Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A clever way to fight IE6

igorpartola.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

71–80 of 114 posts

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#71

Post by umjames »

dkarl wrote: post #63
edw519 wrote: post #42

Be careful what you wish for. This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased . I wonder how applicable this phenome…

Subcontract the IE6 compatibility work to someone who doesn't know how much you're charging for it.

And if the subcontractor does crappy work, the client will think you did a crappy job.

I would think that if the subcontractor was good enough not to do bad work, he/she would also not want to do IE6 compatibility work.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#72

Post by abp »

redorb wrote: post #48
edw519 wrote: post #42

Be careful what you wish for. This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased . I wonder how applicable this phenome…

Q:"sure you'll make a ton of money, but is that what you want?" A: "yes, that will be fine."

Thats what i can't life with.

I like to enjoy doing things i want to. Mostly.

But money will never get me to do things that are awful to me.

It's just not feeling right and money really isn't worth it.

Try to enjoy your life without a lot of money, i think it's really possible and even better in the end.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#73

Post by qjz »

Isofarro wrote: post #59
powrtoch wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I disagree, I think that techniques like this do contribute to killing IE6. The reason that corporations don't upgrade their browsers is pretty simple: they don't have to. As it stands now, IE6 is "good enough" for their employees to do whatever it is they need to do. The more websites that drop IE6 support, the more IE6 becomes "not good enough", and the more pressure accumulates for corporations to upgrade. Right n…

The UK Government decided that it will stay with IE6 for the forseeable future: http://www.hmg.gov.uk/epetition-responses/petition-view.aspx... Claiming: Security: "Complex software will always have vulnerabilities and motivated adversaries will always work to discover and take advantage of them. There is no evidence that upgrading away from the latest fully patched versions of Internet Explorer to other browsers wil…

Those arguments can be used to put off adopting any technical advance. While it may be wise not to follow a policy of early adoption, eventually there's a tipping point that will force one to embrace the present. The disadvantages of protecting IE6 will soon outweigh any advantage of using it. Hopefully, the UK government will be lucky when it pins itself to the next platform.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#74

Post by umjames »

redorb wrote: post #48
edw519 wrote: post #42

Be careful what you wish for. This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased . I wonder how applicable this phenome…

Q:"sure you'll make a ton of money, but is that what you want?" A: "yes, that will be fine."

I think you're letting the allure of the money downplay the costs of actually doing the work. It's not like one client is going to hand you a duffel bag full of $100 bills, you do the conversion once, and then you're set for life. It's going to be a seemingly endless line of enterprise clients who already have a history of not keeping up with the times.

The amount these clients pay, while substantial, probably won't provide you with the "fuck you"-money needed to never have to do it again.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#75

Post by MJR »

tnorthcutt wrote: post #62
MJR wrote: post #26

Many users of IE6 have no choice of browser. It's either IE6 or nothing. They're forced to use it because many large companies have IE6 as they're single browser on the desktop. Forcing an upgrade of all the clients in a company to IE7, 8, or another browser can be a large effort. The end users have zero control to upgrade their own browser or install other software. An upgrade also requires that all internal applica…

"that recently upgraded from IE6 to IE7 internally" Why on earth didn't they go ahead and make the jump to IE8?

Again - when you're dealing with outside vendors and you have internal applications which rely on browser compatibility you can only move to IE8 if the applications support IE8 - which they don't. So, IE7 is the current ceiling. It sucks, but it's the reality.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#76

Post by hngryhppos »

tlrobinson wrote: post #57
edw519 wrote: post #42

Be careful what you wish for. This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased . I wonder how applicable this phenome…

Take the limit of this scenario and you get a single job that pays more money than you'll ever need, thus leaving time to do whatever you want.

I bet this trend follows a logistic curve, not an exponential. So, sadly, I'm sure the limit would be some smaller-than-fuck-you-money amount.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#77

Post by armandososa »

tsycho wrote: post #51
tmlee wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

but the underlying problem is that IE6s are still sticking in big enterprise/workplace where they do not have a choice of uninstalling it.

TL;DR => Most users in large enterprises cannot get rid of IE6 even if they want to. I working for a large company (100,000+ employees) in the US and we are stuck with IE6. We cannot uninstall or upgrade it without admin rights, which 99% of employees do not have. A small minority of tech-savvy employees use Chrome or Firefox, but this is heavily frowned upon. Once when my hard disk crashed, our internal tech support…

Everytime somebody says this is a good enough reason to support IE6 my only thought is "screw enterprise users".

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#78

Post by eitally »

drivingmenuts wrote: post #70
tsycho wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

TL;DR => Most users in large enterprises cannot get rid of IE6 even if they want to. I working for a large company (100,000+ employees) in the US and we are stuck with IE6. We cannot uninstall or upgrade it without admin rights, which 99% of employees do not have. A small minority of tech-savvy employees use Chrome or Firefox, but this is heavily frowned upon. Once when my hard disk crashed, our internal tech support…

Then your company needs to fire their tech team en masse and hire some up-to-date techies.

You'd be shocked at how much very expensive enterprise software has never been updated to support anything newer than IE6. It's not that enterprises don't want to upgrade their users, but that their hands are largely tied (hooray for Chrome Frame!).

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#79

Post by kijinbear »

brazzy wrote: post #58
sudonim wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hadn't heard this before. Do you have data to support that claim?

Here's the article I remembered: http://www.troyhunt.com/2010/08/aye-pirates-be-reason-ie6-ju... Interestingly, some specific countries (namely the Phillipines and Indonesia) have a much lower IE6 usage than their equally poor neighbours, due to a very high market share of Firefox.

Another interesting fact: Both Taiwan (40%) and South Korea (43%) have piracy rates comparable to Singapore (37%), but 5-6 times more IE6 users (32-38% vs 6%). The correlation is not particularly strong there. Other factors might be at play.

In South Korea, for example, all payment gateways and government portals are required by law to have certain "security features", which can only be implemented as an ActiveX control. (Good luck with security!) That explains the 94%+ IE adoption rate. Also, all those ActiveX controls break every time a new version of IE comes out, so users are understandably reluctant to move away from IE6. In fact, I've heard rumors that the only reason IE8 still supports ActiveX is that the South Korean government specifically requested it.

Of course, China and India together totally skew the statistics. Each of them is bigger than everybody else combined.

Re: A clever way to fight IE6

#80

Post by nathanb »

edw519 wrote: post #42

Be careful what you wish for. This reminds me of former NFL great and Monday Night Football announcer Frank Gifford. At one time, he charged $10,000 per corporate appearance. The grind was wearing him down, so he doubled his rate to reduce volume. Funny thing happened though, the higher rate made him more desirable to corporate program directors and his demand actually increased . I wonder how applicable this phenome…

If it matters that much to you, just say "no" when they ask if you support IE6. However, I agree with the article: it's a good strategy which seems to have worked for at least one person.
Post reply on HN