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IE7 users, we need to talk…

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Re: IE7 users, we need to talk…

#161

Post by moocowduckquack »

mjolk wrote: post #153
avenger123 wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both of your points are valid. And frankly it does really depend on the company on which point is more valid. At the end of the day, csmithuk viewpoint is a solution/enterprise architect's view point which caters more to the overall business needs of a company. And based on my experience, the challenge of getting any new technology in a company that is mature and successful is really hard. The challenge of changing t…

>At the end of the day, csmithuk viewpoint is a solution/enterprise architect's view point which caters more to the overall business needs of a company. Not really. I've worked as an Enterprise Architect and worked in good as well as bad architectures. If you engineer a system that backs the company into a corner of "we can never upgrade," then you're a crappy architect. Even more so if you can't hire someone to step…

If you engineer a system that backs the company into a corner of "we can never upgrade," then you're a crappy architect.

Sometimes the we can never upgrade is part of the job description. A lot of control software for industrial systems is like that. You do not expect to be thinking about having to upgrade the core code for at least a few decades, as downtime for development and testing is obscenely expensive.

Re: IE7 users, we need to talk…

#162

Post by mendelk »

chris_wot wrote: post #109

"Wayne Gretzky once said “skate where the puck is going, not where it’s been”" No, no he did not. Steve Jobs said that Wayne Gretzky said "skate where the puck is going, not where it's been". However, I'm sure one day Wayne Gretzky will quote Steve Jobs saying that he once said that you must skate to where the puck is going, not where it's been. That day will be quite awesome. On that note, what happens when the puck…

'[Wayne Gretzky's father] Walter taught Wayne, Keith, Brent, Glen and their friends hockey on a rink he made in the back yard of the family home, nicknamed the "Wally Coliseum". Drills included skating around Javex bleach bottles and tin cans, and flipping pucks over scattered hockey sticks to be able to pick up the puck again in full flight. Additionally, Walter gave the advice to "skate where the puck's going, not where it's been"'[0]

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wayne_Gretzky

Re: IE7 users, we need to talk…

#164

Post by [deleted] »

mjolk wrote: post #145
csmithuk wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the spirit of maintaining my argument... The company should light a fire under the ass of their vendor or development department if they're being forced to live with some very serious security risks. The vendor doesn't exist any more. This is a realistic problem. They had source escrow which results in them hiring a development team to port it. This has taken 4 years, including retraining all 5000 users and portin…

>The vendor doesn't exist any more. This is a realistic problem. Yes, it's a realistic problem of "if your vendor goes extinct, you should start moving." If you're in charge and you let your business get stuck in this spot, the liquid lunches need to stop. >This has taken 4 years, including retraining all 5000 users and porting data. This isn't some shitty TODO list app or an Intranet - it's a full ERP with over 2 mi…

[deleted]

Re: IE7 users, we need to talk…

#165

Post by majc2 »

josteink wrote: post #117
ajpos wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work for a F500 and we cannot upgrade to 8. We have antiquated web platforms that don't work without it. It sucks. A lot.

I really don't get this mentality, at all. Shouldn't at some point the cost of all websites in the world being broken on your corporate machines be a bigger problem than having to do some work on some antiquated LOB app you've considered rewriting anyway the last 5 years? Do these weirdo F500 still demand railroads to operate steam-trains for them, since that was the last thing they read about last time they received…

Having worked in a large bank, I can maybe shed some light on it. It's all about balancing benefits, risk, cost and opportunity cost. Large corporates typically have budgets for projects/investments and for Business as Usual (BAU). BAU budgets aren't a good place for a big infrastructure change because of all the dependencies that may or may not exist - you simply don't know until you do the project to get it done.

As budgets are scarce and ideas for projects are typically plentiful, someone somewhere has got to come up with a business case for each project and unless the cost benefits of doing it are significantly great then it ain't going to get done - there are going to be better investments for that org. It ain't the techies who are in charge in corporates, they need to do the stuff that the business wants done.

The other lens of corporate IT is that they are typically risk averse and want changes to be controlled. IT folks do not change if they can help it - because sometime upgrading something broke something else or maybe they'd rather to do something more interesting.

Re: IE7 users, we need to talk…

#166

Post by moya »

rmc wrote: post #104
gburnett wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In the case of elderly users I don't think that many of them could even identify the browser that they use without prompting from others.

Sure they can. The usually use Google as a browser.

When I recently asked my grandfather about his browser preference, he said Yahoo. I came to realize that he believes Yahoo IS the web; it's his start page on IE.

Re: IE7 users, we need to talk…

#167

Post by PopsiclePete »

csmithuk wrote: post #106
pilif wrote: post #71

> IE7 users make up 1.22% of our traffic right now, and this will decline as more computers are upgraded and can use modern browsers. No computer exists that is able to run IE7 but not IE8. And because IE7 came out way past the "optimized for IE" age, I doubt there is software around that requires 7 and doesn't work with 8. This is in contrast to 6 which is what IE was stuck in for years, so software began depending…

Actually no, you are completely wrong. It might be a popular opinion but it's wrong. Some facts: 1. Firstly, there are a couple of COM APIs that were broken with IE8 which mean that some horrible "intranet applications" that use ActiveX won't work with IE8 properly. They worked fine with IE6 and IE7. These are now no longer supported by the vendors with no upgrade path so people are stuck with IE7 whilst applications…

Your argument applies to anything that has been obsoleted. What about the poor bastards who can't afford a car and depend on a horse and buggy? The highways are too dangerous for them. What about those "long-term" planners who standardizes their IT infrastructure on Jazz drives? And the poor sods who think all new laptops are awful because of that one printer they bought in 1987 that needs a serial port?

IE7 and COM are fucking ancient. And they're both shitty technologies. COM, especially, is a sad, disgusting 1990's remnant of "guru"-level C++ shit-baggery that is the only technology I'm aware of where the boiler-plate code is 2x to 3x more than the actual code. I'm glad those are put on the back-burner by MS.

Unix is from 70's and it's fucking solid. You wrote C code in 1975, you could probably port it to Ubuntu Linux without too much effort. You "standardized" on "enterprise" (a hilarious word, btw) technologies like IE7 + ActiveX? You deserve all the pain that is being dished out to you.

The crying and stomping of feet that happened at my company after IT deprecated WinXP + IE6 was music to my ears.

The world doesn't need IE6. It doesn't need IE7. It doesn't need COM. What it needs is fewer "enterprise architect" types who read too much MSDN Magazine and develop brittle "solutions" based on ActiveX and sell them to unsuspecting victims.

Re: IE7 users, we need to talk…

#169

Post by mgkimsal »

acdha wrote: post #149
pbhjpbhj wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Doesn't MSIE8 have a MSIE7 compatability mode that basically runs the IE7 rendering engine in a wrapper (like IE tab). Can't you use MSIE7 on the internal system and have a recent browser for web access?

> Doesn't MSIE8 have a MSIE7 compatability mode that basically runs the IE7 rendering engine in a wrapper Of course not, that was obviously the right way to implement this so they had to do something worse first. IE7 compatibility mode works plausibly well for visual display but as eonwe's link pointed out there are still some key differences. That link, however, doesn't really mention the worst part: IE8-as-IE7 does…

"Oracle support actually called me asking if they could redistribute my work to other customers!"

What did you tell them?

Re: IE7 users, we need to talk…

#170

Post by TheZenPsycho »

csmithuk wrote: post #116
TheZenPsycho wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You've come to exactly the wrong conclusion. web sites from 1992 still work on browsers today. it's IE proprietary activex stuff that's broken and changing rapidly.

Actually no they don't unless they are a really small subset of HTML/CSS. The box model was broken for years, don't even get me started on tables, JavaScript is the most loosely defined language to have ever existed, there have been several different document parser models (HTML, XHTML, HTML5) it's unreal. At best, most browsers these days estimate what they are doing, diving into some wierd mode full of edge cases p…

This is very confused thinking. I'm not sure where to start here.

Browsers are really the most stable backwards compatible platform you'll find provided you:

1. stay away from proprietary extensions, applets, plugins, and what have you.

2. stay away from the new features that aren't standardised yet.

The different parser models are there, and are STILL there. they will be there forever. Why? because DON'T BREAK THE WEB.

"At best, most browsers these days estimate what they are doing, diving into some wierd mode full of edge cases purely by accident if you step on the wrong stone."

Evidence or it didn't happen.

"As for proprietary extensions, they are the most stable in IE. The IE8 change was the first since IE4 and it was primarily a security model change. "

IE's proprietary extensions are the most stable, except they aren't, at all? Are you reading what you're writing before you send it?

By popular demand IE has been forced to expunge the worst of it, and support standards. The ones that don't change every browser release.

"Now we have NaCl on the horizon (ActiveX v2) and every vendor fighting their own extensions into the "standard" by buddying up for a new "standards" group."

Well then don't use those.

"It's a minefield which throwing critical applications into is a bad move both from a logical and risk perspective."

It's only a minefield if you go into it with extremely misguided and confused thinking like you apparently have. There is a huge, rich, extremely stable platform here that you missed out on because you ironically are only interested in the whiz bang new shiny feeding frenzy going on. Just don't use those parts that are changing rapidly. they are easy to spot. Use the old parts that haven't changed since 2004. If they've been around for 10 years they'll be here for 10 more years.

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