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I honestly believe that too much is being made of the supposed work involved in supporting IE6 theses days. Granted I would rather not have to support older bro

I honestly believe that too much is being made of the supposed work involved in supporting IE6 theses days. Granted I would rather not have to support older browsers for a number of reasons but the fact is that supporting it hasn't been terribly difficult. With the javascript and css frameworks that are available, compatibility is much less of an issue. We recently rebuilt our site and had to include support for IE6. While developing the site we mainly looked at IE8, Firefox 3.5, Safari 4, and Chrome. Only at the end did we look at IE6 and I believe I had to create 1 stylesheet that has probably less than 30 lines of CSS to fix a few minor visual issues (mainly dealing with widths, margins, and paddings). It took me less than a day. Yes I wish IE6 would fade much faster than it seems to be but I think it is overblown on how hard it is to support.

mstevens 17y ago
I've seen people spend somewhere between weeks and months purely on IE6 support.
- mstevens 17y ago
  Thinking about it more, a problem that personally cost me a couple of days was investigating a problem where AJAX calls intermittently fail on IE6. It took a while to find, and was something obscure with keepalives I forget.
bensummers 17y ago
Is this a web app or a static site? If a static site, yes, it isn't too hard. But a web app is another matter all together -- not only working around the issues but stopping you use features that better browsers offer.
- akmiller 17y ago
  It's a full blown web-app and it is the core of our business. It is also used worldwide with one of our fastest growing user bases being China. In China, at least for our app, IE6 and Maxthon (which like IE is based on Trident) are the most popular browsers. I'm sure there may be features we will miss out on but off the top of my head I can't think of anything that we couldn't accomplish. Are there specific features you have in mind that are impossible in IE6?
  - bensummers 17y ago
    If you restrict yourself to the IE6 feature set, then yes, it should be relatively easy. But if a complex web app is this easy, why is Google giving up on it for it's web apps?
- kaiserama 17y ago
  What is your site's address? I'd be curious to see it.
warfangle 17y ago
At this point, it's less of a compatibility issue and more of a: - Security issue (this is internal to the installation site of IE6, and doesn't affect development all that much) - Performance issue (if you're doing something complicated in JS, it won't work in IE6. It will just be way too slow)
dasil003 17y ago
Let's start with PNG alpha transparency. If you allow yourself the use of PNG alpha transparency it makes many things possible and many things much easier or more maintainable. There are hacks to make alpha transparency work, but none are universal across all the ways to use image asset files. As for basic CSS, yes, if you know the major pitfalls then IE6 isn't so terrible (when it was released a decade ago it was a breath of fresh air actually), but even that requires a constant vigilance against dozens of bugs that are a minefield for anyone who is not anticipating them due to years in the trenches. Oh you might be lucky and avoid them, or you might stumble upon them and rue the day you ever posted such a dismissal to HN. Javascript has a number of similar pitfalls that are hard to be aware of and are fairly arbitrary limitations to place on your development. Frameworks paper over some of this stuff, but some of them are hard limits. In my case for instance I am the lead dev on a VOD site showing feature-length films. You could watch one film on IE6, but if you watched 2 without restarting it would usually crash. We weren't using some bloated JWFlv player, we had a minimal, custom flash player designed to squeeze out maximum performance. There's absolutely nothing we could do about that, and just the support costs of reading emails from people whose browser crashed when they were watching movies was not worth it.

mstevens 17y ago

I've seen people spend somewhere between weeks and months purely on IE6 support.

mstevens 17y ago
Thinking about it more, a problem that personally cost me a couple of days was investigating a problem where AJAX calls intermittently fail on IE6. It took a while to find, and was something obscure with keepalives I forget.

bensummers 17y ago

Is this a web app or a static site? If a static site, yes, it isn't too hard. But a web app is another matter all together -- not only working around the issues but stopping you use features that better browsers offer.

akmiller 17y ago
It's a full blown web-app and it is the core of our business. It is also used worldwide with one of our fastest growing user bases being China. In China, at least for our app, IE6 and Maxthon (which like IE is based on Trident) are the most popular browsers. I'm sure there may be features we will miss out on but off the top of my head I can't think of anything that we couldn't accomplish. Are there specific features you have in mind that are impossible in IE6?
- bensummers 17y ago
  If you restrict yourself to the IE6 feature set, then yes, it should be relatively easy. But if a complex web app is this easy, why is Google giving up on it for it's web apps?
kaiserama 17y ago
What is your site's address? I'd be curious to see it.

warfangle 17y ago

At this point, it's less of a compatibility issue and more of a: - Security issue (this is internal to the installation site of IE6, and doesn't affect development all that much) - Performance issue (if you're doing something complicated in JS, it won't work in IE6. It will just be way too slow)

dasil003 17y ago

Let's start with PNG alpha transparency. If you allow yourself the use of PNG alpha transparency it makes many things possible and many things much easier or more maintainable. There are hacks to make alpha transparency work, but none are universal across all the ways to use image asset files. As for basic CSS, yes, if you know the major pitfalls then IE6 isn't so terrible (when it was released a decade ago it was a breath of fresh air actually), but even that requires a constant vigilance against dozens of bugs that are a minefield for anyone who is not anticipating them due to years in the trenches. Oh you might be lucky and avoid them, or you might stumble upon them and rue the day you ever posted such a dismissal to HN. Javascript has a number of similar pitfalls that are hard to be aware of and are fairly arbitrary limitations to place on your development. Frameworks paper over some of this stuff, but some of them are hard limits. In my case for instance I am the lead dev on a VOD site showing feature-length films. You could watch one film on IE6, but if you watched 2 without restarting it would usually crash. We weren't using some bloated JWFlv player, we had a minimal, custom flash player designed to squeeze out maximum performance. There's absolutely nothing we could do about that, and just the support costs of reading emails from people whose browser crashed when they were watching movies was not worth it.