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This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

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Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#71

Post by gtk40 »

starquake wrote: post #8

Unfortunately this is not true: "Beginning January 12, 2016, only the most current version of Internet Explorer available for a supported operating system will receive technical supports and security updates." The latest Internet Explorer version that runs on Windows Vista is Internet Explorer 9. So there will still be users using that... Windows Vista will have security updates till 2020.

Versions of IE as old as 7 are still supported if you look at various embedded and server editions of Windows and their support windows.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/lifecycle#gp/Microsoft-I...

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#72

Post by al2o3cr »

rrss1122 wrote: post #3

It will be a while still before you can actually party. As long as a measurable percentage of your users are still on these browsers, you're missing out on money of you don't support them.

"As long as a measurable percentage of your users are still on these browsers, you're missing out on money of you don't support them."

This seems to be a common refrain here. It's missing an important caveat: "unless supporting those browsers costs more than the customers are worth". Supporting ancient IEs means things like: avoiding features that can't be polyfilled, providing XP images for CI, debugging IE issues, etc. None of these happen for free.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#73

Post by serge2k »

jacquesm wrote: post #67
chris_wot wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.…

That's not a very good way to run a commercial entity. And it is also why developers should not be making the call about which browser to support and which not. The reason why is that the fixed cost of a business are that: fixed. The profit is usually over-represented in the last few percentage points of the people using the service or buying the products so if you lop off some arbitrary percentage at the top that 15…

It's a fine way to run. data based decision based on the cost of support and the amount of traffic.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#74

Post by iqonik »

mcs_ wrote: post #63
iqonik wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then when your clients don't renew, your revenue is significantly affected, you have to lay off staff, you have a realization that this works in an ideal world, but we don't live in one.

i don't know... how much is the cost to develop an application to cover 100% of the available desktop browsers? maybe use that value to improve mobile target make more sense at this point?!

In my experience it is far less than the cost of acquiring new customers, onboarding and supporting them, also far less risky.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#75

Post by perlgeek »

chris_wot wrote: post #41
oliwarner wrote: post #28

Oh poor, deluded TNW. Software only dies in the way developers care about when users stop using it. Well beside its actual expiry (which seems to be 2020), people STILL use XP with an ancient versions of IE6 and IE7. Many Vista users stick on IE7. So calm yourself and put flexbox back down. You've got a few years before that's supported enough.

If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.…

Giving 15% of your users a shitty experience is a really bad of doing business.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#76

Post by jacquesm »

serge2k wrote: post #73
jacquesm wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not a very good way to run a commercial entity. And it is also why developers should not be making the call about which browser to support and which not. The reason why is that the fixed cost of a business are that: fixed. The profit is usually over-represented in the last few percentage points of the people using the service or buying the products so if you lop off some arbitrary percentage at the top that 15…

It's a fine way to run. data based decision based on the cost of support and the amount of traffic.

It is extremely rare that the cost to support a browser outweighs the economic importance of those using those browsers. If it is then you are probably too small an entity to matter anyway, but as soon as your IE6 users are numerous enough that you can assign a percentage to the population you would probably be well advised to simply serve them rather than to attempt to force them to upgrade, if they haven't done so yet they either have very good reasons or you won't be able to convince them anyway.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#77

Post by grandalf »

chris_wot wrote: post #41
oliwarner wrote: post #28

Oh poor, deluded TNW. Software only dies in the way developers care about when users stop using it. Well beside its actual expiry (which seems to be 2020), people STILL use XP with an ancient versions of IE6 and IE7. Many Vista users stick on IE7. So calm yourself and put flexbox back down. You've got a few years before that's supported enough.

If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.…

It's not as if web developers like supporting broken, outdated browsers. It's done because without the users using those browsers, the business would be worse off.

There are lots of intermediate steps like warning about an inferior experience, but at this point it's necessary to test most websites on at least a few versions of IE9.

I've found that using react I've had very easy compatibility with older IE, etc. The only thing I've had to do is install a polyfill or two.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#78

Post by kdamken »

chris_wot wrote: post #41
oliwarner wrote: post #28

Oh poor, deluded TNW. Software only dies in the way developers care about when users stop using it. Well beside its actual expiry (which seems to be 2020), people STILL use XP with an ancient versions of IE6 and IE7. Many Vista users stick on IE7. So calm yourself and put flexbox back down. You've got a few years before that's supported enough.

If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.…

While I completely get where you're coming from, realistically this can be very messy. You'd quickly find that an increasing number of your support calls were from those users having issues. 15% doesn't sound like a lot, but 15% of a million people is 150,000 people.

So, you'd succeed in angering a lot of customers. Much better to try and inform all of your customers (not just corporate) of the upcoming changes, and provide support materials for them to follow while giving them a reasonable timeframe to do so.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#79

Post by pjc50 »

scholia wrote: post #70
pjc50 wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's the other way round: programs include the browser as a COM component. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752040%28VS.85%29... So on the older operating systems, programs that shipped with the OS will be embedding the browser as a COM component, usually for help purposes. If they're rendering local HTML (or generated HTML!) then they require that to keep working. So that particular interface has to be mai…

> Microsoft were kind of correct in the "browser choice" lawsuit that they'd used the browser as an OS component, and everyone else was correct that this was kind of a bad idea. Unfortunately, Microsoft signed a consent decree with the DoJ in 1995 which allowed them to add features to the operating system but meant they couldn't tie a separate program to the operating system. Therefore the browser had to be an added…

The consent decree is a large part of why we have browser (and OS!) choice at the moment. Imagine the world where IE6 won and use of ActiveX controls on websites was routine.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#80

Post by lost_name »

pjc50 wrote: post #40
ars wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've heard that, but no one is forcing them to program it that way. They could do the equivalent of static linking and include the necessary components in the browser instead of the OS. That's more or less what the Utilu IE Collection does I think.

It's the other way round: programs include the browser as a COM component. https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa752040%28VS.85%29... So on the older operating systems, programs that shipped with the OS will be embedding the browser as a COM component, usually for help purposes. If they're rendering local HTML (or generated HTML!) then they require that to keep working. So that particular interface has to be mai…

> On the other hand, how do you embed a browser component in a forward-compatible way?

Android uses a WebView component. If an app wants to display a webpage, it can make use of this to render HTML. I imagine iOS uses something similar.

I believe this component is compiled separately for different versions of Android, and Android will only update to the newest compatible version.

Docs: https://developer.android.com/reference/android/webkit/WebVi...

Store page: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.google.and...

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