4 ms·

I hardly think this is a crisis. Support it or piss off your userbase. That's your call. In our case, becaues we're a corporate provider, 65% of our userbase

by meaty 14y ago

I hardly think this is a crisis. Support it or piss off your userbase. That's your call. In our case, becaues we're a corporate provider, 65% of our userbase is on IE8 still and will be for the forseeable future. Do we have a problem? No. Why? Because we're not fickle when it comes to technology. We're not obsessed with the latest thing. We're not going to throw this policy away and it's not a crisis. Compatibility is something which people have stopped valuing, which is bad.

rurounijones 14y ago
Depends on your market. As you have rightly pointed out in your case supporting IE8 is very very important. For others, not important. The fact that your last few lines seem to, in your opinion from what I can tell, place you in the "right" regarding this issue seems a bit hypocritical given your first two lines. To each their own, the market (and an XP EOL next year) should eventually kill off IE8.
- meaty 14y ago
  I'm stating the truth that you can do what you like, but I don't think that is necessarily right. We still have a lot of corporate users on windows XP with no sign of them upgrading any time soon. Why? They don't need to - they're not on the public internet and everything they already do still works. There is little value in them changing. Their windows 7 upgrade is scheduled as an incremental step around 2015 but only on hardware failures.
  - Wintamute 14y ago
    Imagine you're a representative of an advanced space faring civilisation and have been given the task of safe-guarding a small stone-age settlement of promising humanoids. Their planet is rich in precious ores but the galaxy is at war and their position is precarious. Do you teach them the secrets of metal work or let them grub around in the mud for another few thousand years?
    - meaty 14y ago
      Nope. I just live in the real world in a company which isn't a social network or VC funded wank fest selling iPhone apps, cloud storage, useless productivity cloud crap and doesn't use Haskell, LISP or Clojure for anything.
      - deleted 14y ago
        [deleted]
      - mamp 14y ago
        In some parts of the real world it is now possible to replace corporate rich client applications with all their complicated deployment and update work with (well written) modern HTML5/Javascript apps that also provide an opportunity to better abstract the application middle and back ends. IE 6-9 are barriers. We have had success with Chrome Frame but some IT departments are still resistant to even this because they are afraid their IE 6 active X specific web apps will stop working. Even if they don't, it's just something they don't want to think about, and Microsoft aren't providing a corporate IT dept transition for IE 6 to HTML5 etc.
        meaty 14y ago
        Agreed it's possible. In fact our main line of deployment is web application which is fairly up to date feature wise, but it still degrades to the lowest denominator. However, the resistance is usually budgetary and apathy related rather than for any technical reason. They are thinking about it, but it's still cheaper to keep your old stuff than update it, even if it is old.
derleth 14y ago
> we're not fickle when it comes to technology > Compatibility is something which people have stopped valuing, which is bad. OK, test your website in Netscape 4.
- meaty 14y ago
  That's an extreme point. IE8 is only 3 years old and still supported. Netscape 4 hasn't been around for nigh on ten years.
  - derleth 14y ago
    > Netscape 4 hasn't been around for nigh on ten years. So? Ten years is nothing. There's no good reason for your site to not work in it.
    - meaty 14y ago
      I've actually tried it. It actually mostly works. There was one JavaScript error which I've fixed and the layout is broken but still flows properly.
- nivla 14y ago
  It is pretty interesting that most people don't take compatibility seriously. There is the famous saying, "If it ain't broken don't fix it" and another "Move forward", compatibility I feel is the link between the two, moving forward while not breaking anything. So yes it is very important. Some cool examples: [o]You can still design a fully functional website using the basic html markup and it will still render finely on a Netscape 4. [o]You can still make Doom play on the latest Windows. [o]You can still get one of the oldest linux programs such as DC Calc or Roff to work with the lastest Ubuntu.
  - derleth 14y ago
    > It is pretty interesting that most people don't take compatibility seriously. If you don't test in NS4, you don't take it seriously, either.
roel_v 14y ago
"Do we have a problem? No." So now comes jQuery 2 and now what? Maybe you don't use it, but just replace it with any library you use in your environment. This comes from somebody doing C++ on VS 2008 on Windows XP, so I feel your pain. I just think it's not a very feasible stance to take. I've held out on XP for as long as I could, but I'm not sure how long I'll be able to last. (although, to be honest, I haven't found any real compatibility issues yet; of course I'm not using IE any more so that probably shields me from most issues. I did have one problem a few weeks ago with a Windows 2000 server not being able to run recent Firefox versions, but I guess Win2k is really deprecated by now ;) )
- meaty 14y ago
  jQuery 2 can fuck off. In fact jQuery as a whole can fuck off. It's been a disasterous slog using it for us. No end of problems with it and associated half-arsed shitty plugins to the point we've developed our own internal JS API and toolkit which we can control. Even minor version upgrades of jQuery have been dependency hell (we have 110kloc of JS excluding jQuery plugins - a lot!). We deploy desktop apps (via ClickOnce / direct) as well as web applications, so we're supposedly in the same mire, however they still "just work". They don't suddenly stop working one day. Youre entire toolchain is fine. Just keep it in a VM. We only just killed a desktop app deployed on Windows NT4 which was thrown together with VC++ 6. I have the VM running now as I'm porting it to .Net 4 (C# this time).
  - andybak 14y ago
    > to the point we've developed our own internal JS API and toolkit which we can control I would have thought submitting a bug fix to jQuery might have been less work.
    - meaty 14y ago
      Harder than it looks. Submitted 20+ bug reports, got 1 solved. jQuery's issue tracking and source management was a baron land of incompetence. By that time we had our own wrapper API that fixed all the jQuery bugs so we just took the guts out and replaced then with our own.

by meaty 14y ago

rurounijones 14y ago

Depends on your market. As you have rightly pointed out in your case supporting IE8 is very very important. For others, not important. The fact that your last few lines seem to, in your opinion from what I can tell, place you in the "right" regarding this issue seems a bit hypocritical given your first two lines. To each their own, the market (and an XP EOL next year) should eventually kill off IE8.

meaty 14y ago
I'm stating the truth that you can do what you like, but I don't think that is necessarily right. We still have a lot of corporate users on windows XP with no sign of them upgrading any time soon. Why? They don't need to - they're not on the public internet and everything they already do still works. There is little value in them changing. Their windows 7 upgrade is scheduled as an incremental step around 2015 but only on hardware failures.
- Wintamute 14y ago
  Imagine you're a representative of an advanced space faring civilisation and have been given the task of safe-guarding a small stone-age settlement of promising humanoids. Their planet is rich in precious ores but the galaxy is at war and their position is precarious. Do you teach them the secrets of metal work or let them grub around in the mud for another few thousand years?
  - meaty 14y ago
    Nope. I just live in the real world in a company which isn't a social network or VC funded wank fest selling iPhone apps, cloud storage, useless productivity cloud crap and doesn't use Haskell, LISP or Clojure for anything.
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
    - mamp 14y ago
      In some parts of the real world it is now possible to replace corporate rich client applications with all their complicated deployment and update work with (well written) modern HTML5/Javascript apps that also provide an opportunity to better abstract the application middle and back ends. IE 6-9 are barriers. We have had success with Chrome Frame but some IT departments are still resistant to even this because they are afraid their IE 6 active X specific web apps will stop working. Even if they don't, it's just something they don't want to think about, and Microsoft aren't providing a corporate IT dept transition for IE 6 to HTML5 etc.
      - meaty 14y ago
        Agreed it's possible. In fact our main line of deployment is web application which is fairly up to date feature wise, but it still degrades to the lowest denominator. However, the resistance is usually budgetary and apathy related rather than for any technical reason. They are thinking about it, but it's still cheaper to keep your old stuff than update it, even if it is old.

derleth 14y ago

> we're not fickle when it comes to technology > Compatibility is something which people have stopped valuing, which is bad. OK, test your website in Netscape 4.

meaty 14y ago
That's an extreme point. IE8 is only 3 years old and still supported. Netscape 4 hasn't been around for nigh on ten years.
- derleth 14y ago
  > Netscape 4 hasn't been around for nigh on ten years. So? Ten years is nothing. There's no good reason for your site to not work in it.
  - meaty 14y ago
    I've actually tried it. It actually mostly works. There was one JavaScript error which I've fixed and the layout is broken but still flows properly.
nivla 14y ago
It is pretty interesting that most people don't take compatibility seriously. There is the famous saying, "If it ain't broken don't fix it" and another "Move forward", compatibility I feel is the link between the two, moving forward while not breaking anything. So yes it is very important. Some cool examples: [o]You can still design a fully functional website using the basic html markup and it will still render finely on a Netscape 4. [o]You can still make Doom play on the latest Windows. [o]You can still get one of the oldest linux programs such as DC Calc or Roff to work with the lastest Ubuntu.
- derleth 14y ago
  > It is pretty interesting that most people don't take compatibility seriously. If you don't test in NS4, you don't take it seriously, either.

roel_v 14y ago

"Do we have a problem? No." So now comes jQuery 2 and now what? Maybe you don't use it, but just replace it with any library you use in your environment. This comes from somebody doing C++ on VS 2008 on Windows XP, so I feel your pain. I just think it's not a very feasible stance to take. I've held out on XP for as long as I could, but I'm not sure how long I'll be able to last. (although, to be honest, I haven't found any real compatibility issues yet; of course I'm not using IE any more so that probably shields me from most issues. I did have one problem a few weeks ago with a Windows 2000 server not being able to run recent Firefox versions, but I guess Win2k is really deprecated by now ;) )

meaty 14y ago
jQuery 2 can fuck off. In fact jQuery as a whole can fuck off. It's been a disasterous slog using it for us. No end of problems with it and associated half-arsed shitty plugins to the point we've developed our own internal JS API and toolkit which we can control. Even minor version upgrades of jQuery have been dependency hell (we have 110kloc of JS excluding jQuery plugins - a lot!). We deploy desktop apps (via ClickOnce / direct) as well as web applications, so we're supposedly in the same mire, however they still "just work". They don't suddenly stop working one day. Youre entire toolchain is fine. Just keep it in a VM. We only just killed a desktop app deployed on Windows NT4 which was thrown together with VC++ 6. I have the VM running now as I'm porting it to .Net 4 (C# this time).
- andybak 14y ago
  > to the point we've developed our own internal JS API and toolkit which we can control I would have thought submitting a bug fix to jQuery might have been less work.
  - meaty 14y ago
    Harder than it looks. Submitted 20+ bug reports, got 1 solved. jQuery's issue tracking and source management was a baron land of incompetence. By that time we had our own wrapper API that fixed all the jQuery bugs so we just took the guts out and replaced then with our own.