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I don't know how to IE6

blog.colbyrabideau.com

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Re: I don't know how to IE6

#81

Post by notahacker »

derleth wrote: post #66
true_religion wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to make a "me too" like post, but as soon as I read his biography, I thought "... wait we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?". Are we now just leveling the playing field so experience is irrelevant, and kids just out of college should be able to compete with those who have been working the field for ages (ages which I might add included a time when IE6 was the…

> we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too? No, we should look seriously at whether we need to keep doing things the cheap labor can't perform anymore. Supporting IE6 is a Black Art, and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive. I suppose the traditional comparison is to COBOL codebases and greenscreen IBM development. If thinking about that convin…

For the majority of websites it's not so much a Black Art as something anyone who designed websites more than 5 years ago should manage competently (assuming there aren't unreasonable requirements such as pixel perfection or reproducing every hover effect). The comparison is more finding someone that knows how to program Python instead of copy/pasting PHP scripts.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#82

Post by unreal37 »

You're 20. Working as an intern for a social networking company. I am sure life seems ideal to you, working on only modern technologies and being able to ignore things that are not perfect.

Outside of this sheltered life, you will have to be able to deal with people asking you to do things you would rather not do. Might as well accept it, instead of writing a blog post every time it happens.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#83

Post by Morcane »

IE6, and the browser war age, is the reason why I totally despise everything that has to do with Javascript, CSS and other browser shit. It was a nightmare, literally.

In 2000/1, we engineered a large online system (ported from Tandem to Solaris) to assume the browser is totally fucking dumb (ie, process as much as you can server-side, with eg, get/xsl servers) and only spit out a bit of JS when you're absolutely sure it's possible to do so.

Maybe my JS fear is outdated now, but I can still hear the monkeys.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#85

Post by stdbrouw »

corin_ wrote: post #23
melling wrote: post #15

2% of the US uses IE6. Explain that to your boss and ask if it's still necessary to support it. [Update] For Google Apps, Google no longer supports IE7. YouTube support for IE6 was dropped a year ago, and they make a lot of ad money from YouTube now.

In terms of percentage that's pretty small, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. If you estimate the number of US internet users to be ~240 million, 2% is 4.8 million people. Sure, a small chunk of the pie, but still a large chunk of people. And, in a hypothetical situation where your % of revenue generating visitors is exactly the same as for the overall population, not many companies would want to lose 2% of t…

Considering so many use IE6 at work and so few at home, 2% of visits != 2% of the population in any meaningful way. So the question is more like: how important is it for my application that users at big corporations with outdated software can still use my app while at work instead of just at home?

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#86

Post by Morcane »

veyron wrote: post #10

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!"

Heh yeah...

We had a DOS client program for one of our services, written in abouts 1985, and we had to support that one until 2-3 years ago, when the single one user in our country (the single one user globally for that matter) retired.

So remember when you put funny comments in your software: it lives longer than you expect.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#88

Post by JanezStupar »

mattdeboard wrote: post #3

Why did you have the impression a B.S. in CompSci would teach you about legacy browser support? I dunno, the first few weeks of my internship I had to do the same thing. If nothing else it was a great way to learn about what the company did by doing low-level grunt work. However I'd really recommend that if this is all you'll be doing for the duration of the internship, maybe look for something else. Otherwise be tha…

Progress?

Why do some graybeards feel this sadistic need to make juniors learn pointless stuff (which archaic legacy support kludges for buggy browsers certainly are)? Please note that you may have spent better part of the last 10 years slowly learning about these workarounds, while making your own mistakes.

This is the most pointless type of elitism I have ever seen. Why not use the new advanced knowledge, this kids have? Some of them kids know more of how standards work than most graybeards. Pushing new fresh minds down the madhouse hallway that IE6 is, seems like a moral hazard to me. They might get the wrong idea.

Or are we going to demand that people write their own compilers and languages, before they even start doing productive work?

Mentality like this, wastes customers money all around while contributing nothing to the business or society at large.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#89

Post by DrStalker »

JanezStupar wrote: post #88
mattdeboard wrote: post #3

Why did you have the impression a B.S. in CompSci would teach you about legacy browser support? I dunno, the first few weeks of my internship I had to do the same thing. If nothing else it was a great way to learn about what the company did by doing low-level grunt work. However I'd really recommend that if this is all you'll be doing for the duration of the internship, maybe look for something else. Otherwise be tha…

Progress? Why do some graybeards feel this sadistic need to make juniors learn pointless stuff (which archaic legacy support kludges for buggy browsers certainly are)? Please note that you may have spent better part of the last 10 years slowly learning about these workarounds, while making your own mistakes. This is the most pointless type of elitism I have ever seen. Why not use the new advanced knowledge, this kids…

IE6 support is not pointless if your target market includes banks and large corporates which are still using IE6.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#90

Post by ricardobeat »

After a few years you find out it's not that hard to support it. Prefer padding instead of margins, be careful with floats, use overflow:hidden to clear blocks, add a sprinkle of zoom:1, and it's done. It won't look exactly the same, but don't sweat it - it just needs to work.

But thank god I usually don't need to do any of this anymore :)

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