Why did you have the impression a B.S. in CompSci would teach you about legacy browser support?
I dunno, the first few weeks of my internship I had to do the same thing. If nothing else it was a great way to learn about what the company did by doing low-level grunt work. However I'd really recommend that if this is all you'll be doing for the duration of the internship, maybe look for something else.
Otherwise be thankful that you'll eventually have the flexibility to choose a career path that doesn't require you to maintain compliance with IE6.
I hate to make a "me too" like post, but as soon as I read his biography, I thought "... wait we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?".
Are we now just leveling the playing field so experience is irrelevant, and kids just out of college should be able to compete with those who have been working the field for ages (ages which I might add included a time when IE6 was the dominant browser, and you ignored it at your own peril).
Why do some graybeards feel this sadistic need to make juniors learn pointless stuff (which archaic legacy support kludges for buggy browsers certainly are)? Please note that you may have spent better part of the last 10 years slowly learning about these workarounds, while making your own mistakes.
This is the most pointless type of elitism I have ever seen. Why not use the new advanced knowledge, this kids have? Some of them kids know more of how standards work than most graybeards. Pushing new fresh minds down the madhouse hallway that IE6 is, seems like a moral hazard to me. They might get the wrong idea.
Or are we going to demand that people write their own compilers and languages, before they even start doing productive work?
Mentality like this, wastes customers money all around while contributing nothing to the business or society at large.
You're 20. Working as an intern for a social networking company. I am sure life seems ideal to you, working on only modern technologies and being able to ignore things that are not perfect.
Outside of this sheltered life, you will have to be able to deal with people asking you to do things you would rather not do. Might as well accept it, instead of writing a blog post every time it happens.
This is immaturely and badly argued. So it took a massive two days for an intern to add IE6 support to a web app. This is actually a good argument for keeping IE6 support for the several percent of users who still have it. I am not saying there aren't good arguments for dropping IE6, but this just isn't it.
Some of the supporting arguments are even worse - does he really expect a course called "Legacy Browser Support 301" to be taught at his college? And why would he need that course, seeing as how he managed fine all by himself? He could now teach that course better than any of the profs, who probably don't hack on IE6 conditional code.
There is also this refusal to look at things from a business perspective - he is working for a company which earns revenue from that web app that he worked on. If the revenue from IE6 users is greater than the value of 2 days of an intern's work, which seems likely, then the right decision is to throw in IE6 support. Now, if you have a massive stable of web apps (like Google) and it takes immense developer resources to support IE6 which will go away in a few years anyway, that's a different story. Change the inputs and you change the answer.
He seems like a good prog and a good guy, but he needs to mature some more.
This is off to the side of IE6, but I think we make a big mistake when we calculate costs that way.
It isn't simply a question of whether immediate revenue is greater than 2 days of an intern. The question is whether the projected revenue is greater than the support costs of that feature over time and the opportunity cost, i.e. "we can't do feature X easily because feature Y is in there." The fact that people don't calculate costs that way in software development puts many organizations in a pickle.
This article makes me very angry because the guy is coming across as looking for an excuse not to do the work. When I was building websites for IE 5 + 6 there was very little help out there - the bugs weren't documented and often you would be finding something completely new. I remember discovering an issue with HTML comments (!) after floating elements that seemed to not exist anywhere in Google.
Nowadays there are a ton of resources documenting all of the bugs out there because hundreds of people have already found and documented them. The site http://www.positioniseverything.net/ is a bible for developing through browser bugs, everyone knows about conditional comments, (not used until IE7 came out) and using Javascript is considered acceptable for so many more solutions or fixes. More importantly, there are a load of people who can offer help via many mediums, (Stack Overflow?) who have been there and done that.
Just because you don't agree with a business decision, don't invent excuses like this, you sound lazy.
Edit: In case I'm coming across as a grumpy old man, I started in the industry when I left University, so six years ago. I'm 29, not exactly a dinosaur.
First of all, welcome to the real world. While it may seem appropriate for your job that supporting a vintage browser from the start of the millennium is a bizarre concept, but for many people, particularly in business applications it's still a requirement and is likely to remain one for a good few years yet.
As tempting as it would be to write a lawn-getting-off comment about some of the garbage I've had to deal with in the past, let me just say that it doesn't matter when you start, there's always legacy support needed. At the moment, having IE6 as your legacy platform is a relative luxury compared to having to support a mish-mash of 32 and 16-bit platforms. There is only one IE6. Count your blessings.
I gladly offer to support IE6 to my clients, but i tell them it costs £50,000 in order to do it. Of those clients that initially asked me to support it none of them have taken up on the offer so far. :P
It opened in a mobile-optimized view on my phone, and at the bottom it says, "2 hours ago." It's also listed under August 2011 on the Archive page. But I do agree that most blog posts are generally enhanced by the inclusion of the post date for context.
I'm happy we finally dropped IE 6 support at work, but I don't like the line of reasoning in this article. Having to tackle unsavory but necessary problems is what makes this a job; the ability to do so effectively is what makes you a professional. Two days doing IE6 compliance is not a big deal.
2% of the US uses IE6. Explain that to your boss and ask if it's still necessary to support it.
[Update]
For Google Apps, Google no longer supports IE7. YouTube support for IE6 was dropped a year ago, and they make a lot of ad money from YouTube now.
It really depends on the domain. That two percent can be the difference between wildly profitable and failing.
After all, Google still happily sells clicks to IE 6 users. If you're business relies on external ads and optimizing conversion rates, IE 6 remains a priority.
In terms of percentage that's pretty small, but that doesn't mean it isn't important. If you estimate the number of US internet users to be ~240 million, 2% is 4.8 million people.
Sure, a small chunk of the pie, but still a large chunk of people. And, in a hypothetical situation where your % of revenue generating visitors is exactly the same as for the overall population, not many companies would want to lose 2% of their revenue, or profit.
There was story floating around here not too long ago that had IE 6 at around 4%. Incidentally, Safari was around 4%. I know a lot of devs that want to make sure things look great in Safari but don't care about IE 6 at all. Granted the obvious argument is that 4% of Safari users is a large percentage of Mac users, but it just goes to show how deceiving browser share numbers can be.
I'd also posit that while 2% may seem like nothing for a site with a small flow of traffic, it equates to a lot of money for a high volume consumer-oriented site. I run into a lot of this through my affiliation with Mogotest. During our customer development process I was amazed to find that several of the CTOs I sat down with will support any browser with greater than 0.5% share on their site. And these are guys that have definitely done their cost/benefit analysis.
The browser market share does not matter, the _conversion_ share does. I've heard from several large retailers that IE6 comprises a significantly higher share of their online sales than the market share would indicate. That could be because Grandma's PC hasn't been upgrade, but it might also be because people are buying stuff on their lunch hour with their nasty old IT-department-supported XP with IE6.
Sure, perhaps 2% of the US as measured by some collection of large, publically facing websites. Now try taking that measurement again within the walls of a set of large corporations. This becomes particularly relevant if you're developing an internal application for one of those corporations.
I look after an Australian e-commerce site. About 6.5% of our users are on IE6 (I assume they're mainly office-workers on shitty, out-dated PCs).
That is way too big a chunk of revenue to ignore in the name of ideals or standards or what-have-you.
But please, feel free to redirect any IE6 visitors to your blog to whatever the latest "IE6 is shit and you're an idiot" single serving site of the moment is.
I agree that IE6 is a turd, but have never found making my designs work in IE6 too much of a hassle. There has always been a positive ROI beyond just pleasing the spec-writers.
I think a lot of developers write overly complex, fragile mark-up with lots of nested floats and the like. Keep it simple and you'll realise IE6 support is generally just a few tweaks or at worst a conditional or two.
I try to make my websites work in ie6 but with minimal work, I'll let IE6 users use it but it will be a degraded experience and most of my website for normal people actually haven't seen such high IE6 usage as 6.5%.
You're lucky - one of our clients is an Australian e-tailer, with ~30% IE6 traffic - I'd just figured that Aus was really behind on the whole browser thing.
Anyhow - agreed entirely, we support IE6 whenever theres >1% of visitors using it, as it's all potential revenue. That said, we have noted that IE6 users tend to spend less, so... stupid and cheap. Still, net win, though.
I think it is beyond IE6 now. I am seeing more and more projects that are "okay" with a degraded version of the site on a non-modern browser.
Web developers cringe at shadows, and "non-boxy" effects, because we know the hoops we need to jump through to get there. However, if the project is okay with a "degraded" version of the site, then you can use CSS3 and save time.
I think the mindset of "support" has to change. Sure, have your site work on older browsers, but the good stuff happens when you see it on a modern browser. Users who use shitty browsers, are used to sites looking shitty.
What Computer Science program would leave you buried in CSS for 2.5 years? If he meant he spent 2.5 years working with CSS on the side, why didn't he ever think "maybe I should learn legacy support"?
As product manager, one of the best things I've done for my teams is to fight to leave IE6 out of the spec whenever possible. Sometimes they appreciate it, and many times they don't know it, but I believe we've always shipped better products because of it.
That's just not true in my experience. We have two large corporate clients and one state agency that each require some level of IE6 support. I have a hard time believing these are the exception. I'd wager it's going to take a few more years to reach that point.
10% of the population of the world use IE6, but that is heavily weighted by countries such as China (34%) and South Korea (22%)
If your target audience is English-speaking or European countries, the relevant proportion is 2% to 3% or less.
That's a pretty good level to start to consider whether supporting that small percentage is actually making you more money than you would if you didn't support their browser.
Well, 10% of the world also uses Macs, but people don't seem to support that as much. Why not? Because it depends on the target demographic. IE6 usage is probably a lot higher in the corporate environments and thus matters to websites targeted at the corporate world, just like how if you're not targeting hip 20somethings, Mac support is unnecessary.
I would love to stop supporting ie6 but I develop for customers in China and on the last count from our logs over 60% accessed the service with ie6. ( which, surprisingly, is about double of what is shown on your link )
Hmmm... Let us look a little closer at that map. 2% of the US uses IE6. The numbers in Europe are pretty low too. This doesn't make sense..oh wait... China and South Korea are skewing the numbers. They're not important for our site, it's ok to drop IE6 support.
"Now’s the time. Someone needs to start the ball rolling and just say no."
Lots of us say no to supporting IE6 whenever we can, the problem is the person paying our salaries says we will.
But regardless of that, the sad truth is that developers aren't the ones preventing a full scale cutoff of IE6, it's our users. If the people you are making things for use IE6 then you have to support them.
How much of the revenue comes from IE6 browsers? If it's more than the cost support it/ less drop it... My guess, it's less revenue then cost and that by this time next year we can say the same for IE7.
Developers need to start keeping exceedingly careful track of exactly how much time they spend fighting with IE6 so they can go to the person footing the bill and say "this is how much money you've wasted on a completely obsolete technology".
>>In the final week of wrapping up my first legitimate project, my boss dropped the bomb I was hoping to avoid. “Hey, Colby”, he said, “make sure it works in IE6 and up.”
This is the problem. No foresight. A my agency IE 6 support is a very specific line item in our proposals (if it's in there at all) and it adds 30% to the cost of development.
I usually add IE6 support to my sites. I've done it enough that I know what to avoid from the beginning. I can usually make it IE6-compliant without much extra effort, if any. I sympathize with younger devs who don't have that experience and know it must feel like pointless effort for such a small percentage of people.
Now, there's just IE7... and I get the feeling IE8 will feel like IE7 a few years from now. Microsoft really needs to fix their release style for IE. That is the #1 problem, not that the browsers are bad for their time.
[+] [-] mattdeboard|14 years ago|reply
I dunno, the first few weeks of my internship I had to do the same thing. If nothing else it was a great way to learn about what the company did by doing low-level grunt work. However I'd really recommend that if this is all you'll be doing for the duration of the internship, maybe look for something else.
Otherwise be thankful that you'll eventually have the flexibility to choose a career path that doesn't require you to maintain compliance with IE6.
[+] [-] true_religion|14 years ago|reply
Are we now just leveling the playing field so experience is irrelevant, and kids just out of college should be able to compete with those who have been working the field for ages (ages which I might add included a time when IE6 was the dominant browser, and you ignored it at your own peril).
[+] [-] JanezStupar|14 years ago|reply
Why do some graybeards feel this sadistic need to make juniors learn pointless stuff (which archaic legacy support kludges for buggy browsers certainly are)? Please note that you may have spent better part of the last 10 years slowly learning about these workarounds, while making your own mistakes.
This is the most pointless type of elitism I have ever seen. Why not use the new advanced knowledge, this kids have? Some of them kids know more of how standards work than most graybeards. Pushing new fresh minds down the madhouse hallway that IE6 is, seems like a moral hazard to me. They might get the wrong idea.
Or are we going to demand that people write their own compilers and languages, before they even start doing productive work?
Mentality like this, wastes customers money all around while contributing nothing to the business or society at large.
[+] [-] unreal37|14 years ago|reply
Outside of this sheltered life, you will have to be able to deal with people asking you to do things you would rather not do. Might as well accept it, instead of writing a blog post every time it happens.
[+] [-] JanezStupar|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yaakov34|14 years ago|reply
Some of the supporting arguments are even worse - does he really expect a course called "Legacy Browser Support 301" to be taught at his college? And why would he need that course, seeing as how he managed fine all by himself? He could now teach that course better than any of the profs, who probably don't hack on IE6 conditional code.
There is also this refusal to look at things from a business perspective - he is working for a company which earns revenue from that web app that he worked on. If the revenue from IE6 users is greater than the value of 2 days of an intern's work, which seems likely, then the right decision is to throw in IE6 support. Now, if you have a massive stable of web apps (like Google) and it takes immense developer resources to support IE6 which will go away in a few years anyway, that's a different story. Change the inputs and you change the answer.
He seems like a good prog and a good guy, but he needs to mature some more.
[+] [-] michaelfeathers|14 years ago|reply
It isn't simply a question of whether immediate revenue is greater than 2 days of an intern. The question is whether the projected revenue is greater than the support costs of that feature over time and the opportunity cost, i.e. "we can't do feature X easily because feature Y is in there." The fact that people don't calculate costs that way in software development puts many organizations in a pickle.
[+] [-] beseku|14 years ago|reply
Nowadays there are a ton of resources documenting all of the bugs out there because hundreds of people have already found and documented them. The site http://www.positioniseverything.net/ is a bible for developing through browser bugs, everyone knows about conditional comments, (not used until IE7 came out) and using Javascript is considered acceptable for so many more solutions or fixes. More importantly, there are a load of people who can offer help via many mediums, (Stack Overflow?) who have been there and done that.
Just because you don't agree with a business decision, don't invent excuses like this, you sound lazy.
Edit: In case I'm coming across as a grumpy old man, I started in the industry when I left University, so six years ago. I'm 29, not exactly a dinosaur.
[+] [-] _b8r0|14 years ago|reply
As tempting as it would be to write a lawn-getting-off comment about some of the garbage I've had to deal with in the past, let me just say that it doesn't matter when you start, there's always legacy support needed. At the moment, having IE6 as your legacy platform is a relative luxury compared to having to support a mish-mash of 32 and 16-bit platforms. There is only one IE6. Count your blessings.
[+] [-] TamDenholm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hnbla|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] kennu|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilikepi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bennysaurus|14 years ago|reply
Edit: OP is the poster of the blog also
[+] [-] tedsuo|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wnoise|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] melling|14 years ago|reply
[Update] For Google Apps, Google no longer supports IE7. YouTube support for IE6 was dropped a year ago, and they make a lot of ad money from YouTube now.
[+] [-] enjo|14 years ago|reply
After all, Google still happily sells clicks to IE 6 users. If you're business relies on external ads and optimizing conversion rates, IE 6 remains a priority.
[+] [-] corin_|14 years ago|reply
Sure, a small chunk of the pie, but still a large chunk of people. And, in a hypothetical situation where your % of revenue generating visitors is exactly the same as for the overall population, not many companies would want to lose 2% of their revenue, or profit.
[+] [-] nirvdrum|14 years ago|reply
I'd also posit that while 2% may seem like nothing for a site with a small flow of traffic, it equates to a lot of money for a high volume consumer-oriented site. I run into a lot of this through my affiliation with Mogotest. During our customer development process I was amazed to find that several of the CTOs I sat down with will support any browser with greater than 0.5% share on their site. And these are guys that have definitely done their cost/benefit analysis.
[+] [-] dmethvin|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] ilikepi|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Duff|14 years ago|reply
If you're a social media startup, the customers looking for social media solutions are probably also the folks who are NOT running IE6.
[+] [-] pedalpete|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ansonparker|14 years ago|reply
That is way too big a chunk of revenue to ignore in the name of ideals or standards or what-have-you.
But please, feel free to redirect any IE6 visitors to your blog to whatever the latest "IE6 is shit and you're an idiot" single serving site of the moment is.
I agree that IE6 is a turd, but have never found making my designs work in IE6 too much of a hassle. There has always been a positive ROI beyond just pleasing the spec-writers.
I think a lot of developers write overly complex, fragile mark-up with lots of nested floats and the like. Keep it simple and you'll realise IE6 support is generally just a few tweaks or at worst a conditional or two.
[+] [-] mestudent|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madaxe|14 years ago|reply
Anyhow - agreed entirely, we support IE6 whenever theres >1% of visitors using it, as it's all potential revenue. That said, we have noted that IE6 users tend to spend less, so... stupid and cheap. Still, net win, though.
[+] [-] bbwharris|14 years ago|reply
Web developers cringe at shadows, and "non-boxy" effects, because we know the hoops we need to jump through to get there. However, if the project is okay with a "degraded" version of the site, then you can use CSS3 and save time.
I think the mindset of "support" has to change. Sure, have your site work on older browsers, but the good stuff happens when you see it on a modern browser. Users who use shitty browsers, are used to sites looking shitty.
[+] [-] carbonica|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oliciv|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] StavrosK|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kingsley_20|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] k33n|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilikepi|14 years ago|reply
That's just not true in my experience. We have two large corporate clients and one state agency that each require some level of IE6 support. I have a hard time believing these are the exception. I'd wager it's going to take a few more years to reach that point.
[+] [-] veyron|14 years ago|reply
"We should stop supporting IE6"
"What percentage of people use IE6?"
"10%"
"Hmm, 10% sounds like a lot of people ... let's support it!"
[+] [-] bmunro|14 years ago|reply
If your target audience is English-speaking or European countries, the relevant proportion is 2% to 3% or less.
That's a pretty good level to start to consider whether supporting that small percentage is actually making you more money than you would if you didn't support their browser.
[+] [-] w1ntermute|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] marakas|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buro9|14 years ago|reply
From ie6countdown.com, click the line graph icon: http://www.ie6countdown.com/#chart
Extrapolate the line on its current trend and IE6 will not be even 1% in 13 months time.
Why invest a significant effort when the market share will evaporate within the year?
Further, if your project is going to take time to get traction, it may be a reality that by the time you're done the world no longer cares.
[+] [-] melling|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Technicolour|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Morcane|14 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] masaq|14 years ago|reply
This isn't a developer decision, it's a a business decision.
If you don't support it someone else will.
[+] [-] flamingbuffalo|14 years ago|reply
Lots of us say no to supporting IE6 whenever we can, the problem is the person paying our salaries says we will.
But regardless of that, the sad truth is that developers aren't the ones preventing a full scale cutoff of IE6, it's our users. If the people you are making things for use IE6 then you have to support them.
[+] [-] alexwestholm|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nknight|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wmeredith|14 years ago|reply
This is the problem. No foresight. A my agency IE 6 support is a very specific line item in our proposals (if it's in there at all) and it adds 30% to the cost of development.
[+] [-] joshfraser|14 years ago|reply
[+] [-] code_duck|14 years ago|reply
Now, there's just IE7... and I get the feeling IE8 will feel like IE7 a few years from now. Microsoft really needs to fix their release style for IE. That is the #1 problem, not that the browsers are bad for their time.