Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend • Hacker News Board

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#31

Post by loupeabody » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:30 PM UTC

JoshGlazebrook wrote: post #9

The title needs an asterisk. Because I unfortunately have the privilege of knowing an older gentleman that purposely uses IE6 on Windows XP. He calls the concept of tabs useless rubbish. And I'm not talking a regular consumer, I'm talking someone who develops actual software.

I second this. We recently had an incident at the office where all our Windows 7 machines implemented an update which upgraded everyone's IE8 to IE10. Some software which is used daily in the office to generate reports (using a browser) was using the element to display barcodes (with a barcode typeface).

Since the element has been long deprecated, the barcodes as well as a few other elements rendered differently. This alarmed a few of my bosses who were eager to understand what could be done to bring the barcodes back. After showing them IE10's dev tools and the browser mode, the problem has been temporarily fixed.

But many people I spoke with in the office were of the opinion that IE8 was all around better than IE10, and for their use case, they're not wrong. The legacy software everyone here uses to generate reports is outdated, but it still serves its purpose fine. Web standards and innovative technologies are not relevant to them on a personal level to justify the inconvenience of the update. So yes, my coworkers prefer IE8 to other browsers, but only because they depend on it.

The software we use to generate reports, by the way, could easily be changed to meet modern web standards. So, their opinion is further arbitrated if the software would just be tweaked to work with newer browsers.

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#32

Post by tbirdz » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:31 PM UTC

edent wrote: post #6

nacker_hews wrote: post #2

It would be cool to further break this down by time of day. i.e. look at people who use IE8 from 9-5 on weekdays vs. the weekends. Because I bet nighttime weekday IE8 usage dampens the effect.

Timezones are a problem there. Unless you're a hyper-local site, your worldwide visitor numbers will skew anything on a "daily" basis. For example, my blog is based in the UK but gets a substantial proportion of visits from the USA - which itself has multiple timezones.

Couldn't you do some kind of correlation from geolocation to correct for time zone differences?

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#33

Post by bunderbunder » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:33 PM UTC

stephen_g wrote: post #8

I think a lot of people just don't know enough to upgrade their browser - I see people using IE9 at work even though we are allowed to install whatever software we want... IE really needs silent auto-update, and to actually release more often...

At places I've worked they absolutely do know how to upgrade, but they have to hang onto IE8 because there are sites on the corporate intranet which don't work with IE9+. So the usual compromise is to hold IE at version 8 in order to be able to use those apps, and install some other browser to use everywhere else.

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#34

Post by ekidd » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:35 PM UTC

davidjgraph wrote: post #15

And from a startup point of view, legacy IE means Enterprises, Enterprise means big price tags: 1) Because they are Enterprises. 2) Because nobody wants to support those browsers. If you think it's a declining market that'll be dead in 18 months, we have contracts to support IE 6 until 2019, not to mention 7 and 8.

Enterprise also means six-month sales cycles, finding salespeople with good Rolodexes, endless awful meetings needed to sync up five different departments, and a diminished ability to turn technical superiority into paying customers.

There's a ton of money there, but you need to build the right organization. Some companies will find it easier to sell to smaller businesses.

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#35

Post by tambourine_man » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:38 PM UTC

IE 8 is the last version to support Windows XP

See, browsers have become so important that they now support the OS, not the other way around.

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#36

Post by unreal37 » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:38 PM UTC

jackgavigan wrote: post #16

The words "older", "versions" and "of" are superfluous.

I don't understand when geeks insult other people who like Microsoft Windows or IE. I get it if you don't like the browser, I get it if you HATE the browser, but to actually insult the users of that browser is just ignorant.

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#37

Post by prawks » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:40 PM UTC

JPKab wrote: post #25

stephen_g wrote: post #8

I think a lot of people just don't know enough to upgrade their browser - I see people using IE9 at work even though we are allowed to install whatever software we want... IE really needs silent auto-update, and to actually release more often...

If you think this, then you don't understand enterprises. The vast majority of users you will encounter, even in their 60's, are aware, through friends, kids, family, etc that this "Google Chrome thing makes the internet faster". They want it, but your typical large enterprise foces IE down their throats, courtesy of 20+ years of rape by the legions of IT guys who, through the cognitive dissonance inducing Microsoft…

> your typical large enterprise foces IE down their throats, courtesy of 20+ years of rape by the legions of IT guys who, through the cognitive dissonance inducing Microsoft certification/training/tools process now think that everything Microsoft is magic

I can't speak for every company, but in my experience there's much more to it than that.

A large part of the problem is that many of the tools leveraged by Enterprises (which are purchased from vendors) to develop web applications are extremely brittle and sensitive to the user's browser. When you talk about pushing a new version of IE, every web tool in the company (easily dozens) needs to be examined to determine the impact and cost related to making sure it works with the new version. This often means pushing new versions of these vendor packages as well, and the costs associated with that planning (think of the management effort required) and implementation.

In many Enterprises, this is infrastructure overhead and is largely avoided (it's a huge headache/cost) until absolutely necessary. "Absolutely necessary" means when the vendor (MSoft) stops supporting that browser version. Which doesn't happen until it is well past obsolete.

Of course, management gets many of these concepts from those Microsoft Certified developers, but that's not the whole story.

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#38

Post by raverbashing » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:40 PM UTC

It would be so fun if there's some leak mentioning the role of "legacy software" in facilitating information acquisition by government agencies (or other interested parties).

Like using LM Hashes for "backwards compatibility" or older, more easily exploitable browsers.

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#39

Post by unreal37 » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:40 PM UTC

mcherm wrote: post #12

johnny_reilly wrote: post #10

It's been my (unfortunate) experience that most enterprise / corporate environments lock down users machines heavily in the name of security. And with that goes the ability of the user to upgrade their browser. Oftentimes the reason is that there are old internal web applications which don't work in newer versions of IE / look rubbish in newer versions of IE. It's a pain. And it looks like the death of XP won't mean…

> [...] lock down users machines heavily in the name of security And because the browsers aren't the more recent versions with more recent bug fixes, it may actually increase vulnerabilities, making things LESS secure.

Not necessarily. I have a client that runs IE7 on all their machines, but those machines are completely locked down. We can't even run Webex on those things without IT coming down to install. Their own corporate website looks crappy on their own employee desktops, because the corporate anti-virus blocks one of the javascript's from running. (We had them whitelist it.) I challenge anyone to install any virus or malware on that thing.

Re: Older versions of IE show a much stronger dropoff in usage over the weekend

#40

Post by melling » Wed, Sep 11, 2013, 1:41 PM UTC

davidjgraph wrote: post #15

And from a startup point of view, legacy IE means Enterprises, Enterprise means big price tags: 1) Because they are Enterprises. 2) Because nobody wants to support those browsers. If you think it's a declining market that'll be dead in 18 months, we have contracts to support IE 6 until 2019, not to mention 7 and 8.

What business are you in? If you're going to support IE6 until 2019, which probably runs Javascript 200 times slower than IE10, your software is going to be very limited.

Once your competitions builds a better mousetrap, sends in their sales team then explains that all your customers need to do is install Chrome, it might get a little ugly.