IE7 users, we need to talk…

The "upgrades" necessary would be a new computer in all but case, so unless your name is Theseus, you've got a new computer.

If part of your work depends on using a computer (to manage HR or whatever), you can't be afraid of doing basic tasks like maximizing a window, turning it on, etc.

Just like a carpenter can't be afraid of picking up a hammer.

I hope it's more clear to you now.

I see the same issues as well where I work in education. Teachers, whose job is literally all about learning, are terrified to learn about technology tools for their classroom.

The box model was broken for years, don't even get me started on tables, JavaScript is the most loosely defined language to have ever existed, there have been several different document parser models (HTML, XHTML, HTML5) it's unreal. At best, most browsers these days estimate what they are doing, diving into some wierd mode full of edge cases purely by accident if you step on the wrong stone.

As for proprietary extensions, they are the most stable in IE. The IE8 change was the first since IE4 and it was primarily a security model change. Now we have NaCl on the horizon (ActiveX v2) and every vendor fighting their own extensions into the "standard" by buddying up for a new "standards" group.

It's a minefield which throwing critical applications into is a bad move both from a logical and risk perspective.

I'm not saying it lacks utility, but it's a risky proposition for a product that needs a defined lifecycle.

This isn't really an option for a lot of people.

I love it when people use this phrase. The "reality of the situation". Yes, this is how things are, and they will continue to be that way until we change them.

There is a world of difference between "refuse to support IE7" and "let's rewrite everything in [favorite framework]." Our startup is squarely in the enterprise space, and we don't support IE7. Our app will literally display a "you shall not pass" modal if you try to log in with IE7. Our client list includes a lot of local governments (cities large and small, counties, GPOs, etc), and we still manage to get by just fine without supporting IE7.

I think you'd be amazed at how small of a market you're giving up by telling everyone you simply cannot support IE7. When you just accept "reality", you never bother to push the issue, and you never make progress.

Where reality means a serious failure in tech leadership.

>I've seen some programmers actually try to do the rewrites themselves. They code for a week or two, discover just how much business logic has been written into the thing over the last 20 years, and abandon it to start looking for employment elsewhere.

Having been one of these people that "try to do the rewrites" himself, I left because paying off technical debt wasn't prioritized. It's not just about having a modern stack, it's about being able to hire maintenance programmers and not being forced into trying to keep a sinking ship afloat.

The 'reality of the situation' is that you're no longer retaining any young talent in your company, because you're stuck writing COBOL. The Frankenstein-of-an intranet program you've stitched together is now too big and too complex to work with; only the guys who built it in the first place have the guts to stick their fingers in the code.

Sometime around 5 to 10 years ago, you stopped building software and started slapping a bunch of dirty hacks together to get things to 'just work'. The technical debt is insurmountable, and it's only getting worse. The software is 20 years old. What will happen in the next 10 years? Maybe then the company will be able to afford a rewrite...

Except now the technical debt has crept in to the workflow of your users. People are doing things that computers should be doing. Every process involves some hacky workaround to get your ancient system to play nice. You're printing on dot-matrix printers and scanning it back in. Other companies don't know how to hand you data. CSV files over FTP transfer? Maybe we can just email you the files every week so your mail server can gobble it up and hand it to your ancient application? Other companies are scaling. Your bottom line is hurting.

Now we're 30 years in, and the guys who built it in the first place are looking to retire. There's nobody you can 'pass the torch' because none of the new employees over the last decade have lasted more than two years; they all went on to play with silly 'kid' languages like 'Ruby' and that funny 'Cloud' fad. You'll have to find someone with talent, years of experience in your antique system, and yet isn't thinking about retirement within the next decade. Time to post a job opening for a COBOL ninja-rockstar!

And frankly it does really depend on the company on which point is more valid.

At the end of the day, csmithuk viewpoint is a solution/enterprise architect's view point which caters more to the overall business needs of a company.

And based on my experience, the challenge of getting any new technology in a company that is mature and successful is really hard. The challenge of changing the status quo once that tech has become embedded in their business processes is twice has hard. There is always a benefit/cost ratio. The cost is not just development - it's training, its documentation, its lost time, etc.

It's not particularly large but add complexity to that and the work is insane. The application was implemented in C++ and COM for reference which is terse and complex.

I feel as if you have a flippant stance towards web-applications, which I promise you is incredibly misguided. Not everyone here is making TODO apps with Ruby.

Not particuarly. I've spent 18 years writing web applications (big ones) and do today. I'm a pragmatist and web applications are not for all use cases. In fact bar information presentation they are a complicated frustrating area. The emphasis is on smaller applications within this community by comparison which is where my point lies. The reality of real businesses with complicated procedures, processes and regulatory compliance is not something people have to deal with. Fanfaring about the death of IE7 shoots a big chunk of the industry in the face. These people do a disservice to us all.

Where to begin on this? To keep it somewhat related to the parent thread, I'd suggest that code for embedded systems is a different world than sharecropping on a Microsoft technology (or a code-bloat ERP almost certainly containing layers of awful sedimentary hacks placed by numerous outsourcing companies). In 2007, you had your head in the sand (while drinking the koolaid) if you thought ActiveX was a long-game.

The reliability and lifespan expectations are surprisingly similar. The delivered product is different but the processes and procedures are similar. yes in 2007 ActiveX had the writing on the wall but in 2007 the product was already 18 years old and was a 1998 port to COM/C++ from an AS400 platform.

Oh come on, this is just ageist. Was the guy that wrote something that only works on IE6/7/8 thinking ahead? What about an engineer that created a scenario in which hardware can't be updated? Unless your code is going on a satellite, congrats on over-engineering a solution that only works in a given architecture

Not ageist. When this was written, they had Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape 4. Try engineering a solution that fulfills the requirements with any other technology than ActiveX at the time. Even Java wasn't mature enough then. As for hardware it was designed to work for 30 years and they bought enough spare parts to make sure it does.

With most consumers thinking of computers as tools that access the web, thinking that you don't have to be incredibly reactive to change is myopic. Do you think that writing maintainable stacks for a changing consumer preferences and patterns is something done without planning?

This is a temporal argument. When the application stack was designed 16 years ago, the world was a different place. And thanks to the lifecycle guarantees of Microsoft, that guarantee was made up to 2017. In 16 years the same will be true. Time needs to be frozen for certain things and guarantees need to be made otherwise it limits the ability to write off risk against big projects.

If your customer thinks that she can predict needs for the business 10 years in advance, she's about to have her lunch eaten by another company.

Simply no. For some markets, yes but for a lot of traditional supply chains this isn't the case. The company has been around for over 100 years so they've obviously done ok with high lead times and a static model for the last 60 years. Whilst there are some disruptive changes, particularly in the consumer-facing and retail sectors, the sheer amount of work, knowledge and momentum required to enter some industries is prohibitive so they are unlikely to be disrupted by new technology startups.

The "technology press" is media and investors.

Yes. Noise. They focus on the technology company, not the company that uses technology purely as a function of its business.

The 'critical cogs' are maintained by kernel, hardware, and protocol devs that are typically paid by a company that doesn't obsess over running ancient code on dinosaur hardware because that doesn't scale with changing demand.

Actually no. The critical cogs are the ones that generate revenue. The kernel, hardware and protocol work is bought in. The unique algorithm, advantage or working model for your company is the revenue stream, not the stack. The stack is incidental to it. The port from COM to Java SE/EE here is seen as an incidental cost of doing business.

With respect, I feel like you're drawing a line in the sand and being smug because you imagine your problem domain to be on somehow more "pure" side of engineering.

No it's not pure; it's just a considerably larger problem domain than most people anticipate and an unrepresented area of the industry amongst these circles.

Everyone has a story to tell; this is purely mine. I'm not suggest it's right or wrong but there are two sides to every coin and people should consider both before they start a browser witch-hunt.