4 ms·

But blowing off an installed base is nothing Microsoft hasn't done before. There are Internet Explorer versions (5.5 and prior) that are effectively end-of-lif

by jcl 19y ago

But blowing off an installed base is nothing Microsoft hasn't done before. There are Internet Explorer versions (5.5 and prior) that are effectively end-of-lifed. No web developer has to think about the 5.5 hacks anymore, and any corporate intranet that relies on 5.5 hacks is screwed. Has this been a problem? I get the feeling that it has not, because a good MS-based IT department can spin the cost of rewriting its websites as part of the MS upgrade treadmill... as part of the cost of upgrading to .NET, or .NET 2.0, or Vista, or Sharepoint, or Windows Server 2008, etc. (And any business that has decided to get off of this treadmill is no longer among MS's paying customers.) On the other hand, Microsoft's piecemeal approach to web standards is starting to hurt it. The de facto web development best practice is now "Develop for a standards-compliant browser first, then hack it until it looks right in IE." This hurts Microsoft because it means that most new webpages only work incidentally in IE; if a corner case of some new feature is accidentally missed in the IE rewrite, the workaround might well be: "Try using Firefox until we get a fix out."

mdemare 19y ago
As a web-developer you don't have to worry about IE5.5 now, in 2008, seven years after the release of IE 6.0. Seven years to make sure your site works in IE 6.0. Seven years time to upgrade to IE 6.0. If Microsoft goes through with what they've promised, one day you've got a web site which works on the latest version of IE, and the next day (when MS releases IE 8) you don't. Since all web pages aren't going to be fixed in a day, practically nobody will upgrade. The only solution is to do what they did for version 7, and 6, and 5.5. Maybe they could have prevented the problem by releasing a more standard-compliant IE 5, but since then, they're stuck. The good thing is that we're slowly getting better at abstracting the problem away.

by jcl 19y ago

mdemare 19y ago

As a web-developer you don't have to worry about IE5.5 now, in 2008, seven years after the release of IE 6.0. Seven years to make sure your site works in IE 6.0. Seven years time to upgrade to IE 6.0. If Microsoft goes through with what they've promised, one day you've got a web site which works on the latest version of IE, and the next day (when MS releases IE 8) you don't. Since all web pages aren't going to be fixed in a day, practically nobody will upgrade. The only solution is to do what they did for version 7, and 6, and 5.5. Maybe they could have prevented the problem by releasing a more standard-compliant IE 5, but since then, they're stuck. The good thing is that we're slowly getting better at abstracting the problem away.