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Comment by czstrong | Hacker News Reader

Incompatible Browser.

I'm at a large Nation-wide law firm and stuck on IE6. I imagine there are Wall-Street corporationss that are also still using old browsers.

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As a long-time Opera user, I can say that this incompatible browser landing page crap has got to go. Either bend over backwards to satisfy everyone, or gracefully degrade, or collapse entirely without a warning message -- but I'm using a perfectly competent browser and you're locking me out of your damn site. 0/10.

While true for Opera, it's rather generous to call IE6 a "competent browser."

Good point. I know IE6 still has a decent user-base but I really felt I shouldn't spend the enormous amount of time necessary to make this site work with it. IE8 is due out soon and for web developers to continue supporting IE6 is the reason why its still around. I only wish more people would stop supporting it. Opera on the other hand is a great browser but I can't get jQuery to work correctly with it at all. And thats out of my hands in a way.

According to w3schools.com's browser stats -- which, by the way, are slanted toward people with an interest in web design -- IE6's share has only been dropping by about 1.5% a month for the last year, and is still around 26%. It's safe to assume IE6 support will remain completely unavoidable for any serious business, especially those pitching to a more traditional (read "technologically backwards") audience.

Thank you! So many people miss the point that while it might be a useful ideological and labor saving decision to not support IE6, it also limits the size of your market (possibly drastically). That's a decision that should be based on business principles, not just taste. Sure, if you're targeting geeks, ditch it, but if you're targeting "mortals", you'd better darn well support their browser if you want a 2nd (well, 1st I guess) look.

If you want to get people in large corporations using your site, you have to support IE6 for a while longer I think. I've worked in a few of these, and they all move extremely slowly in upgrading. I can see some of them keeping IE6 for at least another year or more.

I know I hear you. It definitely should be done but I'm not even sure if it's possible. I'll begin looking more into it shortly. At the moment, not a single feature or layout segment is operational.

jQuery at least claims to be compatible with Opera. It might be worthwhile to do a little bit of research into your issues.

I tried it in Opera, got the 'unsupported browser' message, copied the URL and opened it in Firefox. When I got the same message again, it took me a second to realise that it was because the URL was now http://www.streetread.com/browser rather than http://www.streetread.com/.

Also, the name 'streetread' made me think it would be something like Google Maps rather than a stock quote site.

Looks very nice, though.

I'm at one. All IE6 here. I use firefox, but I'm an exception.

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