7 ms·

IE 8 is the new IE 6

98 points by mcav 16y ago

jaspero 16y ago
This will always be a problem. The corporates and most of the business will always use whatever comes with their OS, for a simple reason that they don't have administrative rights to upgrade their browser, or simply because its just an extra overhead for the corporation to upgrade thousands of their workstations. I can't think of any alternatives to this problem. I am pretty sure I will still be considering IE6 while developing websites in 2015, let alone IE8.
- pavel_lishin 16y ago
  Not to mention that IE's turn-around time will almost always be longer than, for instance, Firefox's, or Chrome's, etc., since Microsoft is inherently less flexible than the others. Oh, and don't forget that a lot of proprietary corporate apps are written to work ONLY in IE6. I wonder if a "legacy" mode for new versions of IE would alleviate part of this problem. (And yeah, I know that there's a big fat bag of poisonous acid-spitting kitten-eating snakes that this would open up.)
  - jaspero 16y ago
    Firefox and Chrome would have the same fate, if they are as widely used as Windows/IE and comes default with an OS(Windows killer), like IE.
    - pavel_lishin 16y ago
      Which fate? Slow release cycles, or apps written specifically for a single browser?
      - jaspero 16y ago
        Fate as in, if Mozilla came up with a Windows-killer OS and all the Windows user moved to the new Mozilla OS. Than people will be stuck with FF 3.6, even after 10 years from now.
        heimidal 16y ago
        There is no evidence to support this assertion. The new auto-upgrade model Mozilla has adopted for FF 4.0 (and that Chrome has had for ages) makes upgrade cycles, for all practical purposes, negligible. Chrome 6.0 was released on September 2. Since then, Chrome 5.0's market share has dropped to nearly 0%, with Chrome 6.0 picking up all of 5.0's share while also absorbing a good amount of IE's share. If Microsoft instituted an auto-upgrade path for IE and released updates with more regularity, this would slowly become a thing of the past.
        zooey 16y ago
        In Enterprise Company there is no such thing as "Auto Upgrade"
        jaspero 16y ago
        I haven't tried it but can you upgrade those browsers without administrative rights? I am assuming you can't do it on corporate settings.
        nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
        On Windows, if the user installs Chrome, it's installed into the user's home directory (local application data or something). This means the user does not need admin rights to either install or upgrade Chrome.
        sid0 16y ago
        There are several ways to update programs on Windows without needing admin rights: - You could do it as Chrome does and have a per-user install. I don't think Mozilla wants to do this. - You could install a service or a scheduled task to do the work for you. - MSI updates can be installed without admin rights if they're Authenticode signed, and Mozilla does have a valid Authenticode digital certificate.
        barake 16y ago
        Over half our Firefox traffic is still pre-3.6. Not IE6 bad, but it lacks CSS gradients and such.
    - deleted 16y ago
      [deleted]
  - Joeri 16y ago
    The legacy mode is exactly the problem. They have an IE7 legacy mode in IE9, so upgrading once you are on IE7 or up is generally not that big of a deal. I still fail to recognize any other reason than corporate decision making for why IE8 didn't have an IE6 legacy mode. I can understand they didn't understand the issues when they released IE7, but by the time IE8 got shipped they should have known better.
- eitally 16y ago
  There is a lot of pressure mounting for even the most slothful corporations to upgrade, both their browsers and their legacy web apps that [currently] only run in IE6. This is partially to do with the growing prevalence of enterprise-ready web apps & services, but also with Microsoft's insistence that they really will kill XP and IE6 in 2014. The same thing recently happened when they finally killed support for XP SP2 (just last month) and there was a big run to upgrade millions of corporate PCs to SP3 (which forces an IE upgrade unless you do all sorts of not recommended funky hacks to prevent it). As an aside, most companies for whom IE6 is an elephant-scale problem are using both AD and MS SCCM for user configuration management & group policy controls. CM makes it trivial to deploy stuff across the board, including complex software like OS service packs [and browser upgrades]. I posted before that my own org is in the process of upgrading everyone to IE8 right now, but we switched to Firefox as our standard browser about a year ago and are currently testing the new Chrome MSI (woohoo for GPO support), since even though Google's interpretation of the HTML5 standard includes a few things that aren't actually in the draft yet, it works much better with Google Apps. You won't have to worry about IE6 in 2015.
pavel_lishin 16y ago
> I’m developing for the future exclusively Weird, I'm developing for my employer, and by extension for our clients.
- jaspero 16y ago
  I'm developing for the employer and clients exclusively.
- castis 16y ago
  In my personal time, I goof around with all the new stuff that I'll get to use in 12 years when my clients that I work for catch up.
- acqq 16y ago
  We should let the OP "develop for the future" and keep our sites providing the content for everybody who has any browser. After some time we can compare the notes. (I wonder how he imagines that I would even try to access his site with anything else but with Opera Mobile from my phone).
grandalf 16y ago
The best way to help is to port Chrome to Windows 2000. Firefox is too slow to be usable on most Windows 2000 boxes, IE newer than 6 isn't supported, and Chrome isn't supported, which makes IE6 the best option.
- ehosca 16y ago
  Chrome is hardly stable on pages with a ton of flash content ...
- melling 16y ago
  Windows 2000 doesn't appear to have any significant market share. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
  - grandalf 16y ago
    Who uses IE6 on XP? Pirated copies of XP? That's bizarre.
    - vasi 16y ago
      How about half the population of China? http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-200909-201009 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-200909... Plus folks at many organizations with conservative IT policies.
      - loupgarou21 16y ago
        I know I had to do some voodoo to make a website we setup work right for a client because all of their internal windows computers were still running IE6
  - camiller 16y ago
    Much higher that win98. I wonder if my 12yr old daughters machine is the last win98 machine on the internet?
- 16y ago
seldo 16y ago
This complaint is as old as the hills. You may as well slap an obnoxious "Designed for HTML5" button on your site. The cost of having the world's largest addressable audience of any development platform is that web developers have to deal with the fact that it varies a lot. Them's the breaks. Edit: because I hate comments that are purely negative, my suggestion for getting users to the latest technologies is to use libraries (like YUI and jQuery) which do the hard work of implementing newer features in backwards compatible ways, but use the modern feature if it's available. That way the difference between IE8 and a more recent browser becomes one of performance rather than the binary absence of functionality. Users can that way see what they're missing and have a reason to upgrade that's more compelling than the designer petulantly insisting their browser sucks.
- evo_9 16y ago
  The thing about all this I don't get is that IE8 is not anywhere near as bad as IE6 was. Like you mentioned, using libraries like YUI, or jQuery really mitigate a lot of the problems. If you also plan a bit up front and have a competent designer to help out with the css definitions and strategizing (like avoiding gradients for now, fun/cool as they be), it's really not that big a deal. I'm working on a new site and I've literally done nothing other than have a designer help out with the CSS and the only difference between Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE8 are css drop-shadows, and rounded corners. Purely cosmetic, unlike IE6 which if you didn't account for it could stop your app in it's tracks. To me IE8, as much as I would never personally use it, is a huge improvement from IE6. Even over IE7 it's hugely better, easier to deal with.
  - Xixi 16y ago
    IE6 was a gigantic improvement over IE5.5, too. The problem is not there, the problem is that people are still stuck with IE6 today, close to ten years later... IE8 seems not so bad today, but without any support for html5, css3, canvas, video or websockets, what will you think 10 years from now ? That it sucks: it will force you to have Flash/Silverlight fallbacks to do something as trivial as plotting a graph or displaying a video. Yet many XP users will still be using it, so you will have to support it...
metamemetics 16y ago
Yes, but IE9 will also be the new IE8 eventually. Perhaps automatic embedding of unicorns becomes the new css-gradient and textshadow in 10 years. Designing for the minority isn't a very good solution. A better solution: embedded SVG rendering within <img> and <htmlelements> cross browser. Then you can assemble ANY trendy graphical element without having to wait for people to continually agree on, release, and implement css4, css5, css6, etc. Other benefits: - it's an XML format like HTML - Machines can now scrape understand and generate pictures too - Vector graphics will scale great with different zoom\resolution settings - Designers can use tools like Adobe Illustrator, a more logical approach than css-versionX hacking that fits the problem domain better
- ars 16y ago
  >Yes, but IE9 will also be the new IE8 eventually. I think the problem is that microsoft is tying the browser version to the OS version. Will you be able to install IE9 on XP?
  - metamemetics 16y ago
    I don't think the underlying problem has to do with specific companies and applies to older versions of Firefox as well. The underlying problem is: (Demand\Rate of requests for specification changes) >> (rate of widespread implementation) ...ensuring there will always be a very narrow audience for the latest features. While it's good to increase the rate at which new specifications are implemented, it's largely impossible to do without authoritarian measures to A) control the programmers working on every web browser B) control specification committees to agree faster. edit: or C) make everyone use the same web browser Another approach is to DECREASE the rate of [edit: demand for] specification change. I think a large part of the problem is our expectations from the CSS specification. We are trying to expand its problem domain to include the construction of graphics and graphical effects, something which it was clearly not built for on a syntactical level! It might be better to convince browser teams with limited resources to better support long existing open standards to handle the dynamic creation of graphics with more logical syntax. Because the rate at which specification revisions are required will be drastically reduced. Whereas the process for creating new graphical features to your website via CSS is to submit it to a committee and wait 5years, it is done within the syntax of SVG. Making it a better allocation of resources.
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
deleted 16y ago
[deleted]
moqalib 16y ago
As long as features can be simulated adoption will stagnate. As much as we like to think we (the developers) are in control of browser adoption, the simple reality is that we're not. The end users are. The "normals". They don't give a shit if your box-shadow uses a PNG or is implemented using CSS3. They don't know the difference between canvas and flash. Hey! it works right? I honestly believe that the way to move the web forward is by letting browsers innovate at the expense of standards, and for developers to adopt non-aesthetic API's that will cause functional differences from the stagnating dominant incumbent if there is one at the time (at the moment IE). In other words, when developers get pissed, they find solutions. When end users get pissed, the switch browsers, or decide your app is not worth it. Our goal is to get that proposition in front of end users as often as possible, and create enough value that they choose the former.
- simonw 16y ago
  I don't think I've ever met a web developer who thinks they're in control of browser adoption. We're slaves to dumb corporate IT policies and users who don't even understand the concept of a browser, let alone what it would mean to "upgrade" one.
Yaggo 16y ago
> I’m developing for the future exclusively and asking users of legacy browsers to adopt a modern browser or install Chrome Frame. It’s an uphill battle from here, but nobody is going to bend this curve but us. I do exactly the same. Unless generously compensated, I refuse to develop for outdated broswers while an easy plug-in solution exists.
cletus 16y ago
I think it's safe to generalize this as: IEn is the new IE(n-1)
xentronium 16y ago
I wonder if Microsoft has to support Win XP forever in the eyes of the author. I don't know of a single reason why you shouldn't switch from xp to seven aside from evil corporate policies.
- brownleej 16y ago
  What about the system requirements? As sad as it may be, a lot of people in under-funded organizations are stuck using computers that are 5-10 years old, which may not support Windows 7.
  - xentronium 16y ago
    I saw several netbooks (which are not famous for horsepower) upgraded to win7 without a single problem.

98 points by mcav 16y ago

This will always be a problem. The corporates and most of the business will always use whatever comes with their OS, for a simple reason that they don't have administrative rights to upgrade their browser, or simply because its just an extra overhead for the corporation to upgrade thousands of their workstations. I can't think of any alternatives to this problem. I am pretty sure I will still be considering IE6 while developing websites in 2015, let alone IE8.

pavel_lishin 16y ago
Not to mention that IE's turn-around time will almost always be longer than, for instance, Firefox's, or Chrome's, etc., since Microsoft is inherently less flexible than the others. Oh, and don't forget that a lot of proprietary corporate apps are written to work ONLY in IE6. I wonder if a "legacy" mode for new versions of IE would alleviate part of this problem. (And yeah, I know that there's a big fat bag of poisonous acid-spitting kitten-eating snakes that this would open up.)
- jaspero 16y ago
  Firefox and Chrome would have the same fate, if they are as widely used as Windows/IE and comes default with an OS(Windows killer), like IE.
  - pavel_lishin 16y ago
    Which fate? Slow release cycles, or apps written specifically for a single browser?
    - jaspero 16y ago
      Fate as in, if Mozilla came up with a Windows-killer OS and all the Windows user moved to the new Mozilla OS. Than people will be stuck with FF 3.6, even after 10 years from now.
      - heimidal 16y ago
        There is no evidence to support this assertion. The new auto-upgrade model Mozilla has adopted for FF 4.0 (and that Chrome has had for ages) makes upgrade cycles, for all practical purposes, negligible. Chrome 6.0 was released on September 2. Since then, Chrome 5.0's market share has dropped to nearly 0%, with Chrome 6.0 picking up all of 5.0's share while also absorbing a good amount of IE's share. If Microsoft instituted an auto-upgrade path for IE and released updates with more regularity, this would slowly become a thing of the past.
        zooey 16y ago
        In Enterprise Company there is no such thing as "Auto Upgrade"
        jaspero 16y ago
        I haven't tried it but can you upgrade those browsers without administrative rights? I am assuming you can't do it on corporate settings.
        nuclear_eclipse 16y ago
        On Windows, if the user installs Chrome, it's installed into the user's home directory (local application data or something). This means the user does not need admin rights to either install or upgrade Chrome.
        sid0 16y ago
        There are several ways to update programs on Windows without needing admin rights: - You could do it as Chrome does and have a per-user install. I don't think Mozilla wants to do this. - You could install a service or a scheduled task to do the work for you. - MSI updates can be installed without admin rights if they're Authenticode signed, and Mozilla does have a valid Authenticode digital certificate.
        barake 16y ago
        Over half our Firefox traffic is still pre-3.6. Not IE6 bad, but it lacks CSS gradients and such.
  - deleted 16y ago
    [deleted]
- Joeri 16y ago
  The legacy mode is exactly the problem. They have an IE7 legacy mode in IE9, so upgrading once you are on IE7 or up is generally not that big of a deal. I still fail to recognize any other reason than corporate decision making for why IE8 didn't have an IE6 legacy mode. I can understand they didn't understand the issues when they released IE7, but by the time IE8 got shipped they should have known better.
eitally 16y ago
There is a lot of pressure mounting for even the most slothful corporations to upgrade, both their browsers and their legacy web apps that [currently] only run in IE6. This is partially to do with the growing prevalence of enterprise-ready web apps & services, but also with Microsoft's insistence that they really will kill XP and IE6 in 2014. The same thing recently happened when they finally killed support for XP SP2 (just last month) and there was a big run to upgrade millions of corporate PCs to SP3 (which forces an IE upgrade unless you do all sorts of not recommended funky hacks to prevent it). As an aside, most companies for whom IE6 is an elephant-scale problem are using both AD and MS SCCM for user configuration management & group policy controls. CM makes it trivial to deploy stuff across the board, including complex software like OS service packs [and browser upgrades]. I posted before that my own org is in the process of upgrading everyone to IE8 right now, but we switched to Firefox as our standard browser about a year ago and are currently testing the new Chrome MSI (woohoo for GPO support), since even though Google's interpretation of the HTML5 standard includes a few things that aren't actually in the draft yet, it works much better with Google Apps. You won't have to worry about IE6 in 2015.

pavel_lishin 16y ago

> I’m developing for the future exclusively Weird, I'm developing for my employer, and by extension for our clients.

jaspero 16y ago
I'm developing for the employer and clients exclusively.
castis 16y ago
In my personal time, I goof around with all the new stuff that I'll get to use in 12 years when my clients that I work for catch up.
acqq 16y ago
We should let the OP "develop for the future" and keep our sites providing the content for everybody who has any browser. After some time we can compare the notes. (I wonder how he imagines that I would even try to access his site with anything else but with Opera Mobile from my phone).

grandalf 16y ago

The best way to help is to port Chrome to Windows 2000. Firefox is too slow to be usable on most Windows 2000 boxes, IE newer than 6 isn't supported, and Chrome isn't supported, which makes IE6 the best option.

ehosca 16y ago
Chrome is hardly stable on pages with a ton of flash content ...
melling 16y ago
Windows 2000 doesn't appear to have any significant market share. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_os.asp
- grandalf 16y ago
  Who uses IE6 on XP? Pirated copies of XP? That's bizarre.
  - vasi 16y ago
    How about half the population of China? http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-200909-201009 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-200909... Plus folks at many organizations with conservative IT policies.
    - loupgarou21 16y ago
      I know I had to do some voodoo to make a website we setup work right for a client because all of their internal windows computers were still running IE6
- camiller 16y ago
  Much higher that win98. I wonder if my 12yr old daughters machine is the last win98 machine on the internet?
16y ago

seldo 16y ago

This complaint is as old as the hills. You may as well slap an obnoxious "Designed for HTML5" button on your site. The cost of having the world's largest addressable audience of any development platform is that web developers have to deal with the fact that it varies a lot. Them's the breaks. Edit: because I hate comments that are purely negative, my suggestion for getting users to the latest technologies is to use libraries (like YUI and jQuery) which do the hard work of implementing newer features in backwards compatible ways, but use the modern feature if it's available. That way the difference between IE8 and a more recent browser becomes one of performance rather than the binary absence of functionality. Users can that way see what they're missing and have a reason to upgrade that's more compelling than the designer petulantly insisting their browser sucks.

evo_9 16y ago
The thing about all this I don't get is that IE8 is not anywhere near as bad as IE6 was. Like you mentioned, using libraries like YUI, or jQuery really mitigate a lot of the problems. If you also plan a bit up front and have a competent designer to help out with the css definitions and strategizing (like avoiding gradients for now, fun/cool as they be), it's really not that big a deal. I'm working on a new site and I've literally done nothing other than have a designer help out with the CSS and the only difference between Firefox, Safari, Chrome and IE8 are css drop-shadows, and rounded corners. Purely cosmetic, unlike IE6 which if you didn't account for it could stop your app in it's tracks. To me IE8, as much as I would never personally use it, is a huge improvement from IE6. Even over IE7 it's hugely better, easier to deal with.
- Xixi 16y ago
  IE6 was a gigantic improvement over IE5.5, too. The problem is not there, the problem is that people are still stuck with IE6 today, close to ten years later... IE8 seems not so bad today, but without any support for html5, css3, canvas, video or websockets, what will you think 10 years from now ? That it sucks: it will force you to have Flash/Silverlight fallbacks to do something as trivial as plotting a graph or displaying a video. Yet many XP users will still be using it, so you will have to support it...

metamemetics 16y ago

Yes, but IE9 will also be the new IE8 eventually. Perhaps automatic embedding of unicorns becomes the new css-gradient and textshadow in 10 years. Designing for the minority isn't a very good solution. A better solution: embedded SVG rendering within <img> and <htmlelements> cross browser. Then you can assemble ANY trendy graphical element without having to wait for people to continually agree on, release, and implement css4, css5, css6, etc. Other benefits: - it's an XML format like HTML - Machines can now scrape understand and generate pictures too - Vector graphics will scale great with different zoom\resolution settings - Designers can use tools like Adobe Illustrator, a more logical approach than css-versionX hacking that fits the problem domain better

ars 16y ago
>Yes, but IE9 will also be the new IE8 eventually. I think the problem is that microsoft is tying the browser version to the OS version. Will you be able to install IE9 on XP?
- metamemetics 16y ago
  I don't think the underlying problem has to do with specific companies and applies to older versions of Firefox as well. The underlying problem is: (Demand\Rate of requests for specification changes) >> (rate of widespread implementation) ...ensuring there will always be a very narrow audience for the latest features. While it's good to increase the rate at which new specifications are implemented, it's largely impossible to do without authoritarian measures to A) control the programmers working on every web browser B) control specification committees to agree faster. edit: or C) make everyone use the same web browser Another approach is to DECREASE the rate of [edit: demand for] specification change. I think a large part of the problem is our expectations from the CSS specification. We are trying to expand its problem domain to include the construction of graphics and graphical effects, something which it was clearly not built for on a syntactical level! It might be better to convince browser teams with limited resources to better support long existing open standards to handle the dynamic creation of graphics with more logical syntax. Because the rate at which specification revisions are required will be drastically reduced. Whereas the process for creating new graphical features to your website via CSS is to submit it to a committee and wait 5years, it is done within the syntax of SVG. Making it a better allocation of resources.

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

deleted 16y ago

[deleted]

moqalib 16y ago

As long as features can be simulated adoption will stagnate. As much as we like to think we (the developers) are in control of browser adoption, the simple reality is that we're not. The end users are. The "normals". They don't give a shit if your box-shadow uses a PNG or is implemented using CSS3. They don't know the difference between canvas and flash. Hey! it works right? I honestly believe that the way to move the web forward is by letting browsers innovate at the expense of standards, and for developers to adopt non-aesthetic API's that will cause functional differences from the stagnating dominant incumbent if there is one at the time (at the moment IE). In other words, when developers get pissed, they find solutions. When end users get pissed, the switch browsers, or decide your app is not worth it. Our goal is to get that proposition in front of end users as often as possible, and create enough value that they choose the former.

simonw 16y ago
I don't think I've ever met a web developer who thinks they're in control of browser adoption. We're slaves to dumb corporate IT policies and users who don't even understand the concept of a browser, let alone what it would mean to "upgrade" one.

Yaggo 16y ago

> I’m developing for the future exclusively and asking users of legacy browsers to adopt a modern browser or install Chrome Frame. It’s an uphill battle from here, but nobody is going to bend this curve but us. I do exactly the same. Unless generously compensated, I refuse to develop for outdated broswers while an easy plug-in solution exists.

cletus 16y ago

I think it's safe to generalize this as: IEn is the new IE(n-1)

xentronium 16y ago

I wonder if Microsoft has to support Win XP forever in the eyes of the author. I don't know of a single reason why you shouldn't switch from xp to seven aside from evil corporate policies.

brownleej 16y ago
What about the system requirements? As sad as it may be, a lot of people in under-funded organizations are stuck using computers that are 5-10 years old, which may not support Windows 7.
- xentronium 16y ago
  I saw several netbooks (which are not famous for horsepower) upgraded to win7 without a single problem.