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Comment by ses4j | Hacker News Reader

I wish they weren't dropping IE7 support. You can make fun of "who uses that!" all you want, but we build a site that is used by government people who can't control their own computers, and our current demographics are 50% IE7! Nothing to be done, we just can't upgrade to Bootstrap 3.0. So -- if you MUST do this, at least leave the website docs up for Bootstrap 2, cause we're not going anywhere...

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At some point people need to be pushed off. That's all there is to it. A lot of wasted developer time goes into supporting old browsers. Probably a lot more time than it would take to upgrade the browsers in the first place. If a large portion of the Internet stops working because a company/govt is using IE7, Firefox 3.6, etc, maybe they'll come to the conclusion that it's worth looking at different options.

While it's tempting to use the threat of obsolescence to force governments and enterprises to adopt newer software, these groups are traditionally the most resistant to such efforts. This is due not in significantly to the bastions of old tech living in iso, where all they have to talk to is the custom-built application.

Also, the promise that the forced obsolescence will eventually work out better for the world is cold comfort when it's you who must choose between legacy tech and sacrificing a large portion of your revenue.

Bootstrap 2.2.2 is going to be the last 2.x release and it's fairly polished to begin with.

There's nothing wrong with intentionally staying behind -- Bootstrap 3.x features will more than likely lean a lot more heavily on CSS3/HTML5.

There is however the problem that historically they have not keep a copy of the old docs online. So if you stick to 2.2.2 your probably going to be SOL when it comes to reference info.

Sure there is an archive somewhere of the old docs but that is a long way from ideal.

Aren't the docs part of the repo?

Yes they are. Get them here: https://github.com/twitter/bootstrap/tree/master/docs

I agree, our Enterprise app still has a lot of IE7 visits.

Roughly 10% IE7, 30% IE8, 25% IE9, 17% Chrome, 12% Firefox, 6% Safari. No IE10 yet, not even one.

Same stats roughly, 9.5% IE7. Client's are asking for IE7 support as base level (they normally don't ask for IE6 when I say +50% cost). I suspect next year will start the "death to IE7" campaign. Hopefully.

We also have 1.67% IE6 users who haven't take the hint, my banner and the fact it's totally broken doesn't deter them.

This is a public facing website, although we did investigate the IE7 users and found alot come from public/government networks. They strangely browse the site at work then buy at home (IE8+/Firefox/Chrome) which is frustrating as they won't buy if the site doesn't work in IE7...

I've found this site to be very helpful: http://bootstrapdocs.com/

As someone with something like four applications on different Bootstrap versions, THANK YOU (and to the creator of this site as well).

ps: yes I know you can just use the docs from the archives.

That's certainly nicer than the one I threw together (and never found time to update manually) at http://bootstrap-docs.org. I'd probably consider pointing the domain at one that was maintained properly :)

Maybe you should be looking into a more custom solution instead of using Bootstrap if you have to support IE7.

It's not like bootstrap adds 1000 features that can be created manually.

Why would that be better than sticking with Bootstrap 2? Bootstrap has been a huge boon for us -- provides a cross browser, consistent, and well documented layout framework that has brought valuable organization and unification to our previously hodgepodge and inexpert usage of CSS. It's a fabulous tool, much better than any custom solution we would gin up with the limited time allotted for that sort of thing.

I almost fell out of my chair when you said "government people who can't control their own computers". That's just so wrong. No they refuse to change. Administrators have no excuses anymore.

If they literally couldn't control their computers, they would have to be terminators.

> Administrators have no excuses anymore.

Yes they do. They have procedures and are paid to act according to them. You are clearly unaware how the public sector works, or how expensive are upgrades in such scale. Upgrading software for the whole administration sector of a big country means upgrading a few hundreds/thousands computers per city (depending on the population), do the math; and only if the upgrade is even possible (breaking dependencies of software ordered 10 years ago).

Yeah, 'the system is broken', blah blah, it is what it is.

BTW Polish parliament (420 people) members were given iPads 'to save on paper'. Aside from the fact they watch porn at work, the yearly cost of maintanance and upgrades is at $150k. Yep.

You probably want your govt to spend money on better things than upgrading browsers.

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