4 ms·

People consistently keep falling back on this argument that there are a large number of sites that MS has to continue supporting because of reliance on legacy A

by geuis 18y ago

People consistently keep falling back on this argument that there are a large number of sites that MS has to continue supporting because of reliance on legacy ActiveX-type systems. I just don't see it. Firefox is only a few years old, yet there isn't a single site I've visited in recent memory that doesn't work properly. For a browser that "only" has ~25% of the market, every single site out of thousands I've visited not only work properly, they tend to break in IE 6/7 and not standards-based browsers. There has been a mass of work done on the developer side of things across thousands of public-facing web properties in the last few years to be much more standards compliant. Microsoft shouldn't worry about "breaking the internet". They've already done that. By just releasing updates to their browsers on a regular basis, orienting around w3c standards, and providing definitive support cut-off dates for old software, they will easily move the mass of their users forward. Its very simple, really. If they simply just adopt web standards and stop supporting their old crap, suppose it breaks some Fortune 500 internal sites. What are these companies going to do, drop Microsoft and move to other standards-based solutions? In the end, they end up using modern software anyway. Microsoft is creating their own problems.

dimitry 18y ago
He talks about enterprise web software, not so much public sites/blogs/etc.
- umjames 18y ago
  I know it's not going to happen, but I say if IE updates break existing enterprise web sites because they are more standards-compliant, then go for it. Any place that's holding on to IE6 because they're afraid to break IE-only web sites probably isn't going to update anyway. The timesheet and employee self-services system where I work are IE-only for no good reason. The timesheet site is a Java applet, and the employee self-services system uses XML and Javascript to render content. There's nothing I've seen on either system that cannot be done using simple web standards. I guess people who use Macs here (and there are a number of them) have to have access to a PC to get paid. As long as we allow enterprises not to be standards-compliant through and through, we, as web developers, will continue to have IE-related headaches.

by geuis 18y ago

dimitry 18y ago

He talks about enterprise web software, not so much public sites/blogs/etc.

umjames 18y ago
I know it's not going to happen, but I say if IE updates break existing enterprise web sites because they are more standards-compliant, then go for it. Any place that's holding on to IE6 because they're afraid to break IE-only web sites probably isn't going to update anyway. The timesheet and employee self-services system where I work are IE-only for no good reason. The timesheet site is a Java applet, and the employee self-services system uses XML and Javascript to render content. There's nothing I've seen on either system that cannot be done using simple web standards. I guess people who use Macs here (and there are a number of them) have to have access to a PC to get paid. As long as we allow enterprises not to be standards-compliant through and through, we, as web developers, will continue to have IE-related headaches.