I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP": Vista shipped in 2007, so if your company wrote software after that that was locked to XP they made a mistake - one they've had EIGHT YEARS to fix. Everything except the most expensive, vertical-market hardware (that might require XP for driver support) has nigh-certainly already been depreciated to zero on the books.
This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
81–90 of 177 posts
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's a fine way to run. data based decision based on the cost of support and the amount of traffic.
It is extremely rare that the cost to support a browser outweighs the economic importance of those using those browsers. If it is then you are probably too small an entity to matter anyway, but as soon as your IE6 users are numerous enough that you can assign a percentage to the population you would probably be well advised to simply serve them rather than to attempt to force them to upgrade, if they haven't done so…
>It is extremely rare that the cost to support a browser outweighs the economic importance of those using those browsers.
Citation please. Are you really sure this applies to modern front-end web app with reasonable complexity?
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is extremely rare that the cost to support a browser outweighs the economic importance of those using those browsers. If it is then you are probably too small an entity to matter anyway, but as soon as your IE6 users are numerous enough that you can assign a percentage to the population you would probably be well advised to simply serve them rather than to attempt to force them to upgrade, if they haven't done so…
>It is extremely rare that the cost to support a browser outweighs the economic importance of those using those browsers. Citation please. Are you really sure this applies to modern front-end web app with reasonable complexity?
I don't need to 'cite' what I can see with my own eyes from the stats of my payment services provider. Browsers are very easily released, they take a very long time to die. This is one reason why I tend to keep things simple, this vastly reduces the amount of resources required to make something work on a lot of different platforms and browser combinations.
Of course if your web app relies on all kinds of sexy stuff then you're going to have to convince yourself that those people don't matter.
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#84I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP": Vista shipped in 2007, so if your company wrote software after that that was locked to XP they made a mistake - one they've had EIGHT YEARS to fix. Everything except the most expensive, vertical-market hardware (that might require XP for driver support) has nigh-certainly already been depreciated to zero on the books.
Let me play the devil's advocate:
Why should I as a user be forced to upgrade from a system which does it's job just fine only because the system's manufacturer decides that they don't want to spend any more resources on patching up errors in this system? Having bought the system, shouldn't I have gotten a product that is reasonably secure in the first place? How do I know that the new shiny replacement system doesn't introduce new problems which take years until they are discovered and could be much worse than the old system where already a lot of work has gone into fixing bugs?
I bet the real reasons are much more mundane. I've seen several times where updating a single tool in game production teams takes years, because the 'time is never right', the update can't be done incrementally, and the production can't afford to switch the whole team over and risk weeks of instability and bug-hunting because unexpected bugs crop up that didn't manifest in small-scale tests.
Basically: never change a running system :)
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, they could do that now, but that doesn't help the IE 6, 7, 8 problems, does that?
Yes it does. They could ship a statically-linked copy of Edge to Windows Vista (and even XP) users via Windows Update. The old IE DLLs would have to stay there to be used by the system, but the actual web browser could be a newer one.
Microsoft Edge is a Universal Windows App, i.e. uses APIs that exist on Windows 10 only. And Microsoft is not backporting that.
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's easy to say this stuff, less easy to implement in a business. It depends on your demographic and your content. Take B2B sales or B2B SaaS. Enterprise users are THE main reason for crappy old browsers in my experience, so the real question becomes... Are you really willing to take a 10% hit on sales? You can announce EOLs until the cows come home (Microsoft has and look how well it has done them). If your product…
It's the 80/20 rule for me. Think about the type of client (individual user/corporation) that is still using Entities who use legacy software have more problems than their browser. It's symptomatic of a much larger issue, and I love being able to filter them out!
On behalf of other developers, thanks for the extra business.
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#87I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP": Vista shipped in 2007, so if your company wrote software after that that was locked to XP they made a mistake - one they've had EIGHT YEARS to fix. Everything except the most expensive, vertical-market hardware (that might require XP for driver support) has nigh-certainly already been depreciated to zero on the books.
When you've got a system that is, for example, underpinning your whole business operation (eg billing, machine controls, whatever) and that cost thousands (often tens or hundreds of thousands) to implement and it only works on a legacy version of an operating system (be that Win 3.11, Linux 2.4, or even just XP) you WILL move heaven and earth to avoid disrupting that system.
Even if it's a smooth migration to a current release, it doesn't have 15 years of perfect history behind it.
And that's when you can migrate. There are plenty of control systems for devices that cost $millions that were bought decades ago that just need to keep working. You don't have source. The vendor went out of business with the dot-com bubble.
Yeah, we probably could replace all the things, but at what cost? Will it beat the last 15 years of perfect uptime? Are you the buy willing to stake your job on it? Or shall we just paper over the cracks and keep shovelling coal into that server in the corner?
Edit: I'm describing worst-case scenarios in specific use-cases but even if there isn't a good reason to stay behind, the feeling of "why fix what ain't broke?" is pervasive in management, especially IT management. Maybe it's a generational thing and we'll see waves on waves of upgrades in the next decade or two but I'm fairly sure that'll just lead to another generation of "make do"ers.
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.…
That's not a very good way to run a commercial entity. And it is also why developers should not be making the call about which browser to support and which not. The reason why is that the fixed cost of a business are that: fixed. The profit is usually over-represented in the last few percentage points of the people using the service or buying the products so if you lop off some arbitrary percentage at the top that 15…
Encouraging or even assisting users with browsers that have security bugs is also not a responsible way of going about doing business!
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#89I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP": Vista shipped in 2007, so if your company wrote software after that that was locked to XP they made a mistake - one they've had EIGHT YEARS to fix. Everything except the most expensive, vertical-market hardware (that might require XP for driver support) has nigh-certainly already been depreciated to zero on the books.
> I really don't get the concept of people being "stuck on XP"
Can you understand the concept of people being too poor to ever upgrade? Can you understand the concept of people who live in places where up-to-date technology is hard to get? (see Cloudflare's recent SHA1 deprecation post: https://blog.cloudflare.com/sha-1-deprecation-no-browser-lef... )
And before you say "there's Linux that's free", the idea of Linux being free if you don't value your time is absolutely applicable to these people. They perceive their time as having more important uses than acquiring and learning different software.
Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday
#90Oh poor, deluded TNW. Software only dies in the way developers care about when users stop using it. Well beside its actual expiry (which seems to be 2020), people STILL use XP with an ancient versions of IE6 and IE7. Many Vista users stick on IE7. So calm yourself and put flexbox back down. You've got a few years before that's supported enough.
If I was a developer, I'd carefully look at my referer logs and if only 15% of my user community was using IE 8-10, I'd just develop for IE 10. I would NOT warn the end users about needing to upgrade, I'd just let script errors occur and not release any compatibility fixes. I'd respond to support tickets explaining that there are bugs in their old version of IE and suggest they upgrade, or install Chrome or Firefox.…
> If I was a developer,
It's pretty clear you're not a developer (or wouldn't be for long).
There are two really bad decisions here:
1) You are driving away up to 15% of people who actually use your product. How much would you spend to acquire that many active users? It's easier to keep existing users than acquire new users.
2) Sending users through a ticket system for errors you could have prevented with a simple warning is a bad experience for them and far more work for you. And most users will silently disappear instead.