Hacker News Reader

Comment by joubert | Hacker News Reader

It'd be nice if they could include in a SP to IE 6, 7, and 8 considering half the planet is still on legacy browsers.

This is one thing I've been thinking about since Google released Chrome Frame. Microsoft should release a service pack that attaches a standard compliant rendering engine to IE (basically a Microsoft blessed Chrome Frame). Then legacy applications would continue to work and the rest of the world could toss a meta engine="nosuck" that IE would respond to by rendering with the good engine.

That WAS Internet Explorer 9, but the online community made such a ruckus (with good reason) that MS would use the "standards compliant" mode only with a nosuck tag, that they went ahead and made it the default and you'd have to opt-in to the sucky mode.

IE9 should be standards compliant by default. A patched version of IE6 however should continue to be sucky by default and use a new rendering engine only with a nosuck tag.

Absolutely. I'm gung ho for IE catching up, but they don't bother to push their IE 6 and 7 users to upgrade in the same way safari, firefox and all other browsers use. Mainly, it's just creating yet-another-browser-to-test.

(edit: forgot to hit reply and made a new message. doh.)

It's a critical Windows update, meaning that for most people IE will update automatically with Windows.

Why are so many people still on IE 6 then?

Because local network admins in various big companies refuse to upgrade from IE6 since they depend on internal applications coded against IE6 specifically, and Microsoft does not control every single corporate LAN to be able to force upgrades down their throats when they don't want them ...

... and many companies are unwilling to fork out the money for upgraded boxes until those running Windows 2000 finally die. We're stuck in that situation.

do you realize that we are at the current situation precisely because every IE version is different from the previous one and they are all different from the standards available at their time?

If local network admins upgraded to the latest and greatest IE8/9 we would still be in the same horse shit regarding IE not following web standards. We would be free of "IE6 doesn't have a fucking clue about the box model". But we would be at "IE8 doesn't support canvas (or proper event bubble)".

Microsoft has been using this "network admins don't upgrade from IE6" for too long as an excuse for the mess they keep putting web standards into.

A proper solution for Microsoft now would be to completely ditch IE backend and use one of the current available libraries like webkit. And put in place a IE frontend that can have IE6/7/8 tabs and a proper browser (defaulting to a proper browser). Any other move coming from Microsoft is either PR or evilness.

1. There are still a lot of people running on older computers (i.e. Windows 98/ME) and see no reason to upgrade (and probably have never installed a system update/hotfix at all).

2. There are just a lot of people that don't install any system updates.

3. There are people with pirated Windows versions that don't know how (or just don't care about them at all) to hack around the 'Genuine Windows' checks. So they don't install system updates.

The only way many of the laggards are going to upgrade is if their favorite sites stop working. I think soon it will become too expensive to hack n' test for four versions of IE, and companies will start dropping support for IE 6.

Most IE6 laggards are large companies with sprawling IT bureaucracy (I did some work at one up until a couple of month ago). And their favourite sites where the internal project and time tracking web sites. As long as those work they'll see no reason to upgrade from IE6 and they'll never make any changes to those sites that will break IE6. They really don't care too much whether the rest of the internet works or not.

When the CEO can't access ESPN.com from his work PC, then you'll see a big push for something to be fixed.

The CEO (and all the other big shot managers) have all received the magic blessings needed to plug their personal laptops into the company network and never even sees the desktop working environment foisted upon their menial workers (or at least that is my experience).

And since when providing a nice web environment is in the interest of Microsoft? Their goal is to provide an experience as much broken as possible that doesn't offend their users and convince them to move to better browsers.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com