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Comment by JoshGlazebrook | Hacker News Reader

The title needs an asterisk. Because I unfortunately have the privilege of knowing an older gentleman that purposely uses IE6 on Windows XP. He calls the concept of tabs useless rubbish. And I'm not talking a regular consumer, I'm talking someone who develops actual software.

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I second this. We recently had an incident at the office where all our Windows 7 machines implemented an update which upgraded everyone's IE8 to IE10. Some software which is used daily in the office to generate reports (using a browser) was using the <font> element to display barcodes (with a barcode typeface).

Since the <font> element has been long deprecated, the barcodes as well as a few other elements rendered differently. This alarmed a few of my bosses who were eager to understand what could be done to bring the barcodes back. After showing them IE10's dev tools and the browser mode, the problem has been temporarily fixed.

But many people I spoke with in the office were of the opinion that IE8 was all around better than IE10, and for their use case, they're not wrong. The legacy software everyone here uses to generate reports is outdated, but it still serves its purpose fine. Web standards and innovative technologies are not relevant to them on a personal level to justify the inconvenience of the update. So yes, my coworkers prefer IE8 to other browsers, but only because they depend on it.

The software we use to generate reports, by the way, could easily be changed to meet modern web standards. So, their opinion is further arbitrated if the software would just be tweaked to work with newer browsers.

In his opinion about tabs, he is in good company [1], though the company in question prefers Safari rather than IE 6 :)

[1] http://www.jwz.org/blog/2012/04/why-i-use-safari-instead-of-...

Certainly a general title flourished with a little hyperbole is not atypical.

Doesn't IE (and Firefox, Opera etc.) have an option to turn off tabs entirely? Using IE6 at this point on a machine that has direct access to the internet seems rather... masochistic.

Bollocks. It doesn't need an asterisk. It has a graph that proves your point! The graph doesn't show IE8/9 use going to 0% on the weekends.

In fact, it clearly shows about 35% of IE users still cling onto older versions during the weekends.

Or.. 35% of IE users work during the weekend.

anecdotes don't justify asterisks

Actually, you'll find that while a single anecdote doesn't provide evidence for a general theory, it does provide enough of a counter-example to disprove a statement.

How can it be the case that nobody uses old IE by choice, if at least one person does?

overly literal

The 'nobody' in the title is used figuratively for emphasis. The point of the link is to raise the issue for discussion, not to provide scientific proof that no one uses older versions of IE by choice.

Yes, and providing stories about how people you know who do use oldIE by choice is discussing the issue, and shouldn't warrant the kneejerk "anecdote != evidence" argument, which is what I was railing against.

It'll disprove a genuine universal statement of the kind that can be expressed with a "∀x" quantifier.

But anecdotes are pretty useless against hyperbole. About the best you can accomplish by going that route is to devolve the conversation into a quagmire of "dueling anecdotes" sophistry.

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