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Comment by youngerdryas | Hacker News Reader

Just a heads up for anyone thinking of ugrading to IE10, it breaks several sites including FedEx, at least on Win7.

The great thing about IE is that is backwards compatible. A website can automatically trigger IE to render in a specific version using metadata tags. I believe it can even go so far as to force it into compatibility mode by default for the website.

For websites that don't do this you can create a special list which can even be managed by group policy.

I'm always very frustrated when organizations choose not to upgrade for "compatibility" reasons. That's baloney. They're just too lazy to properly configure their systems.

There are features in oldIE that you can't bring forward via compatibility mode. I don't have a full list handy, but XML Data Islands come to mind as something that has legitimately anchored companies I've worked with to IE6 (and not because I wrote apps using the XML Data Islands, for the record!).

It's not very hard to update that code to use non-legacy approaches, but it's a massive undertaking to even determine what code needs to be updated in some companies where hundreds of one-off apps are created and then never maintained, much less do the work to update them.

>XML Data Islands come to mind as something that has legitimately anchored companies I've worked with to IE6

Looking at the pages describing XML data islands, it looks like it would be a day's work to make a shim for other browsers using jQuery.

What other "features" would you miss out on by not using IE6?

The problem isn't fixing that in one application. It's determining which features are affected, how many of your enterprise's hundreds of internal apps are affected, and then putting together a plan to fix all of them. Often, no one has touched these apps for years, and the people who were familiar with them are long, long gone.

Even if it turns out that none of a company's applications need to be updated, the cost of determining that is far from zero. In larger companies it can be difficult to successfully make the argument for that cost.

XML data islands works even in IE10 in IE9 and older modes: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ie/hh801224%28v=vs.8...

Two of my clients were never able to get that to work in IE8 or IE9. Thankfully, we haven't needed to try in IE10 because we've finished a site-wide revamp at both to bring their apps current.

I've seen a couple mentions about that (Gmail being another site it breaks). What seems to be going on, and I don't have a Win7 machine to test on myself, is that something's causing IE10 on Win7 to incorrectly switch to compatibility mode on the affected sites. If you use the dev tools to switch back to IE10 standards mode, those sites work normally.

I think they should be able to fix that soon via Windows Update. I remember Windows Update made a change a few years ago that was switching all localhost:// addresses to compatibility mode, so there's probably an easily updatable list of sites that this happens automatically on.

IE10 on Windows 8 is not affected.

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