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IE7 users, we need to talk…
- waitingkuo 13y agoIs it possible to hold a foundation to help people upgrade from ie7?
- scrabble 13y agoSupporting IE7 is the worst part of my day job. I end up building new modules in Firefox, making sure they look the same in Chrome, then testing IE7. Then I have to fix all the stuff broken in IE7 and ensure it still looks good on the modern browsers. My ultimate goal though is for it to be presentable in IE7 with a top notch experience in anything newer, makes it a little easier.
- knassy 13y ago> My ultimate goal though is for it to be presentable in IE7 with a top notch experience in anything newer, makes it a little easier. I think that's the exact right attitude. I work in an environment that supports back to IE7 and I really get a kick out of creating robust solutions that work in crappy or older browsers. Admittedly I work with web sites, or simple applications, rather than full on web applications, but I find starting with sensible HTML/CSS/JS and using progressive enhancement usually gets me 95% of the way there.
- protocow 13y agoWell done. But many IE7 and IE8 users aren't by choice. They are employees at large companies with no ability to upgrade their corporate computers.
- SDGT 13y agoOne might ask why they're looking for nursing jobs at work then.
- skywhopper 13y agoProbably because they're at a job so crappy that their employer forces them to use IE7.
- DannyBee 13y ago"Screw you nerds, i'm going to change bedpans for the elderly"
- thejosh 13y agoPeople even use their current work emails for job applications.
- beedogs 13y agoSomeone should probably tell them not to do that.
- taspeotis 13y agoOne might ask how those job offers end up on the site. Other unemployed nurses, or hospitals?
- vinceguidry 13y agoMaybe they don't have computers at home.
- trothamel 13y agoFrom what I understand, there's a reasonably large market for temporary nurses, for times when a hospital is understaffed. I suspect it's acceptable to look for a new gig before your current one ends. Edit: It also looks like hospitals, not nurses, are the actual customers.
- veesahni 13y agoDo these corporations not have security issues with these old browsers?
- vinceguidry 13y agoYou're assuming corporations take security seriously.
- singold 13y agoYes they have. I work on one of those (I'm the webmaster), they didn't wanted to get me firefox or chrome, because of 'security issues'...
- goldenkey 13y agoThe newer browsers actually come with a lot of feature-induced security problems too. Microsoft continues to release security updates for IE7 so it might be better to use than a newer version of IE that could have HTML5 exploits.
- justinph 13y agoThat support ends on April 8 of this year: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/endofsupport.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/endofsuppo...
- iNate2000 13y agoTrue enough - but it sounds like the site making the offer is a job-board.
- taspeotis 13y agoAnd hospitals post job offers for nurses from their fleet of home PCs, right?
- malandrew 13y agoI'm surprised no one has yet created a database where people can anonymously submit ranges of IPs where a lot of users are on IE7 and other older browsers. This would paint a big ol' bullseye on those organizations since it highlights them as easy targets for exploits that target older browsers.
- hrktb 13y agoYou can take it from the other end. These employees are locked on IE7/8 because there's not enough external forces to make it a business issue. When they won't be able to use critical resources because of their browser or OS, the upgrade will just happen, how painful and costly it will be (as long as it's less costly than not accessing the said resources)
- pekk 13y agoIf this were python, people would be arguing that IE8 does nothing new and maybe we should fork IE7 and continue using that forever
- hrktb 13y agoActually I agree with this line of thinking. I we could in fact fork IE7, replace it at the system level and people were enthusiastic enough to patch bugs and security holes forever, why not.
- chrismorgan 13y agoCannot all IE7 users upgrade to IE8?
- yuhong 13y agoI think the only exceptions are Server 2003 SP1 and IA-64 versions of Windows, none of which are common.
- Already__Taken 13y agoWell that's fine as no one should be browsing the web on one of those.
- ajpos 13y agoI work for a F500 and we cannot upgrade to 8. We have antiquated web platforms that don't work without it. It sucks. A lot.
- pbhjpbhj 13y agoDoesn't MSIE8 have a MSIE7 compatability mode that basically runs the IE7 rendering engine in a wrapper (like IE tab). Can't you use MSIE7 on the internal system and have a recent browser for web access?
- eonwe 13y agoSadly, the IE7 compatibility-mode is not a perfect copy: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/03/12/site-compatibility-and-ie8.aspx http://blogs.msdn.com/b/ie/archive/2009/03/12/site-compatibi...
- acdha 13y ago> Doesn't MSIE8 have a MSIE7 compatability mode that basically runs the IE7 rendering engine in a wrapper Of course not, that was obviously the right way to implement this so they had to do something worse first. IE7 compatibility mode works plausibly well for visual display but as eonwe's link pointed out there are still some key differences. That link, however, doesn't really mention the worst part: IE8-as-IE7 does not have a compatible DOM or JavaScript engine. They're using the IE8 JS engine under the hood which is generally better but, among other things, it started raising exceptions for previously ignored bad code. I found out about this shortly after IE8 was released when my then-employer's Oracle apps stopped working because they used a really old version of a UI toolkit which at one point set zIndex to null before assigning it a new value. This is clearly invalid according to the specs but prior to IE8 it appears that nothing threw an exception. I ended up patching the JS file because getting a patch would have taken aeons and Oracle support actually called me asking if they could redistribute my work to other customers! The good news is that Microsoft finally came up with the right way way to do this in MED-V, which will seem very familiar to anyone who's used e.g. VMware Fusion: you run antique versions of IE seamlessly inside a VM and the host's Internet Explorer can be configured to load certain sites inside the guest so you only take the performance / feature / security hit for your legacy enterprise apps instead of the entire web: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/video/Ff945178 http://technet.microsoft.com/en-US/video/Ff945178
- taspeotis 13y ago> We are offering to buy a new computer with a modern browser for any of our customers who are stuck with IE7 Great PR, since practically no-one is going to take them up on the offer. If you're on IE7 you're probably on it because MegaCorp's Intranet Application '02 Enterprise Edition doesn't work on anything else. Meaning the new computer will break their LOB application. It's also possible it won't cost them any money in the long run, if their definition of "customer" is limited to the people posting jobs [1]. [1] http://www.nursingjobs.us/employers/pricing/ http://www.nursingjobs.us/employers/pricing/
- valarauca1 13y agoThe other option is they are elderly or just don't care. They have that E-Machines Pentium 3 future proof 256MB of RAM Windows98 computer and they'll use it until they die, because shouldn't everything that costs over $1,000 dollars last for 20-30 years?
- crisnoble 13y agoYes, just like your car will last you 20 years. If you drive a car from 1994 you don't expect to be able to drive 90 mph or offroad without running into major issues. Should cities keep their infrastructure backwards compatible for people with old cars?
- hackmiester 13y agoIt's apples and oranges. In 1994 people went over 80mph all the time, and they still do. If you maintain a car well, it will continue to be able to do that. By contrast, though... a PC perfectly maintained from 1994 until now would be hopeless in today's infrastructure.
- DanWaterworth 13y agoYes, it's more like buying $1000 worth of apples and oranges.
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- cnp 13y agoI'm surprised you didn't just go with IE9 as the cutoff? Why?
- taspeotis 13y agoI was saddled with supporting IE8 for a while because our biggest customer (of one of our products) was using it. They made up ~4% of traffic before they finally moved to Win7+IE11. Money talks.
- ForHackernews 13y agoWindows XP only runs IE8.
- sfeng 13y agoand Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera.
- JohnTHaller 13y agoWindows Safari was dropped a while ago. Safari is Mac OS X only now.
- daigoba66 13y agoChrome is only supported for another year.
- soup10 13y ago1.22% of your users is probably like 1 person lol. Gj gaming hacker news to reach the many nurses that visit here.
- sfeng 13y agoYou think they only have 82 users?
- pikachu_is_cool 13y agoNo, he thinks that they only have 81.9672131148 users, you idiot. Read the post next time.
- robzyb 13y ago1.22% of measured internet users use IE7. The percentage of their customers that use IE7 could be very different.
- jameshart 13y agoYou're right, nursing jobs sites must be so niche they hardly get any traffic. The healthcare industry in the US is tiny, I mean, it's only, what, 16% of the entire US economy? I mean the total expenditure on hospital care in the entire country is only $380 billion or so a year, and employs only about 2.6 million nurses. That's just 1.8% of the US working population. And it's not like nursing is disproportionately dominated by short term contracts, or the provider market that employs them massively fragmented meaning that almost every six to twelve months a career nurse will be jobhunting... yes, 87 nurses looking for jobs, 1 of whom is using IE7, sounds like a perfectly reasonable estimate for the amount of traffic this site with a page 1 google ranking for a search for "nursing jobs" probably gets.
- pikachu_is_cool 13y ago> this site with a page 1 google ranking for a search for "nursing jobs" INCORRECT! The #1 ranked page is in fact nursingjobs.org. The website in the OP is ranked #7. Edit: I'm an idiot.
- kordless 13y agoWorking in infrastructure, this is much less of a worry for your users. We ran the metrics on it.
- NamTaf 13y agoRelated: Kogan (an electronics vendor here in AU) has an IE7 tax on all of their products to pay for the upkeep required to develop supporting IE7. This follows the succesful implementation of an IE6 tax some years ago. http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/ http://www.kogan.com/au/blog/new-internet-explorer-7-tax/
- aaronem 13y agoIt's an interesting idea, I suppose, if a bit smug; I've always found it sufficient just to pop up a note saying something along the lines of "Look, I'm sure you have a good reason for using IE 7, and I'm not going to tell you that you shouldn't. But it's no longer reasonably possible to test in that version of the browser, and I therefore can't warrant everything on this site will work properly in it; I don't particularly expect problems, but you should know they might happen, and if they do, there's not a lot of help I can offer beyond suggesting you instead use a newer version of IE, or an alternate browser like Firefox, Safari, or Chrome, all of which I have tested and can warrant." We're all adults here, after all, even when "we" is mostly composed of triathletes, who are wonderful, athletic people and often not completely barking mad, and I've found this approach to produce quite good results and only a modicum of whining. As for Kogan, their site seems anxious that I should know someone bought an SD card a minute ago in some antipodean town I've never heard of. I can't think why. Oh, and someone else just bought a camera battery. It's interesting to see this sort of thing pop up, to be sure, but why would anyone bother? Does it help conversion rate? Mainly it just seems like an annoying distraction from the blog post I'm trying to read.
- NamTaf 13y agoI've no idea; I've never actually purchased any Kogan product. It nevertheless made news when they released the tax and they repeated the process so I guess it worked out for them? (The lesson here is that many people will probably just blindly pay whatever the final cost is without checking the itemised receipt and why it costs what it does)
- deevus 13y agoI did a job recently where a legacy site needed to be upgraded to support mobile and tablets. After all the work was done I was informed that the site didn't work in ie6 (the default browser on their work machines) [1] Luckily firefox was installed on their machines as well. There was no way I was going back to fix it for ie6 on the budget I was allocated. [1]: This constraint was never mentioned in initial talks. Fortunately it wasn't a massive deal in the end.
- DrStalker 13y agoI've found asking up front what level of IE6 support was needed and then listing it as a separate line item in a quote is a good way to get out of supporting it, or at least move from "must be pixel perfect!" to "the main functionality has to work"
- microcolonel 13y agoJust to clear up your confusion guys. Their clients are, as far as I can tell, the hospitals posting the jobs. Other users are mostly accessing the site on home computers, where they can almost certainly install some other browser which isn't as broken. While in general a hospital may not have computers for this, their hiring manager is likely to be able to take an extra machine onto the network.
- baldajan 13y agoBrings up an interesting point: cost of buying every customer with IE 7 a new computer < cost of adapting to IE 7 - assuming it's true after all. Personally, I wouldn't have done an offer like that, as I would see no point in it (other than PR); but then again, I take a ruthless approach to upgrades
- craigching 13y agoSo you upgrade their computers and ... they're stuck with IE8! :p In all seriousness, I think it's better and more cost effective to have them switch to a better browser (FF, Chrome and even IE11). There are a lot of Win7 companies that still insist on IE8 as their browser of choice and that costs a lot to support as well, speaking from experience.
- Zancarius 13y agoI think the point is more for PR purposes and public awareness than it is to actually buy people new computers. If it is, it's a rather good tactic. It gets your attention, doesn't it? ;)
- craigching 13y ago> I think the point is more for PR purposes Oh, believe me, I get that ... ;)
- nlp 13y agoOk, so I download IE7, sign up on the site, get a new computer, and then go back to using Firefox.
- kristopolous 13y agoI think it would be better to find an existing user and execute the scheme - a registration date of "yesterday" and a post count of "1" probably wouldn't qualify you. It reminds me of the MSFT settlement in the early 2000's where you could get a (I think) $100 check from Redmond. It was somehow "transferable" and a few of my friends bought people's right to redeem the check by doing things like giving out gift certificates or handing out free ice cream. (IANAL so excuse me if I didn't use the proper lingo there) IIRC, I think they made in the tens of thousands.
- dougmccune 13y agoI've often received bug report screenshots or sat in watching a customer screenshare using our product in IE6 on literally a 800 x 600 screen. Each time it makes me cry inside and I debate just ordering them a new computer. That said, as others have pointed out here, almost nobody these days running IE 6/7/8 is doing so of their own free will, and any computer you send them can't be used for work.
- crisnoble 13y agoI applaud them for moving the web a small step forward. Every minute saved by not worrying about IE7 is a minute that you can spend creating features for standards compliant browsers. As more sites drop support for older versions of IE, more employees will pressure their IT departments for updated browsers. Maybe one day we will see nothing but evergreen browsers in the logs...
- ddw 13y agoI work for a fairly large org. Once I finished an internal app and sent out an email for some folks to check it out. I soon received an email that the website was not working for someone. The screenshot showed that the browser they were using was Lotus Notes. They were clicking on the link in their email and it was opening it in Lotus freaking Notes. "Uh, no, we don't support that."
- m_mueller 13y agoWell - if you don't support that, set it by (NAB-) policy.
- atesti 13y agoI had a report from the manager in another company who bought our hosted solution that everything was misaligend. Turned out clicking a link from an email opened Netscape Navigator 4 for him! Normally he uses Internet Explorer if he clicks on Internet on his desktop
- madaxe_again 13y agoYeah, we've got a client who still uses IE for Mac, and refuses to consider using Safari, or anything else, as his feeling is that the internet should conform to him and his browser, not the other way around.
- pilif 13y ago> IE7 users make up 1.22% of our traffic right now, and this will decline as more computers are upgraded and can use modern browsers. No computer exists that is able to run IE7 but not IE8. And because IE7 came out way past the "optimized for IE" age, I doubt there is software around that requires 7 and doesn't work with 8. This is in contrast to 6 which is what IE was stuck in for years, so software began depending on that. If you could upgrade from 6 to 7, then you can upgrade from 7 to 8. Even more so considering that IE8 has an IE7 compatibility mode built in that can be enabled without having to touch the site itself (by setting the HTTP header in the server). The same is true for local software embedding the IE control, but there you need to set some registry flag to do it. There is no excuse for sticking with 7 and 8 is so much better to develop for. It's 2014. I would stop caring about 7. People still using 7 are used to sites not quite looking right anyways (as the majority of sites stopped caring) and in all likelyhood, they might not even notice the odd rendering glitch.
- ralish 13y agoIE7 shipped with Vista. I've seen a few organisations that started deploying Vista and updated their XP systems to IE7 so all their workstations are running the same IE version. Admittedly, there aren't many of these companies given most gave Vista a miss in favour of 7 or something else entirely, but they do exist, and it is a plausible reason that IE7 is still around for some.
- lmm 13y agoIE8 in IE7-compatibility mode does not always render the same as IE7 - I know because it broke a site I worked on. So it's not that simple.
- timje1 13y agoWorse than that, IE8 in IE7 compatibility mode has some regression bugs that you won't have seen since IE5.
- davedx 13y agoI am pretty sure that these IE7 users (users of NursingJobs.us) are probably browsing from a hospital, where I know for a fact IT policies can be just as bad, if not worse, than at large corporations. I don't think the users have a choice here (besides using a different computer at the hospital or surfing from home).
- ocfx 13y agoHow is buying potentially thousands of computers for people cheaper than gracefully degrading features from a bootstrap site?
- be5invis 13y agoBeware Chinese. They may browse your website using IE7 ON PURPOSE to get a new computer.
- simonsquiff 13y agoWe also make software for healthcare customers, and asked the same question re: IE7 support internally. Sadly our stats show that IE7 usage for our clients is at 59%! Down from a peak at 81% but still crazily high. We're hoping the April no support for XP deadline will change things but sadly IE7 is far from dead in UK healthcare.
- kfk 13y agoWhat about IE8-9-10? I mean, I don't care, but my website frontpage still looks wrong in IE10 and I didn't do anything fancy. The overlay doesn't work in IE<10. I mean, IE is a mess in general. I wouldn’t buy a PC to all that use this terrible piece of crap, but at least we can rant about it, no? I mean, they should have said: OK, we take the pain to STILL support this shitty IE, but please stop using IE7 we will buy you a PC if you do.
- iopq 13y agoAnything before IE11 is not by any definition a modern browser.
- sdaityari 13y agoThere are people (read professors) here who use IE 6 btw.
- ta_tatata 13y agoThis is a viral marketing scheme to get some free advertising. Seeing this kind of viral marketing advertising on hacker news frontpage is sad, this one is not even clever, it's mostly throwing a pile of money towards microsoft.
- chris_wot 13y ago"Wayne Gretzky once said “skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been”" No, no he did not. Steve Jobs said that Wayne Gretzky said "skate where the puck is going, not where it's been". However, I'm sure one day Wayne Gretzky will quote Steve Jobs saying that he once said that you must skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been. That day will be quite awesome. On that note, what happens when the puck goes past its original position, as inevitably happens in a game of hockey? What does Wayne Gretzky do then? Ignore it?
- louthy 13y agowhile(true);
- mendelk 13y ago'[Wayne Gretzky's father] Walter taught Wayne, Keith, Brent, Glen and their friends hockey on a rink he made in the back yard of the family home, nicknamed the "Wally Coliseum". Drills included skating around Javex bleach bottles and tin cans, and flipping pucks over scattered hockey sticks to be able to pick up the puck again in full flight. Additionally, Walter gave the advice to "skate where the puck's going, not where it's been"'[0] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Gretzky http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Gretzky
- Angostura 13y agoPonders: So I can sign up now, to receive my free PC?
- mosiac 13y agoAnd you think this is the right place to find them :P
- ck2 13y ago1.22% of your users are bots with an old user-agent
- throw7 13y agoIf we as software engineers really cared, a page like that would never exist.
- TheCoelacanth 13y agoI disagree. Engineering is all about choosing tradeoffs. Freeways aren't built with a slow lane to support horse and buggy users, because that would be an irresponsible use of resources. For most sites, supporting IE7 would be a complete waste of money.
- arsemouflon 13y agoWhere can I download IE7?
- Scottopherson 13y agohttps://github.com/xdissent/ievms https://github.com/xdissent/ievms
- jonaldomo 13y agoI work for a large EMR provider. You would be sick by the IE7 traffic at large hospital systems. Think 20%+. The reason is hospitals spend millions of a dollar for one solution. The solution is usually monolithic and takes years to implement.
- _piyush 13y agoI hope it does not turn out to be opposite of what they intended : people starting to use IE7 just to get a new computer. It is called the Cobra Effect (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cobra_effect)
- rjuyal 13y agoNow, where can I buy old PC with IE7. ;)