Facebook's changing face over time

I work as a systems administrator at freiheit.com. In order for our developers to test the systems they build with different versions of Internet Explorer they asked me to check out a software called "Internet Explorer Collection" [1].  It installs every Internet Explorer from 1.0 to 8... needless to say I needed to try out current sites with old flavors of IE, here are some screenshots of Facebook in the different browsers:


Hmmm, JavaScript wasn't implemented by Microsoft when IE1 was released. It first appeared 1995 with the Netscape browser. Here, the JS-sources are shown within the page...

On to IE2, still no JavaScript:

IE3: Hooray for JavaScript (at that time called JScript by Microsoft due to trademark issues), but apparently CSS support is only in its beginnings:

Then comes IE4. Basic CSS support is there, but not much going on otherwise:


IE5 to the rescue! CSS support is somewhat better, JavaScript also works. But Facebook kept telling me that my Browser is too old...


Needless to say I wasn't able to login with all of those versions. I won't bother to show you screenshots of IE6 - IE8, I'm sure you can find some machines around that have those versions installed.

When playing with the different versions, I frequently got this message dialog, which shows up every time data is stored in a Cookie (a.k.a. "Internet information stored on your computer"). At that time, this was the default behavior.


And guess what page worked in most of the versions? Of course! Google.com, here is a screenshot from IE3, with the suggest box in the top left corner:

Oh well, the good old times...

1: http://finalbuilds.edskes.net/iecollection.htm