4 ms·
Sachin Agarwal of Posterous explains reason#6 much better with a good example. Link here http://sachin.posterous.com/ie6-caused-the-web-to-mature-slower-than-it
by subbu 16y ago
Sachin Agarwal of Posterous explains reason#6 much better with a good example. Link here http://sachin.posterous.com/ie6-caused-the-web-to-mature-slower-than-it-w http://sachin.posterous.com/ie6-caused-the-web-to-mature-slo...
- qeorge 16y agoI'm a little tired of the "IE6 is holding back the web" meme. Lots of hand-waving, no examples.
- marknutter 16y agoAs a developer who has many times decided not to implement a killer feature that works in a modern browser because I will have to come up with some graceful degradation or alternative implementation in IE6, I can say that it isn't hand waving.
- qeorge 16y agoI don't mean to be rude, but could you expound upon this a bit? What was the feature, and why was supporting IE6 critical to moving forward with it? I'm not in any way arguing that IE6 isn't a PITA. I suppose its the "holding back" part of it that I don't understand.
- prodigal_erik 16y agoGood, I prefer those features not exist. It's bad for the Web to depend on anything not thoroughly designed enough to gracefully degrade and be usable on all the browsers you don't happen to care about.
- rjurney 16y agoYou've obviously never engaged in web development. IE6 support is often the most costly part of a project.
- qeorge 16y agoI am a professional web developer. IE6 is one of the many platforms I have to support. Between the different versions of Firefox, Safari, IE, Chrome, and Opera its about 10 browsers that reasonably should be tested for a given site. I guess what I was saying is give developers some credit. We've been working around a lot tougher issues than IE6 for a long time. Its a hurdle, not a brick wall.
- sankara 16y agoRightly said. If we (can) budget out the development cycle a huge chunk goes into ulterior CSS hacks (JS is handled indirectly by jQuery/<x> fmwk) and an unnecessary manual test cycle dedicated to IE6. It's not without a reason Microsoft sent a bouquet to IE6's funeral!
- richbradshaw 16y agoEver website I've ever made has had to avoid new features due to IE incompatibilities. CSS transitions and canvas are obvious examples.
- qeorge 16y agoSide point: why is supporting IE6 mandatory? Its been retired since 2005. We support IE6 wherever reasonable, but if you're building something that needs <canvas>, I'd just do it. What was the feature in this case?
- richbradshaw 16y agoI don't go out of my way to support IE6, only obvious things where it's an extra line of CSS or whatever. Canvas was to replace a timeline view of comments on blog posts, felt that not enough users would be able to see it to include it on the design. I'd guess that worldwide there are plenty of neat little things that could be used that aren't because of trying to support IE.
- Psyonic 16y agoRetired? By Microsoft, perhaps, but not by a large chunk of users. Still large enough to matter, for most sites.
- qeorge 16y agoI agree with you, and that's why we usually decide to support IE6. But there's some things that just can't reasonably be done in IE6, and I think its OK to drop support in those cases instead of canning the feature entirely.
- Psyonic 16y agoI'd also justify that by assuming that if they're still running IE6, they're probably not interested in your fancy app anyway. Obviously this isn't 100% true, but I'd bet its close.
- 16y ago