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Comment by mattdeboard | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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).

Re: fresh out of college kids competing with the oldtimers, I'm thinking that yes, the field is being leveled and certain types of experience are worth less and less. The greater the pace of innovation, the greater the chance that new tools are adopted that make certain knowledge obsolete. This is good in many ways, but it also requires constant learning and change, which is frustrating. Not that it's right or wrong, but I think it's the reality. Once this plays out, I really think we'll see calls for unionization, which would be unfortunate.

Re: supporting IE6, there's a cost associated with that. So if someone shows me that 20% of my traffic comes from IE6 users and that traffic is profitable traffic (enough profit to offset the costs) then yes, let's support IE6. But I think the payoff on supporting IE6 is becoming lower and lower.

> we should stop supporting X browser because some kid doesn't know how to support it too?

No, we should look seriously at whether we need to keep doing things the cheap labor can't perform anymore.

Supporting IE6 is a Black Art, and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive. I suppose the traditional comparison is to COBOL codebases and greenscreen IBM development. If thinking about that convinces you IE6 isn't the mainstream anymore, go for it. The point is that increasing the number of different, and I mean really different, browsers your team has to know about is not free, as the cheap labor only knows the relatively tight cluster of post-IE6 graphical browsers. The article's the evidence of that.

... and keeping people who can perform Black Arts reliably is expensive.

I have nothing to add ("me, too!"), but would like to point out that this sounds like a line from a fantasy novel written by an economist. If such a thing actually exists, I would love to hear of it.

Harald, by David Friedman. (There are a number of notable David Friedmans. This is the anarcho-capitalist-son-of-Milton-Friedman one.)

Harald is quite good, IMO, but there isn't a lot of overt economics so it may not be what you're looking for.

I really didn't think the GP would get an answer to that extremely specific question. Thanks, and I'll be checking this out.

For the majority of websites it's not so much a Black Art as something anyone who designed websites more than 5 years ago should manage competently (assuming there aren't unreasonable requirements such as pixel perfection or reproducing every hover effect). The comparison is more finding someone that knows how to program Python instead of copy/pasting PHP scripts.

Html and css were not designed to be an arcane programming language, but a simple layout markup. If well designed then copy paste should work fine. Arguably we didnt quite make that simplicity, but I think your Python PHP comment is way off as far as html css is concerned...

Progress?

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.

IE6 support is not pointless if your target market includes banks and large corporates which are still using IE6.

They are wasting money by using IE6. Yes you can argue, that they pay for IE6 development and thus its their money and that we should not care.

However it is we who sell Win7 and IE6 support at the same time. And by supporting IE6 we lock our customers into stone age even more.

There are plenty of alternatives for any software that had to be done via ActiveX 7 years ago. It is completely our (industry) fault that banks and large corporates keep using IE6 - since we would rather milk them dry with our shitty solutions than to help them move on.

So what are you proposing... That banks and large corporates keep using Win XP for the next 10,20 years (????).

What about general productivity, usability, security, etc?

What these victims should (but will not) learn is that buying software on the cheap, with disregard to open standards is extremely costly and unwise.

Yes, it costs money to stop using IE6. It also costs money to deploy, test, train users to use, rewrite all other applications to use a new browser. When the former cost is greater than the lesser, businesses will upgrade.

I fail to see how its the fault of outside vendors that their clients or customers are still using an old browser. And if it's an in-house IT shop, it's purely a cost/business decision. You make it sound as if corporations are not upgrading out of laziness.

Same old set of excuses, covering gross negligence and incompetence that is going on in corporate IT departments. Its hard to train users and IT is against it - are two largest straw men arguments on this topic.

I was leading a development effort on this type of project and I took strong position that IE6 shall not be supported (due to some conflicting technical requirements in Request for tender). This specific IT department was delighted with our stance, since nowadays there are literally less than 5% of users who actually prefer their archaic IE6 solutions (which are usually people who don't actually use thy system, but are in position of "power"). This specific IT department also begged us to raise hardware requirements from 500Mhz Pentium III with 512Mb RAM (since that would enable them to push for an upgrade) - which we didn't.

Anyways - end users (yes those "computer illiterate" old ladies, everybody keeps on patronizing) were delighted by added usability that got enabled by using modern browsers. We were able to fulfill all the requirements a lot cheaper than dragging IE6 for that knucklehead department head would allow us to.

The fault of outside vendors is that they don't tell/show their users what they are missing on. The fault of outside vendors is that they don't explain security risks they are being exposed to, by using archaic software. The fault of outside vendors is that they don't help their customers to not pile even more opportunity costs related to stone age software.

Ok, how about considering a different demographic: China.

IE6 remains by far the most popular desktop web browser in China (Statcounter [1] says 50% of the market). If my site is targetting a Chinese audience, IE6 support is a must and no amount of persuasion will move the entire Chinese market to Chrome in a hurry.

[1] http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-CN-monthly-201007...

Another strawman. People using pirated OS's and being technically unsophisticated to the degree of being satisfied with what IE6 has to offer are extremely unlikely to buy your service or to provide any significant value to your advertisers. Basically they are leeches that will use whatever is cheapest/most convenient to them. Thus not having them as your user will only spare you some resources.

But if they really want to use your service - they will upgrade in a heartbeat (upgrading or changing a browser is no significant undertaking nowadays). If they are using your service via Cybercafes - they will get the proprietors to install another browser.

Your argument merely tells me that you either haven't developed or seriously thought about developing a service for Chinese market.

People in those areas using IE6 do pay for services. I know. We were debating this very question, and decided to look at our paid users browser choices, and IE6 was, while not the majority, not the least of our concerns, either. Furthermore, the net loss of loosing IE6 users would have been the salary of a number of people.

Finally, we can support IE6 without losing out on the benefits of newer browsers.

Arguing for or against IE6 using made up fanciful arguments (people using IE6 aren't going to buy your product) is silly. Look at your own numbers. If your first suggestion isn't that, you're ignorant of the realities of web development.

Any company still on IE6 has enough inertia that they aren't going to change for an external vendor, no matter how much that vendor hates IE6 support.

Then they need to be frozen out of ALL vendors. Eventually, it will hurt more to find the one guy left in the world who still does IE6 and pay him the ridiculous hourly rate he asks.

I think your last sentence explains why it will never happen - if one guy will be left making a killing by supporting IE6, why would everyone else have gotten out of the game? Certainly the ridiculous hourly rate he charges will offset the cost of maintaining IE6 support.

That said, I hate css as much as the next twenty-something web developer :)

I had to double-check to make sure you were actually responding to me. I'm the opposite of a greybeard, but thank you.

I was not trying to be grizzled when I responded, just realistic. Doing IE6 support is still a pretty fresh memory for me. It's just realistic.

I don't know if I misread your post or you edited it afterwards. When I originally read it I have seen punctuation that made your post imply that legacy browser support SHOULD be taught and that rookies SHOULD be indoctrinated in legacy support.

I apologize for misreading your post.

p.s.: If you had to support IE6 - then you are a graybeard :D. Even if you are a 25 year old graybeard.

Nope, never edited it.

edit: Also, I really like the layout of your blog. The font & placement of your headlines is really nice.

Thank you. I like it too. However credit goes to Posterous team, since its one of the default themes.

Thank you for reminding me about it. Must add more content.

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