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I despise websites that do this because I have to use IE7 at work. This is probably the second fastest way for me to banish your website from memory besides bei

by kirse 18y ago

I despise websites that do this because I have to use IE7 at work. This is probably the second fastest way for me to banish your website from memory besides being spam. Everyone on here talks about making the sign-up process as easy as possible, and requiring someone to download and install an entirely new application is about as complex and uninviting as one can get. Us "technical" people are still people, and the more you annoy me with the signup process the less likely I am to complete it. Even starting up a new browser and copying your URL is a nuisance. Secondly, I've never really had a Safari/FF->IE7 bug that didn't take about 30 minutes of Googling or simply making a sneaky workaround. There might be some cursing in between but it simply has to get done otherwise it's ignoring a big audience. Edit to Clarify: I am in full support of dropping IE6 as most of you have noted, seeing as how the user base has dropped and the majority of people with IE6 have been "auto-updated" to IE7.

noblethrasher 18y ago
Yes, but it's not usually one bug. A bug here and a bug there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. IE7 isn't so bad but I'm seriously contemplating dropping support for IE6 very soon.
- mrtron 18y ago
  The 'fixes' aka hacks aren't that difficult. The problem is it makes everything so brittle and people tend to do things the shitty route just to support IE. Maybe it was the last changes to fix IE6...but I actually looked up browser percentages and considered dropping support.
  - noblethrasher 18y ago
    IE + hacks, with respect to technical debt, is like one of those credit cards that offer 0% interest and free miles for the first 6 months after which it switches to a non-premium card with a 37% APR.
- feverishaaron 18y ago
  I estimate that supporting IE6 has added more than 30% of the interface development costs to the complex projects I have worked on that use a combination of sophisticated CSS and JS to get the job done. This is a HUGE cost for start-ups and for clients to swallow, once the true cost is explained to them. Just supporting the way various sub-versions of IE6 inconsistently handle cookies is a nightmare, and in many cases lead to unsolvable issues. This costed a client of mine real $$$$ to discover, and less than 20% of their audience used IE6. Less than 15 people actually complained about the issue. IE 7 isn't quite as bad, but it still adds a measure of time to front-end development efforts. I would estimate it in the range of 10-20%, depending on how complex the interface is. On two recent projects, we dropped IE6 support, with virtually no push-back from a general-use audience. IE6 is almost 8 years old. Most people don't keep their cars that long, and can understand that an old crusty browser is not going to perform as well. The only place where I would be hesitant to drop IE6 support is on marketing sites (where you need to entice someone to a call-to-action within the first 30sec-1min) and on e-commerce sites, where every dollar counts.
  - jasonkester 18y ago
    30% cost to support 70% of your userbase seems like a win to me. This is only an issue for developers who target Firefox initially. That's the wrong way to go about web development. Run IE7 on your dev box and build everything against it. That's what your users will have, so that should be your first priority. Step two is making it work for FF. The added benefit to that approach is that you'll find less cross platform issues. Going from IE -> Firefox is a lot easier than the other way around.
    - fdb 18y ago
      Are you kidding? Developing for a crappy browser first is the perfect recipe for an unmaintainable mess of code, since you will be relying on hacks to get IE to do render correctly, then adding hacks again for every browser that does the right thing. First develop for a standards-compliant browser, then add (conditional) hacks to support IE. The other way around is just silly.
- ken 18y ago
  And it's not just bugs, but lack of features. For example, I have requirements for simple 2D graphics with client-side interactivity. If we only had to support Firefox/Safari/Opera/Chrome, we could use SVG, but for users with IE (which has neither SVG or Canvas), that means Flash. Doing simple graphics with Flash is well over 10x more work than just splatting some XML inline into your page (which I've also done for personal side projects). Consider, for example, that Flash/IE is a completely different plugin than Flash/all-other-browsers. We've definitely had Flash compatibility bugs between major versions, between minor versions, and even between the "same version" on different browsers. I can think of a few that took many of us more than 30 minutes just to trace through, much less come up with a workaround. And all of this only because IE (even IE8, AFAICT) doesn't natively support any kind of client-side graphics. I don't know where the 30% overhead estimate for IE came from -- maybe a simple site? That sounds really, really low to me. I would put it at least 100% overhead for the kinds of things I do.
  - jasonkester 18y ago
    You're mistaken. IE has had SVG support since IE5, long before Safari and Firefox introduced Canvas. And the nice kids at Google have built a little library that lets you emulate most Canvas functionality via SVG: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iecanvas http://sourceforge.net/projects/iecanvas
    - ken 18y ago
      (At first I thought this was a joke, but it's up to +4.) I think you're mistaken. I tried IE6 and IE7 just now, and they don't do SVG (though it nicely offers to save the file). I think you're thinking of something called "VML". IE does have that, but it's not the same as SVG, not as full-featured as SVG, and nobody else supports it. Maybe that would solve some of my problems, but I'd never even heard of it before -- though I'm sure checking it out now! I think the URL you meant to post was <http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/> http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/>. I looked at the source, and it uses VML, not SVG.
      - jasonkester 18y ago
- billroberts 18y ago
  I agree totally. We decided a while back that we wouldn't attempt to support IE6 - life is too short. We do support IE7, but still spend a lot of time on fixes and workarounds for minor incompatibilities. If our stuff works on Firefox, it generally works on Safari too, with no extra effort, but an oft-repeated phrase in our company is an exasperated "f*^&&ing IE!"
thesethings 18y ago
Can I ask you (and others in a similar boat) a question about your work environment? When you say "I have to use IE at work," do you mean at the exclusion of other browsers? I too have to have IE6 at work (many old business apps require it), but I can also run Firefox, Chrome, Flock, Safari, etc. And I don't mind having multiple browsers open, in fact, I just usually do naturally, without any impetus. Does you workplace lock it down so you have only one browser?
- alecthomas 18y ago
  At my two previous employers, that's exactly what they do. All machines are completely locked-down. I suspect this is not unusual at large, more traditional corporations.

by kirse 18y ago

noblethrasher 18y ago

Yes, but it's not usually one bug. A bug here and a bug there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. IE7 isn't so bad but I'm seriously contemplating dropping support for IE6 very soon.

mrtron 18y ago
The 'fixes' aka hacks aren't that difficult. The problem is it makes everything so brittle and people tend to do things the shitty route just to support IE. Maybe it was the last changes to fix IE6...but I actually looked up browser percentages and considered dropping support.
- noblethrasher 18y ago
  IE + hacks, with respect to technical debt, is like one of those credit cards that offer 0% interest and free miles for the first 6 months after which it switches to a non-premium card with a 37% APR.
feverishaaron 18y ago
I estimate that supporting IE6 has added more than 30% of the interface development costs to the complex projects I have worked on that use a combination of sophisticated CSS and JS to get the job done. This is a HUGE cost for start-ups and for clients to swallow, once the true cost is explained to them. Just supporting the way various sub-versions of IE6 inconsistently handle cookies is a nightmare, and in many cases lead to unsolvable issues. This costed a client of mine real $$$$ to discover, and less than 20% of their audience used IE6. Less than 15 people actually complained about the issue. IE 7 isn't quite as bad, but it still adds a measure of time to front-end development efforts. I would estimate it in the range of 10-20%, depending on how complex the interface is. On two recent projects, we dropped IE6 support, with virtually no push-back from a general-use audience. IE6 is almost 8 years old. Most people don't keep their cars that long, and can understand that an old crusty browser is not going to perform as well. The only place where I would be hesitant to drop IE6 support is on marketing sites (where you need to entice someone to a call-to-action within the first 30sec-1min) and on e-commerce sites, where every dollar counts.
- jasonkester 18y ago
  30% cost to support 70% of your userbase seems like a win to me. This is only an issue for developers who target Firefox initially. That's the wrong way to go about web development. Run IE7 on your dev box and build everything against it. That's what your users will have, so that should be your first priority. Step two is making it work for FF. The added benefit to that approach is that you'll find less cross platform issues. Going from IE -> Firefox is a lot easier than the other way around.
  - fdb 18y ago
    Are you kidding? Developing for a crappy browser first is the perfect recipe for an unmaintainable mess of code, since you will be relying on hacks to get IE to do render correctly, then adding hacks again for every browser that does the right thing. First develop for a standards-compliant browser, then add (conditional) hacks to support IE. The other way around is just silly.
ken 18y ago
And it's not just bugs, but lack of features. For example, I have requirements for simple 2D graphics with client-side interactivity. If we only had to support Firefox/Safari/Opera/Chrome, we could use SVG, but for users with IE (which has neither SVG or Canvas), that means Flash. Doing simple graphics with Flash is well over 10x more work than just splatting some XML inline into your page (which I've also done for personal side projects). Consider, for example, that Flash/IE is a completely different plugin than Flash/all-other-browsers. We've definitely had Flash compatibility bugs between major versions, between minor versions, and even between the "same version" on different browsers. I can think of a few that took many of us more than 30 minutes just to trace through, much less come up with a workaround. And all of this only because IE (even IE8, AFAICT) doesn't natively support any kind of client-side graphics. I don't know where the 30% overhead estimate for IE came from -- maybe a simple site? That sounds really, really low to me. I would put it at least 100% overhead for the kinds of things I do.
- jasonkester 18y ago
  You're mistaken. IE has had SVG support since IE5, long before Safari and Firefox introduced Canvas. And the nice kids at Google have built a little library that lets you emulate most Canvas functionality via SVG: http://sourceforge.net/projects/iecanvas http://sourceforge.net/projects/iecanvas
  - ken 18y ago
    (At first I thought this was a joke, but it's up to +4.) I think you're mistaken. I tried IE6 and IE7 just now, and they don't do SVG (though it nicely offers to save the file). I think you're thinking of something called "VML". IE does have that, but it's not the same as SVG, not as full-featured as SVG, and nobody else supports it. Maybe that would solve some of my problems, but I'd never even heard of it before -- though I'm sure checking it out now! I think the URL you meant to post was <http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/> http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/>. I looked at the source, and it uses VML, not SVG.
    - jasonkester 18y ago
billroberts 18y ago
I agree totally. We decided a while back that we wouldn't attempt to support IE6 - life is too short. We do support IE7, but still spend a lot of time on fixes and workarounds for minor incompatibilities. If our stuff works on Firefox, it generally works on Safari too, with no extra effort, but an oft-repeated phrase in our company is an exasperated "f*^&&ing IE!"

thesethings 18y ago

Can I ask you (and others in a similar boat) a question about your work environment? When you say "I have to use IE at work," do you mean at the exclusion of other browsers? I too have to have IE6 at work (many old business apps require it), but I can also run Firefox, Chrome, Flock, Safari, etc. And I don't mind having multiple browsers open, in fact, I just usually do naturally, without any impetus. Does you workplace lock it down so you have only one browser?

alecthomas 18y ago
At my two previous employers, that's exactly what they do. All machines are completely locked-down. I suspect this is not unusual at large, more traditional corporations.