Hacker News Reader

Comment by erlanger | Hacker News Reader

"Shut up, I'm at a public library, I don't have a choice."

And hundreds of similar reactions to pretentious frontend web developers who assume that every computer is a personal one.

View on HN

Might not public libraries be one of the places MOST in need of upgrading? Ditto to corporations.

[Aside: Can you imagine how many other dysfunctions/vulnerabilities are likely to exist in a system still using IE 6? ]

OTOH: I haven't noticed that GOOG itself is taking such a bold (hostile?) move to disrupt surfers still clunking along on IE6.

This is not Google's project. It is simply being hosted on Google Code.

If I'm not going to support IE 6, I'd rather have something like this than for my site to just be broken.

Ever heard of "wasted clicks"?

"I'm not going to support IE 6"

I think you're missing his point...you should support IE6. We all know it sucks, but why risk alienating 20% of the Internet just because you don't want to take the time to make sure your site complies?

It may not be 20% of the internet, depending on who actually uses your site/app. Check your analytics.

Point of reference, (Mibbit)

  IE6: 5.7% IE7: 11% IE8:  1%
  FX1:  <1% FX2:  3% FX3: 63%
  SF:    2% OP:   5% CH:   6%

Really cool how Chrome has overtaken Safari, Opera, and IE6 (Admittedly it's a webapp, for which Chrome is well suited).

Also Firefox does a really great job of upgrading its users to the latest version.

At the moment I support IE6, but I'll probably stop soon. It's just too much extra work for not a lot of payoff.

If it takes twice the work.

Anyway I would just add a small notices on the top of the page saying something like you have an old browser, so this page may not render correctly.

I concur. Yesterday I spent an hour building a dropdown menu for a client that rendered correctly in Safari 2+, Firefox 2+ and Opera. Then I spent two-and-a-half more hours getting it to render correctly in IE6 and 7, rendering my page invalid in the process. Ick.

Yesterday I spent 10 minutes implementing the 'Son of Suckerfish Dropdowns' that works in all of those browsers. Why make more work for yourself if there are solutions already out there? :)

(I am of course assuming you mean a standard css navigational drop-down menu - you didn't specify.)

but maybe if enough major sites start doing stuff like this, IT will finally upgrade browsers.

Sadly, inside corporate environments this is unlikely to be the case. Big companies often have web apps that are broken in anything other than IE6. These IT departments will fight the upgrade until it is the only option. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of IE6 users are people in big companies forced to use it. At my previous employer they were STILL writing apps that only worked in IE6 last year.

Ah, so these Upgrade-IE-warnings are actually anti-procrastination tools in disguise! :-)

But you don't have to make a choice -- you can pick both. Why not install Firefox for main browsing and keep IE6 for use with their old apps? This gives you a more productive (IE6 doesn't have tabs...) and secure browser for primary use, and the old browser to use with legacy software.

Most corporate environments don't allow you to install software that isn't authorized. As developers we're normally given full administrative control over our systems but that's not the norm in most moderate to large companies.

Maybe that script should point out the browsers that don't require admin, eg chrome & portable firefox

It's not just about being physically able to install something (i.e. having admin privileges), we aren't allowed to install (or even write) anything that is "network aware" for security reasons.

Exactly right, due to "security concerns" you were not supposed to run anything other than IE6. In this case, "security concerns" are defined as: "the club by which a corporate IT department can beat down a reasonable request without being forced to have an intelligent discussion". All machines had monitoring software that phoned home regularly to tell IT what software you were running.

Most average employees just need to get their work done, so they are not going to risk a fight with the IT machine over a browser. To non-geeks, it's just an annoyance, not a major blocker. Better for them to save their energy for a fight that matters (like getting an exception to the 100 megabyte email quota).

I'm a corporate IT guy, we're on IE7 and chrome (for it's application style shortcuts) and my users get about a gig in their inbox, but only if they need it. We had to wait to upgrade to ie7 but eventually the webapps we needed to use decided to "certify" ie7. Before that point we upgraded a few people for testing and nothing seemed broken but we still needed most everybody to run a "supported" platform.

Nah, even the worst IT department isn't that clueless. If they've still got IE6 deployed, it's for a reason.

Trust me, you don't want to know.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com