51–60 of 165 posts
Now, there's just IE7... and I get the feeling IE8 will feel like IE7 a few years from now. Microsoft really needs to fix their release style for IE. That is the #1 problem, not that the browsers are bad for their time.
Nowadays there are a ton of resources documenting all of the bugs out there because hundreds of people have already found and documented them. The site http://www.positioniseverything.net/ is a bible for developing through browser bugs, everyone knows about conditional comments, (not used until IE7 came out) and using Javascript is considered acceptable for so many more solutions or fixes. More importantly, there are a load of people who can offer help via many mediums, (Stack Overflow?) who have been there and done that.
Just because you don't agree with a business decision, don't invent excuses like this, you sound lazy.
Edit: In case I'm coming across as a grumpy old man, I started in the industry when I left University, so six years ago. I'm 29, not exactly a dinosaur.
I'm happy we finally dropped IE 6 support at work, but I don't like the line of reasoning in this article. Having to tackle unsavory but necessary problems is what makes this a job; the ability to do so effectively is what makes you a professional. Two days doing IE6 compliance is not a big deal.
Saying it's necessary is begging the question.
Pretty much nobody supports IE6 anymore. I know how to IE6, like most devs a little older than the author. I just choose not to. Because I can.
> Pretty much nobody supports IE6 anymore. That's just not true in my experience. We have two large corporate clients and one state agency that each require some level of IE6 support. I have a hard time believing these are the exception. I'd wager it's going to take a few more years to reach that point.
"Now’s the time. Someone needs to start the ball rolling and just say no." Lots of us say no to supporting IE6 whenever we can, the problem is the person paying our salaries says we will. But regardless of that, the sad truth is that developers aren't the ones preventing a full scale cutoff of IE6, it's our users. If the people you are making things for use IE6 then you have to support them.
Developers need to start keeping exceedingly careful track of exactly how much time they spend fighting with IE6 so they can go to the person footing the bill and say "this is how much money you've wasted on a completely obsolete technology".
If 60% of my users are on IE6, it is in no way a "waste" for me to spend the money supporting it and calling it a waste highlights an engineers ignorance of the business side of things.
http://www.ie6countdown.com/ "We should stop supporting IE6" "What percentage of people use IE6?" "10%" "Hmm, 10% sounds like a lot of people ... let's support it!"
Well, 10% of the world also uses Macs, but people don't seem to support that as much. Why not? Because it depends on the target demographic. IE6 usage is probably a lot higher in the corporate environments and thus matters to websites targeted at the corporate world, just like how if you're not targeting hip 20somethings, Mac support is unnecessary.
My image of an IE6 user is a 50 year old housewife with a spyware-invested eMachines they bought in 2002. I'm sure in other countries this could be very different but that has been my experience in the US.
Web developers cringe at shadows, and "non-boxy" effects, because we know the hoops we need to jump through to get there. However, if the project is okay with a "degraded" version of the site, then you can use CSS3 and save time.
I think the mindset of "support" has to change. Sure, have your site work on older browsers, but the good stuff happens when you see it on a modern browser. Users who use shitty browsers, are used to sites looking shitty.