Yes, Microsoft was great when they made IE 6, but when IE 7 came out, Microsoft killed the Internet star. I mean, HTML 5? What? I read a book that said after HTML 4.01, it would be XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1 ... not HTML 5! Tyler Z On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 20:45:20 +0200, Andre Engels wrote:
On Thu, Jun 14, 2012 at 1:46 PM, Chad innocentkiller@gmail.com wrote:
Absolutely not. We have debated the "show notice to broken browsers" thing multiple times--and the answer is always "it's annoying as hell when sites do it and it's not our place to do so."
The stance on "supporting crappy old browsers" has largely over time turned into--continue supporting all browsers with at least 1% of our readers (roughly,I don't believe that number's ever been set in stone). Once they are less than 1%, continue supporting unless it's a burden to do so and/or makes support for newer browsers impossible. And lastly, never purposefully break a browser if you can help it.
Just to give some data: Looking at May, this 1% limit would mean supporting the following browser versions (May 2012 data):
- Chrome 18.0 and 19.0
- MSIE 6.0, 7.0, 8.0 and 9.0
- Firefox 3.6, 11.0 and 12.0
- Safari 534.55 (desktop), 6533.18 and 7534.48 (iOS)
- Opera 11.62 and 11.64
- Safari 533.1 (Android browser)
Furthermore, the following have no version at or over 1%, but do get there or at least near when all versions are combined:
- Opera Mini
- WikipediaMobile (our own mobile app)
- BlackBerry browser
- Apple PubSub (rss reader)
-- André Engels, andreengels@gmail.com
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I agree with Chris and Derric here; at least in the "western world", a large percentage of IE7 users have not upgraded for "Enterprise" reasons. Many of these enterprises use proprietary software that is written for IE7, and upgrading to the IE9 versions can be cost-prohibitive. Often by waiting another couple of years, the cost of the upgrade will drop to the level that is acceptable to the organization (or alternately they can make a better business case because support drops for the older versions or other critical changes are being held back).
My own employer is in this situation, and until they figured out how to add Firefox accessibility to the VPN, I had to keep IE7 on one of my home computers for those occasions when I work off-site.
Risker
On Thu, 14 Jun 2012 12:18:47 -0700, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
I agree with Chris and Derric here; at least in the "western world", a large percentage of IE7 users have not upgraded for "Enterprise" reasons. Many of these enterprises use proprietary software that is written for IE7, and upgrading to the IE9 versions can be cost-prohibitive. Often by waiting another couple of years, the cost of the upgrade will drop to the level that is acceptable to the organization (or alternately they can make a better business case because support drops for the older versions or other critical changes are being held back).
My own employer is in this situation, and until they figured out how to add Firefox accessibility to the VPN, I had to keep IE7 on one of my home computers for those occasions when I work off-site.
Risker
I do have to mention something on this whole topic. All these arguments seem to focus on saying that that IE6/7 should be supported because enterprises are dependent on out of date software and can't update. This line of thought completely ignores the fact that upgrading isn't even the only option... the possibilities of simply installing a second browser for web browsing and only opening IE for internal systems (pretend the page sitting in IE is an app and use shortcuts) or installing chrome frame. Given that fact arguments that enterprises "can't and should be enabled" rather than "just wont and should be ignored" feels rather flimsy.
Daniel Friesen wrote:
I do have to mention something on this whole topic. All these arguments seem to focus on saying that that IE6/7 should be supported because enterprises are dependent on out of date software and can't update. This line of thought completely ignores the fact that upgrading isn't even the only option... the possibilities of simply installing a second browser for web browsing and only opening IE for internal systems (pretend the page sitting in IE is an app and use shortcuts) or installing chrome frame. Given that fact arguments that enterprises "can't and should be enabled" rather than "just wont and should be ignored" feels rather flimsy.
Brion made the same argument already in this thread. It's not a particularly bad argument, though it seems to miss the fact that if your company or organization is strict/senseless enough to require you to use IE6 or IE7 every day, they've probably also disabled the ability to install new applications on your workstation.
MZMcBride
On 15 June 2012 01:30, Daniel Friesen lists@nadir-seen-fire.com wrote:
I do have to mention something on this whole topic. All these arguments seem to focus on saying that that IE6/7 should be supported because enterprises are dependent on out of date software and can't update. This line of thought completely ignores the fact that upgrading isn't even the only option... the possibilities of simply installing a second browser for web browsing and only opening IE for internal systems (pretend the page sitting in IE is an app and use shortcuts) or installing chrome frame. Given that fact arguments that enterprises "can't and should be enabled" rather than "just wont and should be ignored" feels rather flimsy.
I hate to perpetuate this topic, but your assumption that adding a browser to a corporate estate will be trivial (or, at least, less work than just upgrading IE from 6 to, say, 8) is not always correct.
One UK Government organisation where I used to work was quoted an outline figure of ~ US$300m to upgrade IE6 to IE7 (almost all of which was re-certification to UK National Security standards). The figure for Firefox - which doesn't have baseline accreditation, unlike IE - was ~US$500m, and would only be good until the next *.*.1+ release of Firefox, unlike IE where the patches are signed-off. Sure, these costs are partially inflated by their poor contracts, but full security audits against thousands of bespoke (and badly-written VB-based archaic) apps is insanely expensive.
Are these organisations screwed mostly as a result of their own short-sightedness in building systems that weren't standards-compatabile? Yes. Should we trivialise the difficulties into which they've steered themselves? No.
Yours,
On 14 June 2012 20:49, Tyler programmer651@comcast.net wrote:
Yes, Microsoft was great when they made IE 6, but when IE 7 came out, Microsoft killed the Internet star. I mean, HTML 5? What? I read a book that said after HTML 4.01, it would be XHTML 1.0, XHTML 1.1 ... not HTML 5!
I recommend you learn a thing or two about HTML's history, and how XHTML 1.0 and 1.1 (as well as 2.0) was a mistake. XHTML was an attempt to make sure to use strict XML for the HTML, which would create easier parsing. Unfortunately, no one actually did what was required; *serve* as XML, which meant the browsers would still quirk parse it.
Now, of course, if you serve as XML, the browsers will parse it as XML and then break if there is a syntax error. But XML also does not support most HTML entities, so there is a problem right there. But the parsing is likely to be faster.
HTML5 was create in protest against the slow progress to a new HTML standard, and as XHTML wasn't going anywhere fast, people gave it the shrug it so richly deserved.
For that reason, XHTML5 exists, which is just like HTML5, but is required to be parsed as XML.
Also, your email seems to indicate that Microsoft created HTML5, they were perhaps the _last_ ones to get onboard the 'HTML5 train'. Much of HTML5 was supposed to go past the usual long-winded and slow process of standards that is W3C.
And IE6 sucked when it was released.
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