - just funny.

In the end, we agreed he’d get the code reviewed ASAP and he’d fix the bug. The code review happened within the hour (Bharat’s code was fine, but years later it was found that the lower level code it called resulted in ms99-018). The second didn’t - the bug entered and then later got pushed to the next release by one of the PMs. Then Bharat left, and I left, and others… and the bug lingered for years. I’d send whiny emails every couple months about it to the folks still working on IE and… fixing the bug got pushed the next couple releases. I can’t remember when it was finally fixed, but someone forwarded me the checkin mail when it did… I wish I’d kept it.

At any time that week that Bharat checked in the feature I could have sent an email and the checkin would have been backed out. I did hate the implementation… but I liked the feature. It had nothing to do with somehow “screwing Netscape”. It was just a nice, simple, cool feature - easy for web-devs to take advantage of, nice for users.

So the bureaucracy broke down that day, and the result was a popular, inefficient, buggy feature. The right call? Ray says it was. For me it was one of thousands of calls that we all have to make in a career, most right, some wrong, and some will be debated forever. I guess this is the latter. Move on.

Maybe UnoriginalGuy can get his ideas in some standard and implemented in Chrome or Safari. Or he could just check some code in late one night when nobody's around to stop him - I'm sure Ray will okay the spec ;-)