I don't know how to IE6 • Hacker News Board

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#161

Post by nostrademons » Mon, Aug 01, 2011, 6:29 PM UTC

drgath wrote: post #159

nostrademons wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 eve…

Well, under that standard, Google Search still supports Netscape 4.7, which is also served a (slightly different from IE6) degraded experience. I wouldn't be terribly surprised if it supports Netscape 1.0 and Lynx either.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#162

Post by gabebw » Mon, Aug 01, 2011, 6:39 PM UTC

neild wrote: post #79

pjscott wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

... and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive. I have nothing to add ("me, too!"), but would like to point out that this sounds like a line from a fantasy novel written by an economist. If such a thing actually exists, I would love to hear of it.

Harald, by David Friedman. (There are a number of notable David Friedmans. This is the anarcho-capitalist-son-of-Milton-Friedman one.) Harald is quite good, IMO, but there isn't a lot of overt economics so it may not be what you're looking for.

I really didn't think the GP would get an answer to that extremely specific question. Thanks, and I'll be checking this out.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#163

Post by lwat » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 1:09 AM UTC

notJim wrote: post #100

lwat wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have thousands of corporate clients and we tell them all the same thing: They can use any browser they like but it must be the latest / current version. Some of them grumble a bit but we've not lost a client because of IE6 in years.

So all of your clients (who use IE) are using IE9? I find this hard to believe, especially since many corporations are still running Windows XP, which will never get IE9.

Obviously the 'latest version' in that case would be IE8.

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#164

Post by pawelwentpawel » Tue, Aug 02, 2011, 4:32 AM UTC

smackfu wrote: post #149

pawelwentpawel wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Didn't know that. What would you suggest as a legit browser stats then?

The problem is that their users are not a representative sampling of the overall browser market since they heavily skew towards web developers. If you are also making a site for web developers, then the w3schools numbers are valid. Otherwise, no.

That's a valid point. Are there any statistics available that you would recommend?

Re: I don't know how to IE6

#165

Post by flomo » Thu, Aug 04, 2011, 6:15 AM UTC

thisisblurry wrote: post #138

flomo wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm genuinely curious to hear which web developers ignored legacy browser support and got burned. Please divulge.

Sure. The example I was thinking of in particular was an internal project from about 5 years ago where their CSS2 layout completely blew up on IE6. However rather than get down-n-dirty to fix it, they demanded additional budget for a rewrite using tables.

But just last week, another subcontractor apparently didn't realize that our government client was stuck on Flash v9 and spent the next two weeks trying to sort it out.

And it hasn't happened in a few months, but we used to get occasional complaints from clients stuck on Safari v4.