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This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

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Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#91
post #63
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And then when your clients don't renew, your revenue is significantly affected, you have to lay off staff, you have a realization that this works in an ideal world, but we don't live in one.

i don't know... how much is the cost to develop an application to cover 100% of the available desktop browsers? maybe use that value to improve mobile target make more sense at this point?!

It really, really depends on your site's demographic.

Example: skin care website, they sell women's beauty and anti aging products. Their demographic is 15% IE8, but you know who are most likely to buy their products? Mature women, who are also more likely to be the ones in that 15%.

The next part of that puzzle was when they launched into China. China has a huge population still on XP and IE8. Literally millions of uniques from IE8. We even had a percentage from Netscape!

Fortunately the agency handling them was smart enough to research the demographic in both instances, but many agencies won't. They will brazenly force their opinions on their users who frankly, don't give a crap how you feel. They just want it to work so they can buy stuff.

You have to view every hit as a customer. Imagine if Walmart stopped letting in 15% of customers.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

Every browser has security issues. And as a business it is not up to you to decide what browsers people use, the best you could do is inform them but the decision is up to them.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#93
post #81

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.

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 curre…

> why fix what ain't broke

Because it will break eventually. That decrepit PC full of metal dust running XP that controls this here multimillion CNC mill will, given enough time, fail. Some part or other will fail, and eventually you won't be able to find new parts anymore that work with it. Granted, for an XP PC it's far in the future but still.

Besides, a Win 3.11 or XP PC won't have a 15 year uptime, it will probably have a sticker on it reminding users to reboot it daily.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#94

Does this mean jquery will lose a significant part of its utility?

Unlikely.. - 1% of traffic is still significant for most businesses. - Consistency/Training/Hiring. Everyone that has ever written JavaScript has learnt jQuery. Some people don't even "know" JavaScript, they "know" jQuery (I say this as a testament to jQuery, not as a detriment to these developers. jQuery is all they have needed, why know anything else?) - jQuery has so many plugins/frameworks that depend on it. Boot…

Plus with the current state of the web, jQuery from a major CDN is in probably every single browser cache in the world. There's something to be said for a core web library that almost never has to be re-downloaded.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#95
post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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…

>I don't need to 'cite' what I can see with my own eyes from the stats of my payment services provider.

Your original statement was broad and general, not qualified. Your anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to support this claim.

In the context of the discussion about supporting IE 8,9 and 10 and using your terminology flexbox (which IE 8-10 doesn't support) seems to be "all kinds of sexy stuff" and "not keeping things simple". Right, got it.

http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 curre…

> why fix what ain't broke Because it will break eventually. That decrepit PC full of metal dust running XP that controls this here multimillion CNC mill will, given enough time, fail. Some part or other will fail, and eventually you won't be able to find new parts anymore that work with it. Granted, for an XP PC it's far in the future but still. Besides, a Win 3.11 or XP PC won't have a 15 year uptime, it will proba…

I encountered a company with an "antique" mainframe running an "antique" COBOL workload. It had 17 YEARS of continuous uptime. Every single piece of hardware was either double or triple fault tolerant, and nearly everything had been swapped along the way, but the workload (a transaction processing system of a sort) had never ceased operations. It had never needed to be changed.

I know mainframe != Win XP, but it is important to remember that in many systems, it isn't really like a car, where you do maintenance to keep it running, its more like a wrench, where you use it until it breaks, and then get another one that does the same thing. In the years that the wrench is in service, new types of steel, new ergonomics, etc. might come out, but none of that is sufficient reason for upgrade. Only the actual failure of the system justifies replacement. Sure, its rare for that to be the case in a tech company, but not so rare in a company that just uses IT to do something else.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#97
post #81

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.

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 curre…

I agree and disagree. As an operation person, I think we need to make an argument for why X can't be done right away, but we must have a plan Y for migration. I know for a fact there is still some ancient database server running in our data center serving our critical business but there's a plan to migrate that to modern databases. While re implementing everything is costly, company has to hire specialist from a specific consulting firm to support such ancient database, and how long can we retain such talent without spending extreme amount and caution? "I am scared if I did this will screw everything up." There will be a point they have to migrate such database to something modern, and the cost is still several million plus.

The same argument that corporate world doesn't allow Python 3 or has a hard time to migrate to Python 3 because machines are running on some ancient RHEL servers or because of some security requirement. I get it and I don't get it. First, let's ditch RHLE. Fuck that. I really don't see reason to use RHLE; fine, YMMV. But it is people's job to do work. Some pieces can die, and some pieces will have to evolve, either from scratch, or slowly. No one said software development and operation support are easy, see https://pbs.twimg.com/media/CWC74tOVAAAsls0.jpg:large.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#98
post #81

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.

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'…

I guess if you don't mind the person running an unsupported system then don't. Most businesses desire support, however. You can't control when the old unsupported system is going to fail. You might find yourself doing a forced upgrade to a new system at an inconvenient time with zero time for transition. Strikes me as irresponsible.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#99
post #90

Earlier 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.…

> 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 wa…

I feel inclined to agree. These kinds of decisions are the ones that get you in deep trouble when the vocal minority starts to scream. It really is very trivial to at least give some sort of message, warning or guide to upgrade when attempting to use a web product with an incompatible browser.

Re: This is party time; Internet Explorer 8, 9 and 10 die on Tuesday

#100
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

>I don't need to 'cite' what I can see with my own eyes from the stats of my payment services provider. Your original statement was broad and general, not qualified. Your anecdotal evidence is not sufficient to support this claim. In the context of the discussion about supporting IE 8,9 and 10 and using your terminology flexbox (which IE 8-10 doesn't support) seems to be "all kinds of sexy stuff" and "not keeping thi…

Suit yourself. One thing I do know: if you are serious about commerce you can't afford to lose customers that you've spent a lot of money to acquire it tends to wreak havoc with your spreadsheets.
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