Facebook no longer supports IE7 | Hacker News Reader

Facebook no longer supports IE7

thenextweb.com

138 pointsfosk16 comments

It's a horrible article and misleading title. Sending different CSS based on the browser UA doesn't equal not supporting a browser. In fact, just the fact they are doing that shows that they are still supporting IE7 by not pushing features that would be broken to it.

That being said, I would guess that bug fixing and the like for IE7 are probably prioritized lower, hence things like the busted layout shown in the article picture.

I'll wait for the official announcement from Facebook, just like they announced when they would stop supporting IE6.

It's not a bug for IE7. It's just that when you switch the user agent to IE7 it's using the IE7 CSS to render the page on Safari. Obviously that stuff isn't going to work.

It doesn't say the screenshot is from Safari, and I have seen that whitespace when I've testing things in IE7. Funny thing I found earlier when I went there in IE9 in IE7 emulation mode - Facebook crashed the tab every time I tried to click on an individual's profile (Timeline enabled or not.) Didn't bother to actually load a VM to test a true instance of IE7.

It pretty much means not supporting the browser since new features won't work and they don't even fix the issues.

Not a very accurate title. It looks like most of Facebook still works fine w/IE 7, it's just the Timeline that's affected. For example, I can login, view a friend's profile, view my news feed, like something, make a wall post, play a game ... all fine in IE 7. And, the experience is very similar, if not entirely, to that of doing the same in Firefox 9.

Should it have been entirely true, this would have been a great step for the web, even if only a small one.

I think you're confusing "supports" with "works". Facebook may work under IE7, but they aren't supporting it anymore. Any new stuff that they do, don't expect it to work in IE7.

I'm only supporting IE8 and above now. The numbers for IE6 and IE7 are too small to care about anymore. At least for my demographic.

I believe Google has dropped support for IE6 and IE7. That's my excuse.

What's the point of writing that developer toolbar user-agent switch comment? Does setting the UA to IE7 cause the glitches? Because it surely won't change Safari's webkit engine into any sort of IE7 compatibility mode. So are FB conditionally sending broken CSS to IE7?

It appears that FB is using UA sniffing (server side or otherwise) and not conditional comments, or something else rendering engine specific, to alter the page.

Wouldn't make sense to place a message saying IE7 is no longer supported and a link to upgrade? I think most Facebook users won't know what's wrong with their computers.

Funny how the news is expressed as "use the old, unsupported version of the site with an old, unsupported version of a browser".

It seems that facebook white space "quirk" happens when document mode is set to IE8/IE9 standards. I think IE7 users shouldn't have a problem.

http://dl.dropbox.com/u/60164/Forum%20Posts/facebook.png

Facebook can easily help the random user to upgrade their browser. And it has to.

I didn't even knew how the author changed User Agent to be IE 7 from Safari..wonder how accurate it is to real IE 7.

Not at all, webkit still renders everything. Presumably Facebook is delivering different html/css based on the spoofed user agent.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com