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I don't know how to IE6

blog.colbyrabideau.com

151–160 of 165 posts

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#151
>>In the final week of wrapping up my first legitimate project, my boss dropped the bomb I was hoping to avoid. “Hey, Colby”, he said, “make sure it works in IE6 and up.”

This is the problem. No foresight. A my agency IE 6 support is a very specific line item in our proposals (if it's in there at all) and it adds 30% to the cost of development.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any company still on IE6 has enough inertia that they aren't going to change for an external vendor, no matter how much that vendor hates IE6 support.

Then they need to be frozen out of ALL vendors. Eventually, it will hurt more to find the one guy left in the world who still does IE6 and pay him the ridiculous hourly rate he asks.

I think your last sentence explains why it will never happen - if one guy will be left making a killing by supporting IE6, why would everyone else have gotten out of the game? Certainly the ridiculous hourly rate he charges will offset the cost of maintaining IE6 support.

That said, I hate css as much as the next twenty-something web developer :)

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#153
Although dropping IE6 support is a valid enough plea, "favour progress to backward compatibility" would be the wrong professional lesson to learn for him. The real question ought to be "do your customers require IE6 support and will they be unhappy if you drop it?"

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#154
post #91

Interesting way to finish it off: Now’s the time. Someone needs to start the ball rolling and just say no. So really just about anyone but author, then?

That's exactly what I was thinking. He's telling us to stand up and do something he's not willing to do himself?

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#155
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.

There was story floating around here not too long ago that had IE 6 at around 4%. Incidentally, Safari was around 4%. I know a lot of devs that want to make sure things look great in Safari but don't care about IE 6 at all. Granted the obvious argument is that 4% of Safari users is a large percentage of Mac users, but it just goes to show how deceiving browser share numbers can be. I'd also posit that while 2% may se…

Making things look great in Safari is generally as simple as making things look great in Chrome and then maybe tweaking some fonts (due to Safari's different font rendering behaviors).

Making things look great in IE6 often involves many hours and sacrifices of chickens to dark gods with names that have lost all their vowels.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#156
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying it's necessary is begging the question.

But that is a business decision with engineering input, not the inverse.

Sure. But assuming "necessary" is a problem even when put in that context. It's trade-offs and cost-benefit analysis. The benefits are easily seen from the business side. The costs may not be obvious. A couple of days for an intern is just the start. There's the support over the entire product lifetime, and that's going to get worse and worse as time goes on.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#157

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.

Feels good advocating conformism while reaping benefits of thousands of years of nonconformist struggle?

>nonconformist struggle

The guy is whining about IE6. That's hardly a nonconformist position.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#159
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Google dropped IE6 support for YouTube over a year ago. They are dropping Google Apps support for IE7 on Aug 1st (that's today for some people reading this). For search results it's probably more worthwhile and not as hard to support the IE's but for their other apps they say they are only supporting that two most recent browsers.

Google Search dropped mainstream support for IE6 last fall. IE6 users are served a degraded experience that is roughly on-par feature-wise with Google Search as it existed in May 2010, and new features are no longer rolled out to IE6.

And this is how IE6 will slowly be deprecated across the industry. Sure it's easy for an intern to get up on his soapbox and proclaim, "We should stop supporting IE6 because that browser came out while I was still in elementary school." But when you look at the how many people still continue to use it, deprecating support is on a case-by-case basis, and it is irresponsible as web developers to just ignore that it even exists.

I would actually argue that Google Search is still supporting IE6, just as a degraded experience. Dropping support all-together means they just ignore it exists, which is far from the truth and likely won't happen for 5+ years.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#160
Why, when I was a young programmer we had to write the code in the snow with our pee, and a compiler was just a word for the pilot of the hovering dirigible that read the instructions and passed them to the ALU, which was another fellow with an abacus. They would wrap the results around a rock, and drop it on my house when the program would exit. We had to walk uphill...
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