4 ms·

Ever website I've ever made has had to avoid new features due to IE incompatibilities. CSS transitions and canvas are obvious examples.

qeorge 16y ago
Side 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 ago
  I 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 ago
  Retired? By Microsoft, perhaps, but not by a large chunk of users. Still large enough to matter, for most sites.
  - qeorge 16y ago
    I 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 ago
      I'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.
- sethg 16y ago
  There are very large organizations that have tied themselves to IE6-dependent code (or at least, code that their IT staff assumse is IE6-dependent) on their intranets, and they are not eager to commit the resources necessary to bring everything up to HTML5 compatibility. And IE6 still represents about 20% of browsers on the Web (http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200807-200903 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200807...). So a business owner hiring someone to design a public-facing corporate Web site doesn’t want to hear the designer dismiss one out of every five potential customers.

qeorge 16y ago

Side 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 ago
I 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 ago
Retired? By Microsoft, perhaps, but not by a large chunk of users. Still large enough to matter, for most sites.
- qeorge 16y ago
  I 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 ago
    I'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.
sethg 16y ago
There are very large organizations that have tied themselves to IE6-dependent code (or at least, code that their IT staff assumse is IE6-dependent) on their intranets, and they are not eager to commit the resources necessary to bring everything up to HTML5 compatibility. And IE6 still represents about 20% of browsers on the Web (http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200807-200903 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-200807...). So a business owner hiring someone to design a public-facing corporate Web site doesn’t want to hear the designer dismiss one out of every five potential customers.