Poll: dropping oldIE
Poll

Which IE versions don't you care seeing supported for your forum?

Drop IE6, everyone hates that one.
2 (11.1%)
Drop IE6 and IE7, seriously, it's a no-brainer.
14 (77.8%)
Drop all IE versions, my forum members use Linux anyway! Oh, and please add support for Lynx. It's so l33t.
1 (5.6%)
I want to keep everything. It's a miracle that Wedge can both be so modern, and yet not break on oldIE.
1 (5.6%)
Voting closed: March 6th, 2014, 12:21 PM - Total Members Voted: 18

Nao

  • Dadman with a boy
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Poll: dropping oldIE
« on March 3rd, 2014, 12:21 PM »
I already had a similar poll last year, but want to make sure the new guys have a say in this!

Pandos

  • Living on the edge of Wedge
  • Posts: 635
Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #1, on March 3rd, 2014, 12:29 PM »
Unfortunately IE7 is used by some Users. So we should keep up with support.
IE6 is dead.
# dpkg-reconfigure brain
error: brain is not installed or configured

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #2, on March 3rd, 2014, 12:38 PM »
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.

MultiformeIngegno

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Farjo

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #4, on March 3rd, 2014, 02:33 PM »
7 is still supported on Vista but I think it's our responsibility to encourage people off the unsupported 6.

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #5, on March 3rd, 2014, 05:10 PM »
Quote from Farjo on March 3rd, 2014, 02:33 PM
7 is still supported on Vista but I think it's our responsibility to encourage people off the unsupported 6.
Vista users can upgrade to IE9, it's in their interest too... IE7 sucks nearly as much as IE6 does. Believe me...
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.

live627

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #6, on March 4th, 2014, 04:51 AM »
Quote
IE7 sucks nearly as much as IE6 does
True, and it was a catch-up release. Not that it did a very good job, though...
A confident man keeps quiet.whereas a frightened man keeps talking, hiding his fear.

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #7, on March 4th, 2014, 07:56 AM »
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.

live627

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #8, on March 4th, 2014, 07:20 PM »
I agree to an extent. 10 and 11 are quite competent, though.

Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #9, on March 4th, 2014, 07:26 PM »
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.
Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #10, on March 5th, 2014, 12:30 AM »
Pandos and Farjo, can you elaborate on real-life examples of users browsing with IE7 and not caring to switch to IE8 or better..?

* Nao is a bit distracted from Wedge today... A certain RPG game was released and I haven't played a game in like six months... :whistle:

Pandos

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #11, on March 5th, 2014, 08:46 AM »
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.

 ie7.png - 81.55 kB, 1188x693, viewed 193 times.


MultiformeIngegno

  • Posts: 1,337
Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #12, on March 5th, 2014, 11:11 AM »
Flash had a big market share, still Apple decided to drop support for it. I think Wedge should lead and take adult choices. :P

Bunstonious

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #13, on March 5th, 2014, 12:09 PM »Last edited on March 5th, 2014, 12:16 PM
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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Nao

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Re: Poll: dropping oldIE
« Reply #14, on March 5th, 2014, 02:01 PM »
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..?