WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6 • Hacker News Board

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#11

Post by yuhong » Sat, May 21, 2011, 6:14 AM UTC

hxf148 wrote: post #4

It's funny, I have been around so long in this game that I remember never really liking Netscape, ever. IE3 in some ways made web dev fun and interesting again. Then IE4 took over and I was pretty happy using it as Netscape grew fat and slow. Netscape 4 was ok and that was the short lived first era of decent browser consistency. I don't remember much about IE5, head down developing and skipping classes but I do remem…

The funny thing is that IE6 was considered standard compliant back in 2001. AFAIK MS claimed it was CSS1 compliant based on the CSS1 test suite (and AFAIK they weren't the only ones praising it as standard-compliant). But the test suite was incomplete, as pointed out by Hixie, and in any case CSS1 is old now (which is why WordPress say current web standards).

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#12

Post by francescolaffi » Sat, May 21, 2011, 6:15 AM UTC

steve19 wrote: post #2

They are only discontinuing support for the admin part of the package which is very javascript heavy. The default frontend theme will, I am sure, continue to support IE6 for a long time.

Actually the default frontend theme (twentyten) has already dropped ie6 support for the dropdown navigation (can be solved installing a plugin for those who need to support it)

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#13

Post by yuhong » Sat, May 21, 2011, 6:23 AM UTC

hxf148 wrote: post #9

cubicle67 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not sure if you're aware of it, but the reason you're being down voted is not because of your comment (which is fine), but because you've included a link to your blog which adds nothing to the discussion and is generally not viewed as a positive thing [edit: 1 - I upvoted you because I thought your comment was good. 2 - at the time of writing your comment looked to be at about -2 but now it's back in the +ve]

Ahh sorry about that I sign my link as a sig all the time out of habit. I guess in a way it could be related as that link is a project I work on that has minimal intentional IE6 support. :) I'll remember that tip regardless.

You can put it in your about in Hacker News.

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#14

Post by dave1010uk » Sat, May 21, 2011, 6:56 AM UTC

steve19 wrote: post #2

They are only discontinuing support for the admin part of the package which is very javascript heavy. The default frontend theme will, I am sure, continue to support IE6 for a long time.

The new Twenty Eleven theme [1] doesn't fully support IE6 (there's comments on that bug) but I believe it works OK in it. As WordPress is completely themeable, there will probably be themes that support IE6 for years to come.

More interesting (for me at least) is that WordPress 3.2 will require PHP5.2 [2]. WordPress had lots of legacy code for PHP4 that made coding plugins for it a pain.

[1] http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/17198

[2] http://wordpress.org/news/2011/05/wordpress-3-2-beta-1/

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#15

Post by thaumaturgy » Sat, May 21, 2011, 8:33 AM UTC

hxf148 wrote: post #4

It's funny, I have been around so long in this game that I remember never really liking Netscape, ever. IE3 in some ways made web dev fun and interesting again. Then IE4 took over and I was pretty happy using it as Netscape grew fat and slow. Netscape 4 was ok and that was the short lived first era of decent browser consistency. I don't remember much about IE5, head down developing and skipping classes but I do remem…

> 9 isn't bad but they will probably screw it up.

We just had a request from a realty company to roll back all of their IE 9 updates because it breaks the image positioning for some slide show widget on a handful of different sites.

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#16

Post by ceejayoz » Sat, May 21, 2011, 1:51 PM UTC

ck2 wrote: post #6

code_duck wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can think of several large sites or organizations who have dropped IE6 support in the past year. There's nothing lazy about not supporting PHP 4. It is outdated and flawed, and the last release was in 2008. PHP 5 has been out for over 5 years. The fact that those sites are timebombs is not WordPress's fault or their problem.

For modern code that starts off with PHP5 it's fine and understandable to restrict versions. But WordPress is an "ancient" legacy mess and does not have any advanced code that benefits from PHP5 - you actually have to go out of your way to break it for PHP4. There is nothing in it that cannot be fixed for PHP4 without one extra line or two. Note that 99.9% of WordPress3 works on PHP4 - only the security updating fail…

The best thing WP can do, security-wise, is ditch PHP4.

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#17

Post by grandalf » Sat, May 21, 2011, 2:18 PM UTC

This is fantastic news. Now if only Google would release Chrome for Win2K to un-obsolete many valuable Win2K licenses.

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#18

Post by uriel » Sat, May 21, 2011, 4:38 PM UTC

ceejayoz wrote: post #16

ck2 wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For modern code that starts off with PHP5 it's fine and understandable to restrict versions. But WordPress is an "ancient" legacy mess and does not have any advanced code that benefits from PHP5 - you actually have to go out of your way to break it for PHP4. There is nothing in it that cannot be fixed for PHP4 without one extra line or two. Note that 99.9% of WordPress3 works on PHP4 - only the security updating fail…

The best thing WP can do, security-wise, is ditch PHP4.

The best thing it could do security-wise is ditching PHP.

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#19

Post by code_duck » Sat, May 21, 2011, 6:07 PM UTC

uriel wrote: post #18

ceejayoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing WP can do, security-wise, is ditch PHP4.

The best thing it could do security-wise is ditching PHP.

Not really, since that would of course mean a complete rewrite. The code is only as secure as it's authors make it, too - Python or Ruby are not magic bullets against XSS or SQL injection. While it would be fantastic to have WordPress in Python, and for the crufty and backwards bits to be cleaned up, old code that has been tested and audited is surely more secure and bug free than a brand new code base.

Re: WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6

#20

Post by kailashbadu » Sat, May 21, 2011, 6:19 PM UTC

uriel wrote: post #18

ceejayoz wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The best thing WP can do, security-wise, is ditch PHP4.

The best thing it could do security-wise is ditching PHP.

really ? Perhaps you are ignoring the fact that with PHP you can be as secure as you can care to be. It's all up to you. But let's not get started on this one. It's done to death already.