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Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6

274 points by joshuacc 15y ago

NHQ 15y ago
You're wasting your time if you worry about legacy browser support. Period. For every legacy browser out there--a number which only grows in spurts when a browser becomes "legacy"--there are maybe a 1,000(,000) shiny new browsers being shipped daily. Which do you care about? A stagnant legacy count, or a growing demand of new, mostly compatible, mostly upgradable browsers?
HardyLeung 15y ago
When I first read that there are 76 browsers to support, I was thinking... Hmm, yeah this versioning thing is going out of hand. But it was Chrome + FF + Opera + Safari + 72 versions of IE. Seriously? Projecting all the way to IE20 (2022) with a compatibility mode between any two versions of IE?
fady 15y ago
a dose of reality, and it's really a shame.
simonsarris 15y ago
I saw this on paul's G+ and rolled my eyes. Oh guffaw. The time has easily come where we are allowed to say "no" to several browser versions, or at least ignore them. Even Google has dropped support for IE6. Supporting several browsers does not mean that a website has to look perfect in all those browsers. My sites will look good on the latest version of Chrome, IE, Opera, and Firefox. Users of IE6/7/etc are already self-inflicting harm on their own web experience, why should we care to cater to them? They can have the website I display, but I'm not building the site for the past. I don't care if previous browser users see the Best Of All Possible Websites, as long as they see something. And since I'm developing Canvas apps, I don't care if some of them see anything at all. I imagine IE will reluctantly take the road of Chrome or FF and be more insistent about updates, especially outside of the corporate world. I also think that in the future the consensus will be that there isn't anything wrong with dropping support for aged browsers, and just displaying one "simple" site version to them.
- jemka 15y ago
  >Users of IE6/7/etc are already self-inflicting harm on their own web experience Don't assume users have a choice. Even if they do, don't assume they understand the choice. >why should we care to cater to them? If you want to ignore a % of your users, that's fine. Some of your competitors wont. That's your choice. Just realize you can be losing potential users/customers and that lesson about updating their browsers will be lost on the customers that went elsewhere.
  - simonsarris 15y ago
    I'm not suggesting those users who don't have a choice should be ignored completely, I'm suggesting they be ignored for the Best Of All Possible Websites (or whatever you'd like to call it). Even if you display to 70+ browsers you can still get away with programming two versions, as most websites do today (or more than two, as most major websites do). One will simply be less complex and pretty than the other (CSS3, etc). In the future I imagine that will be the standard: Modern version of a website, and then lowest-common-denominator version, which works with IE[X]+ and older mobile browsers, and stubborn/corporate firefox users, etc. In my case I don't have a choice: Canvas cannot work on IE6/7/8. Excanvas works until animation is introduced, then becomes progressively worthless.
    - gmac 15y ago
      It may still not do what you need, but I've found FlashCanvas to be much better (for speed and correctness) than Excanvas.
  - bediger 15y ago
    If you want to ignore a % of your users, that's fine. Some of your competitors wont. You know, as a long-time Linux and Firefox user, I've made that point to a number of newspaper web sites, etc etc etc. I usually get the written equivalent of an eye-roll. Why is it that it's OK for a business to ignore Linux and Mac users (back when Macs didn't have such a huge mind-share). or Firefox and Safari users, but it's not OK for a busines to ignore the same fraction of Windows users?
d2vid 15y ago
FUD - you don't have to support every browser. And it's especially disingenuous to say that if you're developing websites/web applications you should care about, say, IE20 users running in IE 5 compatibility mode.
- alanh 15y ago
  I had a similar thought, but as the author points out in a thread here, it is still largely legitimate for library authors.
melling 15y ago
"Doctor, doctor it hurts when I have to support 10 versions of IE"... errr... "Then don't that!" Only support the last two version. Warn people who come to your site that they are using an outdated and unsupported browser. Point them to Chrome, Firefox and Opera, which are all free. Cut the Gordian Knot:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot
- steve-howard 15y ago
  But for Pete's sake, only warn them once. Every time I visit Hotwire with an unstable version of Firefox, it reminds me to upgrade my browser with an obnoxious pop-up.
- paulirish 15y ago
  As IE6 has died, I think we've kinda lulled into some sort of complacency and I don't see heavy campaigning for browser upgrades currently. I'd be happy to see it, and like I mention, prompting a IE7 user to upgrade to IE9 is currently just irresponsible.
pavel_lishin 15y ago
> Meanwhile, you won't have to worry about supporting Firefox 6 or Chrome 13 in November. You sure about that? Just because they're not officially supported doesn't mean a significant number of people won't still be using them.
- melling 15y ago
  Chrome 13 will definitely be gone. You can verify the data. http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201009-201108 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201009... Mozilla has more of a problem getting people to upgrade but I think they will if simply nudged.
  - gcp 15y ago
    >Mozilla has more of a problem getting people to upgrade but I think they will if simply nudged. I'm guessing both Mozilla and the users are holding back a bit until they get more confident with the add-on situation.
- nextparadigms 15y ago
  For Firefox it may take a few months since they don't do auto-updating like Chrome does, but almost everyone transitions to the latest version of Chrome in a matter of days.
  - bzbarsky 15y ago
    Firefox auto-updates. Where does this idea that it doesn't come from?
    - mappu 15y ago
      It auto-updates, yes, but not like chrome does. Firefox downloads a ~15MB update that might cause unacceptably bad performance, or even not complete in an ordinary browsing session for users on slow connections. Chrome downloads a assembly diff on the order of a few kilobytes, disassembles its own binary, patches and rebuilds on the client machine, completely transparently and without intervention of any sort.
billybob 15y ago
This sounds terrible, but it seems to me that nobody will let it get that bad. It's infeasible to support 70+ browsers simultaneously; no dev shop can afford that. So they would either pick versions or choose some common set of features to support. If this meant that IE users got crappy experiences, despite developers' best efforts, people might finally start ditching IE. (A man can dream, can't he?) But I think the IE team will find a way to prevent this.
masklinn 15y ago
> IE6 has been a source of pain for… I'd say four years. We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007, right after the original iPhone was released. By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari 3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools the next year) available. Hell, by late 2007 IE7 was a year old already. And a significant reason why the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004. IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout [0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully slow runtime & al. Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort). Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to turn its attention from styling to behavior, which lead to the rebirth of Javascript and the creation of modern javascript: AJAX coined (and seminal article on the subject published)? February 2005. Opera Desktop free and ad-free? April 2005 QuirksBlog? December 2004. The killing of "DHTML"? 2005[1]. http://simonwillison.net/2005/Jan/5/swissMaps/ http://simonwillison.net/2005/Jan/5/swissMaps/ http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index.php http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index...., ... the javascript frameworks explosion was also 2004 (Dojo) through 2005 (Prototype, Mochikit) to 2006 (jQuery, YUI) [0] http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html [1] http://adactio.com/journal/938 http://adactio.com/journal/938
- DrJokepu 15y ago
  Actually, by late 2003 Phoenix (which is what Firefox used to be called back then) was already an impressive little browser (it was little back then) and IE6 was already horribly outdated and clumsy for those of us who grew a penchant for alternative browsers (the others being Opera and the Mozilla Suite).
AshleysBrain 15y ago
The 72 browser versions thing is an exaggeration. For your websites, add this tag: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /> - and you force IE to use that version's latest documents mode. So good point about IE's slow adoption, it really is annoying and holding back the web - but for your websites, you can easily force the document mode of your choice, avoiding the crappy emulated modes.
- rocktronica 15y ago
  Kinda sorta. "Edge" rendering on X browsers is still X different ways for all those stuck-in-time browsers to decide what "edge" meant at the time of their release or last update. That meta tag is a good practice but not the ultimate solution.
  - AshleysBrain 15y ago
    Yeah, but the point is X is better than X^2 + (1/2)X. The article makes a big deal of the 72 browsers thing.
- paulirish 15y ago
  Absolutely. That line is critical to avoiding pain. Library authors don't have that option, unfortunately. :/ But even if we ignore the compat versions for now (and quirks mode (and almost-quirks mode)), we still end up with up to 10 IEs in play simultaneously.
  - AshleysBrain 15y ago
    Good point about library authors... that's a headache!
dendory 15y ago
Honestly, IE doesn't worry me anymore. Chrome does. Seems like every month there's new Chrome-only experiments, and Google provides Chrome-only extensions like offline Docs. Is it too much to ask for cross browsers sites?
Macha 15y ago
IE6's entrenched position came from the fact that (a) it was the latest version of Internet Explorer for a _huge_ amount of time and (b) its status as the IE dead end for Win2k and below. When IE7 came out, any company that still had any Win2k machines had to keep designing with IE6 in mind if they wanted their new apps to work on all their computers. (I'm making the assumption that if they were relying on IE previously, they couldn't just switch to Firefox or something). Now, IE8 I think most people can accept is going to end up in IE6's current place. It's the IE dead end for XP, a hugely popular OS. But IE7? None of those companies that don't upgrade upgraded to IE7. Home users that upgrade will also have installed the IE8 upgrade. So you're left with what? Unpatched Vista installations. These are much rarer than unpatched XP installations simply because Vista had a shorter lifespan, and Windows Vista to 7 is sufficiently undramatic an upgrade for the types of people who would take years to go from XP to Vista. So so far we have: - IE6 will drag on as long as XP does. - IE7 won't last particularly long. While it's popular now, earlier Vista computers will be replaced in the close future (2-3 years), causing it to lose market share to IE8. - IE8 will have a long lifespan, although probably not as long as IE6. IE9? IE9 has never been shipped by default with any version of Windows. That means anyone who installed it did decide to upgrade. These users will likely upgrade away, meaning in the future, IE9 will be even more of a non-issue than IE7. IE10 will likely also go the way of IE7. While it will be installed by default on Windows 8, the amount of dramatic changes in W8 will scare off many of the companies that are slow to upgrade. So in 5 years time, what versions of IE will realistically you need to support? - IE6 (maybe - probably, hopefully, enterprise only at this stage) - IE8 - IE10 (enterprise will never use it because Win8 is scary and different to them so for home users only) - IElatest-1 So IE13 or something? - IElatest IE14 or something. Needing to support IE6 and IE10 will likely be mutually exclusive, so that's 4 versions for sites targeted at home users and 5 for sites aimed at both enterprise and home users. Still ugly, but far from 72. And all those versions will be dead in the timescale that the article is using. Insofar as IE6 will ever die, anyway. IE6 for home users will be dead at that point. Most of those old early XP computers will be "broken" and replaced, even if "broken" is just slow and annoying. Using XP in five years will be like using Win98/Win2k. Yes, people do use them. No, they aren't a large enough group for most to worry about. I even have a small amount of hits from Netscape 6. I haven't a clue what my page looked like for them, and don't care. In theory, if even IE is aiming for at least yearly releases from now on, no future IE will end up in the position that IE6 is in, and that IE8 will find itself in, as upgrading your browser frequently becomes a fact of life. The compatibility modes will be much less important too, as the shorter lived the browser, the less likely that the compatibility mode for it will ever be used. (Sidenote: Sorry for the kludgy lists. HN has no proper formatting for them, and they were causing horizontal scrollbars)
unreal37 15y ago
http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-september-2011/ http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-september-2011/ IE 7 is less than 5% market share now, almost the same as IE 6. I don't see how this predicts a future with 72 versions of IE. And how is this any different than Firefox? I am running Firefox 4 on my office computer - can't upgrade because of IT policy.
madmaze 15y ago
The Google Chrome version adoption chart very much drives home the difference between chrome and IE!
hussam 15y ago
Help me understand this, is the issue that IE users are not willing to upgrade to newer versions? or is it that Firefox/Chrome force users to upgrade while IE doesn't? Why is the fast release cycle a problem for IE but not for Firefox and Chrome? why are the adoption charts different for IE than the rest?
- suivix 15y ago
  Chrome makes you to auto-update and you can't disable it.
- MortenK 15y ago
  The issue is mainly with the large companies, who primarily seem to be using IE. Due to their size, they can't auto-upgrade without incurring massive costs. For the average consumer, it's not really a problem.
bittermang 15y ago
> How many browsers would you like to support? I don't support browsers. I support standards. I stopped performing hacky compatibility gymnastics long before Google made it cool to boast how you weren't supporting IE6 anymore, and my workflow and sanity has improved due to it.
- bittermang 15y ago
  To extend my point, I don't care if the user wants to use Firefox or Chrome or even IE. The rendering should be consistent across the board, and the browser should be about the user experience. Add ons, syncing, other such features. Imagine if this applied to the world of televisions. If people didn't buy Sony TVs because they didn't display channels as well as Sharp or Panasonic. If you had to render your video with some hacky kludge so the colors displayed right on a Samsung and an LG. That would be insane.
  - mappu 15y ago
    Remember the "web-safe" 216-colour palette? :(
pixelcloud 15y ago
I thought this was interesting. http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox IE isn't going to have advanced CSS3 support until version 10! However, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Mobile Safari, and Android browser all support it already. It just seems that Microsoft is incapable of staying on the edge.
- smackfu 15y ago
  The important part on that page is: Working Draft. Microsoft has committed to supporting standards, as soon as they are standards. It's certainly arguable whether it's a good idea to implement draft standards that people write HTML for that then change under them. Also, this kinda seems like cheating: "While only recently a W3C specification, this system has been in use for some time by Mozilla and Apple for interface purposes." So they codified something that Mozilla and Apple were already doing, then said that older versions of the browsers already supported the non-existent standard. Impressive.
  - carbon8 15y ago
    "Working Draft. Microsoft has committed to supporting standards, as soon as they are standards." As you can see in the example pixelcloud cites, Microsoft does in fact implement features based on working drafts. They are already doing this with CSS3 transforms and will be doing so with CSS3 gradients, animations, transitions and flexbox. Therefore, that doesn't actually appear to be the issue at all. "It's certainly arguable whether it's a good idea to implement draft standards that people write HTML for that then change under them." Well, we are discussing CSS here, and that's what vendor prefixes (which Microsoft uses, too) help avoid. "So they codified something that Mozilla and Apple were already doing," This is basically how the CSS3 standard progresses. Browser vendors implement a vendor-prefixed feature, and that feature works its way through the standards process. In fact, Microsoft does the same: http://caniuse.com/css-grid http://caniuse.com/css-grid
hvs 15y ago
"Personally, I'm totally happy supporting the latest version of each of the five browsers." Yeah, so would we all. That's not really an argument.
SurfScore 15y ago
I think that this article puts a large amount of speculation that M$ will continue to operate the same way. While I dont think anyone wants to BET on them doing the right thing, the people upstairs do understand money, and they also understand two of their biggest competitors (Google and Apple) both put out better browsers than they have. IE9 showed that they at least understand the importance of the web browser, and I would hope they would continue along that path with 10. Another thing is that web browsers are rapidly changing and evolving, I know Google is involved with a program now that allows C++ to run natively in the browser. In 2019, browsers could be COMPLETELY different than they are now. Backwards compatibility could become a forgotten term by that point, or browsers could operate totally different than they do now. I think a lot of what was written is true as far as the pain of past browsers, but speculating on the future is often a fool's errand.
wrs 15y ago
You kids these days don't know how good you have it. Back in the day, when applications ran on the computer instead of in the browser, we would have killed to have only 76 different configurations to support. (And I'm not joking, though I am smiling ruefully.)
- dredmorbius 15y ago
  Pshaw. We had one computer. And one program that ran on it. And we liked it that way. (OK, but we had a gazillion VMs so we could all run our one program on our one computer, except that we could never schedule any CPU time).
jfoster 15y ago
IE is out of step with the other browsers and no longer has a majority market share. So there's two options: 1. Innovate quickly and have access to amazing new browser features, but only cater to 60% or so of the market. 2. Support 100% of the market, but with considerable more effort (slowing you down). Both approaches are legitimate. I prefer the first one, but the users who can't use my sites are going to want something equivalent for their outdated browser.
aj700 15y ago
Briefly: facebook timeline is terrible. Even Chrome can hardly cope with all the javascript and reflowing as you load a profile page. There's no way in hell IE6 on XP will be able to cope with it -- the rendering engine, OR EVEN the cpu. Maybe that's the whole idea - Facebook could be Microsoft's best way of forcing people to abandon IE6 (and so XP). Semi-seriously, semi-approvingly I ask: Conspiracy?
- robryan 15y ago
  I don't think Facebook has supported IE6 for a long time, at least that was the case when I tested it 6 months ago.
  - aj700 15y ago
    you're probably right and I didn't know that. But all of what I said probably applies to ie7 or even 8.
- andrewflnr 15y ago
  Not conspiracy, just synergy! (I'm not sure if I'm being serious or sarcastic myself...)
Lagged2Death 15y ago
So in a few years from now, you'll be supporting one version of Chrome, one version of Firefox, one of Opera, (probably) one of Safari, and ten versions of IE. I think the nightmare scenario couldn't possibly play out this way. We've all seen what really happens when there are too many browsers to support; web developers drop all pretense of supporting the least popular browsers, which would in a case like this be Opera, Safari, and maybe Chrome. And sites put up banners telling users to upgrade to the latest version of IE.
dredmorbius 15y ago
The thought that occurs to me is that the adoption graph has a lot less to say about the suckage of supporting IE6, and a lot more about the suckage of being a Microsoft user. Users of other browsers are on systems and/or workplaces which allow them to upgrade their browsers within reasonable time as new versions come out. The MS-dedicated shops (and yes, I'm aware that most are large hidebound organizations, enterprises, and/or government entities) are stuck in their own labyrinths of fragile, massively interdependent, legacy systems. This suggests to me that the modern vs. legacy browser war may actually be a proxy for ossified vs. agile organizations. There's still a great deal of power in the ossified side, but it will be interesting to see how comparative advantage plays out over the next 5-10 years (assuming the zombie apocalypse doesn't strike first).

274 points by joshuacc 15y ago

NHQ 15y ago

You're wasting your time if you worry about legacy browser support. Period. For every legacy browser out there--a number which only grows in spurts when a browser becomes "legacy"--there are maybe a 1,000(,000) shiny new browsers being shipped daily. Which do you care about? A stagnant legacy count, or a growing demand of new, mostly compatible, mostly upgradable browsers?

HardyLeung 15y ago

When I first read that there are 76 browsers to support, I was thinking... Hmm, yeah this versioning thing is going out of hand. But it was Chrome + FF + Opera + Safari + 72 versions of IE. Seriously? Projecting all the way to IE20 (2022) with a compatibility mode between any two versions of IE?

fady 15y ago

a dose of reality, and it's really a shame.

simonsarris 15y ago

I saw this on paul's G+ and rolled my eyes. Oh guffaw. The time has easily come where we are allowed to say "no" to several browser versions, or at least ignore them. Even Google has dropped support for IE6. Supporting several browsers does not mean that a website has to look perfect in all those browsers. My sites will look good on the latest version of Chrome, IE, Opera, and Firefox. Users of IE6/7/etc are already self-inflicting harm on their own web experience, why should we care to cater to them? They can have the website I display, but I'm not building the site for the past. I don't care if previous browser users see the Best Of All Possible Websites, as long as they see something. And since I'm developing Canvas apps, I don't care if some of them see anything at all. I imagine IE will reluctantly take the road of Chrome or FF and be more insistent about updates, especially outside of the corporate world. I also think that in the future the consensus will be that there isn't anything wrong with dropping support for aged browsers, and just displaying one "simple" site version to them.

jemka 15y ago
>Users of IE6/7/etc are already self-inflicting harm on their own web experience Don't assume users have a choice. Even if they do, don't assume they understand the choice. >why should we care to cater to them? If you want to ignore a % of your users, that's fine. Some of your competitors wont. That's your choice. Just realize you can be losing potential users/customers and that lesson about updating their browsers will be lost on the customers that went elsewhere.
- simonsarris 15y ago
  I'm not suggesting those users who don't have a choice should be ignored completely, I'm suggesting they be ignored for the Best Of All Possible Websites (or whatever you'd like to call it). Even if you display to 70+ browsers you can still get away with programming two versions, as most websites do today (or more than two, as most major websites do). One will simply be less complex and pretty than the other (CSS3, etc). In the future I imagine that will be the standard: Modern version of a website, and then lowest-common-denominator version, which works with IE[X]+ and older mobile browsers, and stubborn/corporate firefox users, etc. In my case I don't have a choice: Canvas cannot work on IE6/7/8. Excanvas works until animation is introduced, then becomes progressively worthless.
  - gmac 15y ago
    It may still not do what you need, but I've found FlashCanvas to be much better (for speed and correctness) than Excanvas.
- bediger 15y ago
  If you want to ignore a % of your users, that's fine. Some of your competitors wont. You know, as a long-time Linux and Firefox user, I've made that point to a number of newspaper web sites, etc etc etc. I usually get the written equivalent of an eye-roll. Why is it that it's OK for a business to ignore Linux and Mac users (back when Macs didn't have such a huge mind-share). or Firefox and Safari users, but it's not OK for a busines to ignore the same fraction of Windows users?

d2vid 15y ago

FUD - you don't have to support every browser. And it's especially disingenuous to say that if you're developing websites/web applications you should care about, say, IE20 users running in IE 5 compatibility mode.

alanh 15y ago
I had a similar thought, but as the author points out in a thread here, it is still largely legitimate for library authors.

melling 15y ago

"Doctor, doctor it hurts when I have to support 10 versions of IE"... errr... "Then don't that!" Only support the last two version. Warn people who come to your site that they are using an outdated and unsupported browser. Point them to Chrome, Firefox and Opera, which are all free. Cut the Gordian Knot:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot

steve-howard 15y ago
But for Pete's sake, only warn them once. Every time I visit Hotwire with an unstable version of Firefox, it reminds me to upgrade my browser with an obnoxious pop-up.
paulirish 15y ago
As IE6 has died, I think we've kinda lulled into some sort of complacency and I don't see heavy campaigning for browser upgrades currently. I'd be happy to see it, and like I mention, prompting a IE7 user to upgrade to IE9 is currently just irresponsible.

pavel_lishin 15y ago

> Meanwhile, you won't have to worry about supporting Firefox 6 or Chrome 13 in November. You sure about that? Just because they're not officially supported doesn't mean a significant number of people won't still be using them.

melling 15y ago
Chrome 13 will definitely be gone. You can verify the data. http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201009-201108 http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-ww-monthly-201009... Mozilla has more of a problem getting people to upgrade but I think they will if simply nudged.
- gcp 15y ago
  >Mozilla has more of a problem getting people to upgrade but I think they will if simply nudged. I'm guessing both Mozilla and the users are holding back a bit until they get more confident with the add-on situation.
nextparadigms 15y ago
For Firefox it may take a few months since they don't do auto-updating like Chrome does, but almost everyone transitions to the latest version of Chrome in a matter of days.
- bzbarsky 15y ago
  Firefox auto-updates. Where does this idea that it doesn't come from?
  - mappu 15y ago
    It auto-updates, yes, but not like chrome does. Firefox downloads a ~15MB update that might cause unacceptably bad performance, or even not complete in an ordinary browsing session for users on slow connections. Chrome downloads a assembly diff on the order of a few kilobytes, disassembles its own binary, patches and rebuilds on the client machine, completely transparently and without intervention of any sort.

billybob 15y ago

This sounds terrible, but it seems to me that nobody will let it get that bad. It's infeasible to support 70+ browsers simultaneously; no dev shop can afford that. So they would either pick versions or choose some common set of features to support. If this meant that IE users got crappy experiences, despite developers' best efforts, people might finally start ditching IE. (A man can dream, can't he?) But I think the IE team will find a way to prevent this.

masklinn 15y ago

> IE6 has been a source of pain for… I'd say four years. We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007, right after the original iPhone was released. By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari 3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools the next year) available. Hell, by late 2007 IE7 was a year old already. And a significant reason why the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004. IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout [0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully slow runtime & al. Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort). Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to turn its attention from styling to behavior, which lead to the rebirth of Javascript and the creation of modern javascript: AJAX coined (and seminal article on the subject published)? February 2005. Opera Desktop free and ad-free? April 2005 QuirksBlog? December 2004. The killing of "DHTML"? 2005[1]. http://simonwillison.net/2005/Jan/5/swissMaps/ http://simonwillison.net/2005/Jan/5/swissMaps/ http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index.php http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index...., ... the javascript frameworks explosion was also 2004 (Dojo) through 2005 (Prototype, Mochikit) to 2006 (jQuery, YUI) [0] http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html [1] http://adactio.com/journal/938 http://adactio.com/journal/938

DrJokepu 15y ago
Actually, by late 2003 Phoenix (which is what Firefox used to be called back then) was already an impressive little browser (it was little back then) and IE6 was already horribly outdated and clumsy for those of us who grew a penchant for alternative browsers (the others being Opera and the Mozilla Suite).

AshleysBrain 15y ago

The 72 browser versions thing is an exaggeration. For your websites, add this tag: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /> - and you force IE to use that version's latest documents mode. So good point about IE's slow adoption, it really is annoying and holding back the web - but for your websites, you can easily force the document mode of your choice, avoiding the crappy emulated modes.

rocktronica 15y ago
Kinda sorta. "Edge" rendering on X browsers is still X different ways for all those stuck-in-time browsers to decide what "edge" meant at the time of their release or last update. That meta tag is a good practice but not the ultimate solution.
- AshleysBrain 15y ago
  Yeah, but the point is X is better than X^2 + (1/2)X. The article makes a big deal of the 72 browsers thing.
paulirish 15y ago
Absolutely. That line is critical to avoiding pain. Library authors don't have that option, unfortunately. :/ But even if we ignore the compat versions for now (and quirks mode (and almost-quirks mode)), we still end up with up to 10 IEs in play simultaneously.
- AshleysBrain 15y ago
  Good point about library authors... that's a headache!

dendory 15y ago

Honestly, IE doesn't worry me anymore. Chrome does. Seems like every month there's new Chrome-only experiments, and Google provides Chrome-only extensions like offline Docs. Is it too much to ask for cross browsers sites?

Macha 15y ago

IE6's entrenched position came from the fact that (a) it was the latest version of Internet Explorer for a _huge_ amount of time and (b) its status as the IE dead end for Win2k and below. When IE7 came out, any company that still had any Win2k machines had to keep designing with IE6 in mind if they wanted their new apps to work on all their computers. (I'm making the assumption that if they were relying on IE previously, they couldn't just switch to Firefox or something). Now, IE8 I think most people can accept is going to end up in IE6's current place. It's the IE dead end for XP, a hugely popular OS. But IE7? None of those companies that don't upgrade upgraded to IE7. Home users that upgrade will also have installed the IE8 upgrade. So you're left with what? Unpatched Vista installations. These are much rarer than unpatched XP installations simply because Vista had a shorter lifespan, and Windows Vista to 7 is sufficiently undramatic an upgrade for the types of people who would take years to go from XP to Vista. So so far we have: - IE6 will drag on as long as XP does. - IE7 won't last particularly long. While it's popular now, earlier Vista computers will be replaced in the close future (2-3 years), causing it to lose market share to IE8. - IE8 will have a long lifespan, although probably not as long as IE6. IE9? IE9 has never been shipped by default with any version of Windows. That means anyone who installed it did decide to upgrade. These users will likely upgrade away, meaning in the future, IE9 will be even more of a non-issue than IE7. IE10 will likely also go the way of IE7. While it will be installed by default on Windows 8, the amount of dramatic changes in W8 will scare off many of the companies that are slow to upgrade. So in 5 years time, what versions of IE will realistically you need to support? - IE6 (maybe - probably, hopefully, enterprise only at this stage) - IE8 - IE10 (enterprise will never use it because Win8 is scary and different to them so for home users only) - IElatest-1 So IE13 or something? - IElatest IE14 or something. Needing to support IE6 and IE10 will likely be mutually exclusive, so that's 4 versions for sites targeted at home users and 5 for sites aimed at both enterprise and home users. Still ugly, but far from 72. And all those versions will be dead in the timescale that the article is using. Insofar as IE6 will ever die, anyway. IE6 for home users will be dead at that point. Most of those old early XP computers will be "broken" and replaced, even if "broken" is just slow and annoying. Using XP in five years will be like using Win98/Win2k. Yes, people do use them. No, they aren't a large enough group for most to worry about. I even have a small amount of hits from Netscape 6. I haven't a clue what my page looked like for them, and don't care. In theory, if even IE is aiming for at least yearly releases from now on, no future IE will end up in the position that IE6 is in, and that IE8 will find itself in, as upgrading your browser frequently becomes a fact of life. The compatibility modes will be much less important too, as the shorter lived the browser, the less likely that the compatibility mode for it will ever be used. (Sidenote: Sorry for the kludgy lists. HN has no proper formatting for them, and they were causing horizontal scrollbars)

unreal37 15y ago

http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-september-2011/ http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-september-2011/ IE 7 is less than 5% market share now, almost the same as IE 6. I don't see how this predicts a future with 72 versions of IE. And how is this any different than Firefox? I am running Firefox 4 on my office computer - can't upgrade because of IT policy.

madmaze 15y ago

The Google Chrome version adoption chart very much drives home the difference between chrome and IE!

hussam 15y ago

Help me understand this, is the issue that IE users are not willing to upgrade to newer versions? or is it that Firefox/Chrome force users to upgrade while IE doesn't? Why is the fast release cycle a problem for IE but not for Firefox and Chrome? why are the adoption charts different for IE than the rest?

suivix 15y ago
Chrome makes you to auto-update and you can't disable it.
MortenK 15y ago
The issue is mainly with the large companies, who primarily seem to be using IE. Due to their size, they can't auto-upgrade without incurring massive costs. For the average consumer, it's not really a problem.

bittermang 15y ago

> How many browsers would you like to support? I don't support browsers. I support standards. I stopped performing hacky compatibility gymnastics long before Google made it cool to boast how you weren't supporting IE6 anymore, and my workflow and sanity has improved due to it.

bittermang 15y ago
To extend my point, I don't care if the user wants to use Firefox or Chrome or even IE. The rendering should be consistent across the board, and the browser should be about the user experience. Add ons, syncing, other such features. Imagine if this applied to the world of televisions. If people didn't buy Sony TVs because they didn't display channels as well as Sharp or Panasonic. If you had to render your video with some hacky kludge so the colors displayed right on a Samsung and an LG. That would be insane.
- mappu 15y ago
  Remember the "web-safe" 216-colour palette? :(

pixelcloud 15y ago

I thought this was interesting. http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox IE isn't going to have advanced CSS3 support until version 10! However, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Mobile Safari, and Android browser all support it already. It just seems that Microsoft is incapable of staying on the edge.

smackfu 15y ago
The important part on that page is: Working Draft. Microsoft has committed to supporting standards, as soon as they are standards. It's certainly arguable whether it's a good idea to implement draft standards that people write HTML for that then change under them. Also, this kinda seems like cheating: "While only recently a W3C specification, this system has been in use for some time by Mozilla and Apple for interface purposes." So they codified something that Mozilla and Apple were already doing, then said that older versions of the browsers already supported the non-existent standard. Impressive.
- carbon8 15y ago
  "Working Draft. Microsoft has committed to supporting standards, as soon as they are standards." As you can see in the example pixelcloud cites, Microsoft does in fact implement features based on working drafts. They are already doing this with CSS3 transforms and will be doing so with CSS3 gradients, animations, transitions and flexbox. Therefore, that doesn't actually appear to be the issue at all. "It's certainly arguable whether it's a good idea to implement draft standards that people write HTML for that then change under them." Well, we are discussing CSS here, and that's what vendor prefixes (which Microsoft uses, too) help avoid. "So they codified something that Mozilla and Apple were already doing," This is basically how the CSS3 standard progresses. Browser vendors implement a vendor-prefixed feature, and that feature works its way through the standards process. In fact, Microsoft does the same: http://caniuse.com/css-grid http://caniuse.com/css-grid

hvs 15y ago

"Personally, I'm totally happy supporting the latest version of each of the five browsers." Yeah, so would we all. That's not really an argument.

SurfScore 15y ago

I think that this article puts a large amount of speculation that M$ will continue to operate the same way. While I dont think anyone wants to BET on them doing the right thing, the people upstairs do understand money, and they also understand two of their biggest competitors (Google and Apple) both put out better browsers than they have. IE9 showed that they at least understand the importance of the web browser, and I would hope they would continue along that path with 10. Another thing is that web browsers are rapidly changing and evolving, I know Google is involved with a program now that allows C++ to run natively in the browser. In 2019, browsers could be COMPLETELY different than they are now. Backwards compatibility could become a forgotten term by that point, or browsers could operate totally different than they do now. I think a lot of what was written is true as far as the pain of past browsers, but speculating on the future is often a fool's errand.

wrs 15y ago

You kids these days don't know how good you have it. Back in the day, when applications ran on the computer instead of in the browser, we would have killed to have only 76 different configurations to support. (And I'm not joking, though I am smiling ruefully.)

dredmorbius 15y ago
Pshaw. We had one computer. And one program that ran on it. And we liked it that way. (OK, but we had a gazillion VMs so we could all run our one program on our one computer, except that we could never schedule any CPU time).

jfoster 15y ago

IE is out of step with the other browsers and no longer has a majority market share. So there's two options: 1. Innovate quickly and have access to amazing new browser features, but only cater to 60% or so of the market. 2. Support 100% of the market, but with considerable more effort (slowing you down). Both approaches are legitimate. I prefer the first one, but the users who can't use my sites are going to want something equivalent for their outdated browser.

aj700 15y ago

Briefly: facebook timeline is terrible. Even Chrome can hardly cope with all the javascript and reflowing as you load a profile page. There's no way in hell IE6 on XP will be able to cope with it -- the rendering engine, OR EVEN the cpu. Maybe that's the whole idea - Facebook could be Microsoft's best way of forcing people to abandon IE6 (and so XP). Semi-seriously, semi-approvingly I ask: Conspiracy?

robryan 15y ago
I don't think Facebook has supported IE6 for a long time, at least that was the case when I tested it 6 months ago.
- aj700 15y ago
  you're probably right and I didn't know that. But all of what I said probably applies to ie7 or even 8.
andrewflnr 15y ago
Not conspiracy, just synergy! (I'm not sure if I'm being serious or sarcastic myself...)

Lagged2Death 15y ago

So in a few years from now, you'll be supporting one version of Chrome, one version of Firefox, one of Opera, (probably) one of Safari, and ten versions of IE. I think the nightmare scenario couldn't possibly play out this way. We've all seen what really happens when there are too many browsers to support; web developers drop all pretense of supporting the least popular browsers, which would in a case like this be Opera, Safari, and maybe Chrome. And sites put up banners telling users to upgrade to the latest version of IE.

dredmorbius 15y ago

The thought that occurs to me is that the adoption graph has a lot less to say about the suckage of supporting IE6, and a lot more about the suckage of being a Microsoft user. Users of other browsers are on systems and/or workplaces which allow them to upgrade their browsers within reasonable time as new versions come out. The MS-dedicated shops (and yes, I'm aware that most are large hidebound organizations, enterprises, and/or government entities) are stuck in their own labyrinths of fragile, massively interdependent, legacy systems. This suggests to me that the modern vs. legacy browser war may actually be a proxy for ossified vs. agile organizations. There's still a great deal of power in the ossified side, but it will be interesting to see how comparative advantage plays out over the next 5-10 years (assuming the zombie apocalypse doesn't strike first).