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Comment by kijin | Hacker News Reader

i) and ii) are both excellent excuses to keep using IE6 on the intranet.

But there is no excuse for browsing the public web with IE6 anymore. Especially if there's a modern browser installed side by side with IE6.

Ideally, a firewall should be set up so that IE6 can't access anything outside of 10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16, and localhost.

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it would be interesting to analyze the demographics of the people who are using IE6 these days. Probably IE6 is working for them and they don't even know about all the technical and security aspects discussed here.

They all work for a very large risk-adverse organisation. Any private person who ignored the repeated calls to upgrade will long since have drowned in malware.

But grandmothers and great grandmothers are included in those organizations? ;-)

If that is true, then your typical consumer web site or even web app probably does not need to support IE6. If they are so risk-averse they probably will not be allowed to visit your site anyhow.

A large part of the reason why IE6 even works anywhere outside of corporate intranets in 2014 is that we, web developers, have put in countless hours of painful and completely unnecessary work to make it work.

This is the job you signed up for. It's a site easier situation now than 15 years ago. You think supporting browsers is hard now? (I can't believe I get to be the crotchety old man in this thread). Perhaps you don't remember the NN4 vs IE4 days. NN4 didn't even have a DIV tag, it had a LAYER tag, and IE4 didn't have the LAYER tag, it had DIV. The only way to support both with all of the DHTML junk people wanted (like they want the damn-near equivalent malarky out of HTML5 today) was to emit separate markup for each browser from the server. You got to maintain two different versions of the site for desktop users.

I just really don't have any sympathy for you. It's not anything approaching hard these days. These days, you just write everything in a compiles-to-javascript language it figures out the browser compatibilities for you. That shit didn't EXIST. You were considered an ASSHOLE if you did anything with JavaScript.

A situation being better than it used to be is a poor argument against making further progress.

Hopefully, one day I will be the crotchety old man complaining about how the new kids never had to worry about IE8 issues.

If I remember correctly, <div> and <layer> could be nested.

Just because I signed up for a job doesn't mean that I have no right to try and make that job less unpleasant, using the force of the collective if necessary.

After all, that's the whole point of progress. How dared our ancestors complain about working 12 hours a day in dangerous coal mines when their own ancestors worked 16 hours a day under even more dangerous conditions? IE4 vs. NN4 was trivial by comparison with that, but the general principle holds.

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