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Comment by radmuzom | Hacker News Reader

It's not that people refuse to update. At work, we have not yet upgraded from XP so nothing above IE8 works here - you are not allowed to install any software on your own so no Firefox. If news sites, where the primary content should be text and maybe a couple of images, don't work because they require all kinds of fancy "modern web" features - then it is not a problem with users but a problem with the developers of the website.

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No, that's a problem with your IT department being stuck about a decade behind.

Some may see your comment as flippant, but it is very accurate. Didn't MS shut off support for that combination of OS and Browser? If so, their IT department is exposing them to security trouble. If so, their competence is in question.

I've never understood the "well we have to keep IE6 because of this one obscure program" as the excuse to why IT departments force their users to use IE6. Keep IE6 for that one obscure, poorly-made program. Give then a copy of Firefox or Chrome to use for everything else. I realize for a lot of users that's more choice than they can handle, but those that know better must be tortured by that awful lack of choice.

It's actually worse than that: Microsoft gives you free integrated desktop virtualization (MED-V) and, in IE 11 they added an Enterprise Mode which works very well with antique sites. Both can be seamlessly integrated using group policy so a user clicks on the blue e, uses the web as normal and when they hit http://creaky-internal-app.example.com the experience seamlessly jumps back a decade.

This isn't being conservative about upgrades. This about an IT department refusing to learn to do anything they weren't doing in 2000.

I've never used one but I understand there are plugins that load a particular URL in an IEframe. So there's no need for the user to know that they need to use IE for one thing and FF/Chrome for another.

Companies can pay extra for XP support even after MSFT's EOL.

Or keep using it anyway. Most organisations don't actually receive direct Microsoft support/assistance when they run into problems anyway. So Microsoft ending XP support is practically meaningless.

At worst, it allows independent software vendors a small market for regular repeat business. At best, people just keep using XP the same way they've been doing for years.

How is that radmuzom's fault? And more to the point, why should the web be inaccessible to someone a decade behind?

It's not the users’ fault but if nothing else his IT department is being recklessly negligent by choosing to block security updates.

Whatever the IT policy is is not really relevant. There is a big difference between ending or not providing support for older browsers (passively), and actively deciding to limit functionality solely on the basis of having an outdated browser.

Maybe the new search page uses features only found in the newest browsers. But since we have little details to go on (apart from the employee's canned response of "we are constantly updating functionality"), I'm skeptical that in fact they did this just for the sake of doing it "for the users' own good". That is wrong, imho

No your giving publishers a lazy get out - if you actually work for a large publisher online you would be shocked by how non technical and sclerotic they are - makes The laundry files bureaucracy seem fast and responsive :-(

No, the issue is that no newer Windows OS is actually an upgrade.

while i respect that you personally are constrained in this respect, support for XP has ended. Chronologically, google inc was founded ~3 years before XP was released and it wasn't mainstream on inception. So the point being when XP was released like 13 years ago, it enjoyed mass audience. Now there have been several iterations of windows and according to mores law 10 years forward see more innovation than the preceding 100. So I would allege, that it is actually absurd that you could be angry that the site you are using is degrading a little less gracefully than you would hope to put pressure on you and your company to use something that was created recently. Conversely, I wouldn't fault the phone company if my Nokia brick phone wasn't fully supported, while I loved playing snake, times change.

About your nokia example, maybe I'm mistaken but wouldn't it be like you couldn't send a proper SMS without upgrading your phone?

Yes, you can't send an SMS with an "attached" video with your phone unless you update to a phone with a video camera ... you can still do the SMS but the side-channel and video capabilities are missing.

I would fault my phone company if I could no longer make and recieve phone calls and send and receive SMS text messages.

And it's not just about stuff not working on simple machines - many sites are awful to use on recent smart phones and recent OSs because they have only been tested on local networks on development machines. No one has tested them on normal machines.

> I would fault my phone company if I could no longer make and recieve phone calls and send and receive SMS text messages.

We went through this when cell networks decommissioned analog service and again when the early digital stuff was phased out. It turned out not to be such a big deal – once the phone company hit you with a higher bill to support the old equipment, almost everyone quickly decided learning how to use a new phone wasn't so bad.

This is similar: companies are hoping that the rest of us will subsidize their IT decisions with increased development and support costs. The difference is that most places lack a mechanism to pass along those costs so they're rarely confronted with a cost comparison.

Yeah sure, if IE8 could display CSS properly, that would be the case but unfortunately even basic CSS is quite broken on IE8, it's not just graceful degradation.

I'm not sure why I can't reply to the other comment.

I also designed things on IE7 & IE8 and there is definitely some major problems on IE8 which cannot be solved magically by graceful degradation. I think that IE9 is generally fine however, if you design everything with graceful degradation in mind and the website is quite simple it should work (appart for weird borders around images sometimes, but it's fine with a bit of css).

I've definitely experienced z-index bugs, floating bugs, padding bugs, display bugs (with inline & blocks) and core JavaScript bugs in IE8 which are making the website unusable.

IE8 is definitely not IE9, while it's still better than IE7 and there is generally less issues, there is still IE8 specific work to do to make the website compatible. And depending of your strategy within the company, it might not be worth trying to fix these issues. (this is quite costly).

Source/examples? The only real hassle that I experience with IE8 is "odd" behavior around positioned elements, everything else works OK. It even supports box-sizing: border-box.

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