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http://blog.colbyrabideau.com/archive -- August 2011 Edit: OP is the poster of the blog also
>OP is the poster of the blog also Cool, welcome to HN, Colby. It's a good first submission, have you been lurking long? Why not join the conversation?
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Ok, how about considering a different demographic: China. IE6 remains by far the most popular desktop web browser in China (Statcounter [1] says 50% of the market). If my site is targetting a Chinese audience, IE6 support is a must and no amount of persuasion will move the entire Chinese market to Chrome in a hurry. [1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201007...
Another strawman. People using pirated OS's and being technically unsophisticated to the degree of being satisfied with what IE6 has to offer are extremely unlikely to buy your service or to provide any significant value to your advertisers. Basically they are leeches that will use whatever is cheapest/most convenient to them. Thus not having them as your user will only spare you some resources. But if they really wa…
Finally, we can support IE6 without losing out on the benefits of newer browsers.
Arguing for or against IE6 using made up fanciful arguments (people using IE6 aren't going to buy your product) is silly. Look at your own numbers. If your first suggestion isn't that, you're ignorant of the realities of web development.
This is immaturely and badly argued. So it took a massive two days for an intern to add IE6 support to a web app. This is actually a good argument for keeping IE6 support for the several percent of users who still have it. I am not saying there aren't good arguments for dropping IE6, but this just isn't it. Some of the supporting arguments are even worse - does he really expect a course called "Legacy Browser Support…
It isn't simply a question of whether immediate revenue is greater than 2 days of an intern. The question is whether the projected revenue is greater than the support costs of that feature over time and the opportunity cost, i.e. "we can't do feature X easily because feature Y is in there." The fact that people don't calculate costs that way in software development puts many organizations in a pickle.
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.
If you're a social media startup, the customers looking for social media solutions are probably also the folks who are NOT running IE6.
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.
I'd also posit that while 2% may seem like nothing for a site with a small flow of traffic, it equates to a lot of money for a high volume consumer-oriented site. I run into a lot of this through my affiliation with Mogotest. During our customer development process I was amazed to find that several of the CTOs I sat down with will support any browser with greater than 0.5% share on their site. And these are guys that have definitely done their cost/benefit analysis.
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I seriously doubt IE6 support can be the difference between "wildly profitable and failing" for any business. Can you name one example of a failing company that started supporting IE6 and then became wildly profitable?
Maybe not in 2011. But a couple years ago, it wasn't unusual to see 50% IE6 traffic on corporate-oriented apps. And, yes, I can give a few examples were the webdevs ignored legacy browser support and got burned.
Yes, supporting IE6 is a pain in the ass (I have to do it due to my company's huge Chinese user base). But I am watching it die a slow death.
The specific experience sucks, but in general it will help him prepare for realities of web dev.
Nowadays I use mogotest.com to help me with it. It's a lot more handy than booting up a VM.