Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of the past | Hacker News Reader

Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of the past

37signals.com

42 pointslancashire36 comments

By moving to IE9 he's discounting all corporate customers who haven't moved to Windows 7 yet.

This leaves them with only one option if they want support on a long-term supported browser, which is the recently shipped Firefox Enterprise Support Release.

Except there are no customers. It's a new product, and if you want to use it then you'll need an up to date browser. No-one is being cut off.

>>>By moving to IE9 he's discounting all corporate customers who haven't moved to Windows 7 yet.

Nonsense.

Chrome and Firefox will both run on XP.

You'll notice the second sentence there, which talks about Firefox ESR as the only option if they want a long-term supported browser. Many large corporations will not switch to a browser which updates itself more often than they can easily test it against all of their internal apps.

Is the Google Chrome Frame for IE an alternative option for such users?

Sadly not, unless specifically allowed by the IT department. I certainly can't download EXEs past our firewall.

These are very easy to disable(i mean avoid), i don't assume they decode everything what would be very expensive. Just upload the exe file somewhere as .jpg and rename it again after you download it. ... but we are on hacker news, you probably know that yourself ;-) what's the problem? I never worked under such conditions, can they prevent you from executing not white-listed exe files?

"These are very easy to disable"

That would be a sacking offence.

Those corporations tend to be a pain to work, have lots of internal crap apps, and don't use external stuff like Basecamp anyway. Good riddance.

They include banks and other very-security-conscious folk... with money to spend on easily deployable apps that address their needs. Feel free not to go after them as customers, though.

They also have a ton of money. You might not want any of it, but some do. Continuing to support IE7/8 for that reason makes sense.

They include banks and other very-security-conscious folk... with money to spend on easily deployable apps that address their needs. Feel free not to go after them as customers, though.

Are you kidding me? Most banks wouldn't touch an external service like Basecamp with a ten-foot pool. Basecamp is not "deployable", it's externally hosted.

They also have a ton of money. You might not want any of it, but some do.

Every company does not necessarily fit into the "some" that do.

Everybody has money, it's "how possible it is for them to part with it" VS "what your company has to do to make them give it to you", that matters.

If you don't understand the notion of "opportunity cost", you shouldn't be running a business.

Sounds like they simply want to remove as much legacy as possible in the new product. The old product will still work. They are "skating to where the the puck is going to be..." in a year or so.

By moving to IE9 he's discounting all corporate customers who haven't moved to Windows 7 yet.

Better framed: he's discounting all the corporate customers who drag their feet technology wise, and will give him more headache than money.

Such corporate late adopters are not usually the ones to use something external, much less Basecamp, anyway.

It's totally necessary though. Developer's can't be supporting old browsers forever. And really, when we speak of "old browsers" we really just mean IE which still throws weird behaviors at you in the latest versions! When enough sites stop supporting these dinosaurs we not only give users a better experience on our sites but across the entire web.

Corporate customers can always use Chrome or Firefox on XP and if they can't then there's still Basecamp Classic for them. I think they're doing the right thing. It's a calculated risk and I think the odds are in their favor.

It's totally necessary though. Developer's can't be supporting old browsers forever.

It's not really our choice, though. If you run an online shopping site and 40% of your customers use IE7, you should support IE7. Urge them to upgrade, sure, but if you want to actually make money you're going to have to bite the bullet and deal with old browsers.

Yep, it really comes down to money. If you are running a consumer retail site that gets traffic from Fortune 500 employees buying stuff on their lunch hour, you will either support IE7 or lose business.

Sure IE7 has problems, but they are well known problems at this point. An experienced web designer should know how to deal with them to give IE7 users a degraded but functional experience.

Yeah, true. I just have this dream that all web developers will band together to stop supporting "problem" browsers forcing users and browser makers to fall in line. I mean, correct me if I come off as a spoiled brat but I think they should be making browsers to suit how we build sites and not how they want us to develop them.

That's a political struggle. Not just for browser but any area: control.

Ironically, those Fortune 500 employees are actually rather unfortunate.

Sure IE7 has problems, but they are well known problems at this point. An experienced web designer should know how to deal with them to give IE7 users a degraded but functional experience.

True for most CSS bugs, but if you're doing lots of Javascript you might reach a point where IE7 just doesn't cope, especially if you're doing lots of Ajax stuff. Of course, you can probably hack something 'degraded', but it does take a lot of time and might lead to difficult code with lots of hacks.

Well you make a good point but I think you're seeing this as a case where you don't have an option. It is our choice. When you choose the browsers you're going to support you're choosing your customers. I've had to learn the hard way that a business needs to choose it's customers just as a consumer chooses their vendor. If I run American Apparel's online store I'm going to assume a younger customer base and with younger customers comes more recent browsers. If I run "motorcycleaccessories.com" I'll assume middle aged Harley riders that don't give a damn about browsers so I'll support old stuff.

Now, I hope my examples don't get people going pedantic on me. I realize I might be wrong about the audiences in those specific examples but the point still stands. In the end it comes down to 3 things:

Knowing who your customers are in general

Making a choice about which portion of those customers you really want

And finally, is supporting an old browser worth the time and effort compared to being able to put that time/energy into giving your preferred customers a far better experience

I'm partial to not supporting old browsers but I would do it if the situation called for it. There's a part of me that wants to band all developers together in not supporting anything older than IE8 with the hopes being that users upgrade and browser makers (Microsoft, looking your way) start making better browsers and browsers that, at the very least, try to get you to update if they don't do it automatically.

And let's be real here, almost all talk of compatibility centers around IE. Getting something to render properly in IE is like rewriting all your code with special classes and weird, incomprehensible "filter: progId(gibberishNoOneRemembersHere);" nonsense that might as well be another language. If only we could fix or kill (I'm happy either way) IE we wouldn't even need to have this conversation. I mean, look at the version numbers that support modern techniques in other browsers. FF, Chrome, Safari, all pretty much support anything you'd like to do without much effort from v3 or 4 up. IE? We're coming up to version 10 which is a step in the right direction but still too little too late.

IE9 runs on Vista.

I think the title is a little bit misleading. The moment you can drop support for browser versions is pretty dependent on the requirements of your client, and your visitors. 7% for users with IE8 or lower is a pretty tech-savvy crowd, many developers might not have the luxury of dropping support for IE8 because many of their visitors still use that browser.

Agreed. There's still a very significant portion of China using IE6, for example. If you've got an international focus on non-developers, it's not really even close to feasible to drop IE6-7.

I'm so sick of websites not even attempting to render in a browser not in their whitelist. Please give me a button that says "I understand the risks, but I want to try anyway."

We don't do that. We only discriminate against browsers we know will have problems. Like IE6-8. So what we're running is actually a blacklist.

If you show up with a browser that's not one of the big four, we're just letting you in on your own accord.

I completely agree that whitelisting for browsers is bullshit.

I think cutting IE 8 off is a little premature. I agree it's a hassle to support but I think of for example Rogers Cable, a client of mine still sitting on locked down XP across the entire office base. You just cut their 6000-ish employees off at the knees. They can't install another browser even if they wanted to, and I'm sure that same situation exists in a lot of other corporations.

The original Basecamp isn't going anywhere, so those 6000-ish employees won't be out a thing. They'll just need to advance a few IT years to be able to use Basecamp Next.

From the article:

"We know it’s not always easy to upgrade your browser (or force an upgrade on a client), but we believe it’s necessary to offer the best Basecamp we can possibly make. In addition, we’re not going to move the requirements on Basecamp Classic, so that’ll continue to work for people who are unable to use a modern browser."

Some people don't understand the risks, but have been trained to click the OK button. They will then complain when the site doesn't work and completly forget that they clicked the "i accept the risks button"

The multibillion dollar organization I work for just updated to IE8 from IE6 last week. We aren't allowed to use new browsers or chrome frame for "security" reasons. ha!

Lucky you! I work at a large hospital with (likely) 10k+ computers running XP and we're still stuck on IE6.

I'm not sure what the plan to migrate away from IE6 is but my guess is that it will be a massive pain for our IT department.

I have to imagine that IE6 will continue to limp along for a number of years to come, but hopefully large organizations will have learned a lesson about depending on a specific browser version (or a specific browser for that matter).

Is Chrome Frame an option?

My understanding is that IE has a significant market share among users with accessibiliy needs (came up in conversation after the recent jquery 2.0 browser support discussion). While that may not be important for 37 signals it's an oft overlooked side effect of dropping version 8 support.

Now the problem becomes mobile browsers... (hover vs. tap, tiny resolutions, differences in form controls, sometimes crippled features that work fine in a "pc" based browser, fluid layout choices, float issues)

There will always be madness.

[edit] Took me a few to find this link again. Do compatibility charts like this look familiar? http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html

IE6 may ye rest in peace... (or hell)

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