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Ask HN: Being told to support IE6, any advice?

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Re: Ask HN: Being told to support IE6, any advice?

#21

Post by cimmanom »

Can you build a Win2k-compatible wrapper for a modern Blink or WebKit rendering engine?

And man, why aren’t they at least on WinXP?

You may have room to make an argument that this compatibility should be implemented in a separate contract/extension (that is, at extra cost) since compatibility with 20-year-old software that even MS no longer supports is not something that a vendor should reasonably expect as a requirement without it being explicitly brought up from the beginning. You may want to consult a lawyer.

Re: Ask HN: Being told to support IE6, any advice?

#22

Post by MatthewPhillips »

Don't attempt to build a SPA if you are support browsers that old (even IE8 imo). Give them a traditional server-rendered app and they'll be happy.

Since you've already built with React, the good news is that it's easy to build a React app that you deploy as a server-rendered app. Just make sure you are doing things in normal HTML, like forms, and not relying on xhr/fetch.

Re: Ask HN: Being told to support IE6, any advice?

#24

Post by brudgers »

MatthewPhillips wrote: post #22

Don't attempt to build a SPA if you are support browsers that old (even IE8 imo). Give them a traditional server-rendered app and they'll be happy. Since you've already built with React, the good news is that it's easy to build a React app that you deploy as a server-rendered app. Just make sure you are doing things in normal HTML, like forms, and not relying on xhr/fetch.

Being on premises even mitigates two of the major tradeoffs with server side rendering, latency and matching demand to computational power and bandwidth.

Re: Ask HN: Being told to support IE6, any advice?

#26

Post by jackfraser »

Azeralthefallen wrote: post #8
rmason wrote: post #3

Is a Docker or a VM solution possible? I admit to not being very knowledgeable here. If you can get a virtualized solution running a different version of Windows (or Linux) on these machines just for your app. Either that or it's rebuild the app using jQuery and an earlier version of Bootstrap. For an alterative for Electron you can look into LibUI plus LibUI-Node.

That is something a coworker is looking into, the biggest problem is we are expected to have ~5,000+ users of our app internally providing them all with VM's is way beyond the scope of what we support. Even getting our app running on premise was a nightmare, and resulted in us just buying a rack mount and having them put it inside their DC, after everything they gave us was pretty awful.

Consider perhaps a remote-terminal solution - in general I am against VDI and Citrix and such, but maybe you can find a remote app delivery mechanism that still has a Win2k client and can display the browser running remotely.

There are X11 servers for Windows that might be able to run Electron off a remote Linux machine, though watch out for problems with opening files and copy/paste.

Re: Ask HN: Being told to support IE6, any advice?

#28

Post by Barneyparker »

The only real option you have is to rewrite in a server side stack, PHP for example. IE6 isn't going to handle rehydration for SSR, and as you've mentioned any form of virtualization is going to be far more painful than it's worth.

It's entirely doable, the big question is - do you really want to? If this is genuinely the clients fault for not providing the IE6 requirement and asking you to work with a QA team using Ubuntu, then the costs should be covered by them. Potentially though, if the client is important enough to you, you may need to make a reduced rate offer or even take the hit yourselves. Whatever you choose, seeking legal advise may be a wise move.

Re: Ask HN: Being told to support IE6, any advice?

#29

Post by martin-adams »

I suspect this is going to be quite a painful thing to support. I’ve worked with IE6 in the past and even if you do get the app compatible, and get your CSS to render correctly, the JavaScript performance is dreadful. I used to find that our Dojo application when working at IBM would gradually get slower and slower without a page refresh.

I’d consider doing some static rendering from React components then fallback to a simpler client interaction. Alternatively let the client go and waste the engineering efforts of your competitor (I appreciate that may not be an option).

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