Comments for IE 8 is the new IE 6
I asked this of some people at MSFT at the time and never got any response.
Let us know how that goes.
The big problem we face with 6 is the corporate IT infrastructure that is built around 6 (admittedly I work a lot on B2B apps where this is most prevalent). You've got huge corporate environments that are and will be running XP well into this next decade. Even worse, a lot of legacy corporate intranet software (think SAP) was built utilizing the JScript APIs that only exist in IE6 (ironically the first place AJAX and web 2.0ishness showed up!). These companies spent millions of dollars having these systems designed, built, installed, and maintained, and likely they plan on keeping them in place for quite a while. That means if you want to build anything that could be usable in a corporate environment, you're going to have to have a solution for IE6.
I would bet that 6 will likely outlast 8, 9, 10, and beyond.
In other words, what makes you think that people will ever move from IE6/7 to 8 (and not IE 9+ or a non-IE browser)?
Dirk: I don't think folks will move from 6 to 8. Instead, I think there's a huge fixed-base of XP IE 8 users for whom 8 is the end of the line. For them, moving forward will mean either a new OS license (spendy), a different browser (possibly spendy), or Chrome Frame.
We recently just made a product decision not to use GCF, because we'd be hanging waaaay out there with our Fortune 500/IE6-moving-to-IE8 customers. Silverlight is no problem for them -- already deployed. Why fight to get GCF deployed? So we continue to use the old reliable: dojo, dijit, and dojox.gfx :) :) (Which we love. Thank you. Don't get so down on it, it's a fantastic legacy.)
A comment like this makes me wonder if you've been following what the folks of ALA promote pretty heavily: Progressive Enhancement.
At An Event Apart (the conference put on by the ALA folks), they talk about and SHOW the differences between browsers. They help designers/developers understand that not every browser has to see (CSS) or experience (CSS transforms/animations or JS) a website in precisely the same way. There is a difference between a design element that is "mission critical" and that which is simply charming or a nicety.
I think if you really embraced the concept of "developing for the future" as you proclaim above, then you wouldn't be so bent out of shape when decrepit browsers handle things, well, decrepitly. You would just accept things as they are and move on.
We're carrying a lot more baggage than we admit.
At the point that I'm not relying on IE6 to render my intranet correctly, why would I want to use two browsers instead of just one?
In fact when you look at IE9 compared to the latest Chrome/FF/Opera/Safari you'll see that it is by far the weakest of the lot but yet we will still have to support it. Is IE9 not the new IE6 (for the HTML5 generation)?
Also, GCF works in IE 9 ;-)
If they could lift that restriction it would be trivial to have a prism-a-like (http://prism.mozillalabs.com/) app that wraps IE6 and any legacy applications that require IE6 could just be launched as an app. Your users wouldn't have to remember to open the app in IE6, it would Just Work.
In essence, that's what GCF does anyway - although by tackling the problem in reverse. Let the users click the internet icon and not worry about which rendering engine gets picked.
The main problem is the lack of XP support, that is what is going to keep people on (at least) IE8
You need to build sites in such a way that they degrade gracefully when modern functionality is not available, and you need to build a browser in such a way that it behaves properly when confronted with functions it cannot provide.
However, this graceful degrading should be possible in a generic way---for any old browser. Having to add special code to a site for a single browser is just not worth the developer time.
So, you should not complain about missing functionality, you should only complain about bugs that break the generic degrading behaviour.
The problem I faced was explaining the problem with IE6 to the IT support team. While GCF is a clear win for developers, I need the marketing muscle from Google to help me persuade department chiefs that installing this plugin will be a benefit, and a free benefit.
Can Google provide some contacts and some resources (powerpoint decks, videos) to help us make the case? You don't need to tell us developers; we're already sold.
Then why ask the question about why this isn't at the forefront of ALA articles and Ajaxian? They already DO lump those into the down-rev bucket. It seems like you want to argue as if you are the only voice crying out in the night, but you really aren't. It's just that others aren't crying...they're simply addressing the state of affairs in the most logical way possible and moving on.
"Folks who want to live in a future where the web is still a competitive platform can happily have it both ways. What they can’t have, though, is the libraries, reset frameworks, techniques, and infrastructure finely tuned to limping along on architectural decisions anchored in a web of yester-year.
We’re carrying a lot more baggage than we admit."
And we always will. That's the thing you need to accept in order to move on.
Mobile is quickly becoming "the way of the future". That may or may not leave the desktop browser (all brands) in the dust someday. Or, it might not. I can't predict such things.
Regardless, we will continually have to deal with browsers having implemented different parts of a spec - not all having the same features - especially now that W3C recommendations and the items within them are modularized. This is a fact of life.
Browsers will be different from one another. Maybe forever. But rather than trying to build "different sites" to accommodate those differences (like in the old days), browser makers (through the W3C) are at least making an attempt to address fallback plans for degradation.
i mean it's a great theory...only support modern browsers... but your site needs to be DAMNED good to make your users finish their browsing session, close everything, upgrade, reboot, and then come back to you...just to see your content. They're much MUCH more likely to just move on.
hey - it's only YOUR sites your hurting, no skin off my back.
i totally agree with everything else you're saying- but don't forget many MANY people don't have a choice of the browser on the system they use to surf the web, or don't understand HOW to upgrade it...good luck. That's not - realistically - an attitude that the industry as a whole can adopt, and i can guarantee that every single one of our clients would be going APESHIT if we behaved like that.
I don't buy the argument that the current table stakes for starting a web project are a given. The huge costs associated with all of those tools, both in latency and complexity, aren't fixed features of the landscape. A world where browsers move faster allows those costs to come down over time and gives us a way to spend that complexity/latency budget on new things.
Anyhow, I think we're just violently agreeing on the rest -- save the part where you imply that I'm just a whiner ;-)
Regards
http://clubajax.org/the-internet-explorer-five-step-recovery-program/
The key to watch isn't so much IE, but support for XP, which seems to have entered its 30th milestone. Once XP is not supported, anybody still using IE6 can be safely ignored, and the upgrade from XP will get more swift.
IE8 will be painful yes, and 5 more years seems like a long time, but it's no where near as painful as the full decade of support for IE6.
And BTW, I'm doing some intranet work that supports IE8, FF, WebKit - and I was pleasantly surprised how much easier it is to dev to IE8 than IE7. No rounded corners, but not too bad.
"I don’t buy the argument that the current table stakes for starting a web project are a given."
But they are. The current stakes just change when the current time is replaced by a more recent current time. (Meaning, yesterday's current stakes are not the same as today's current stakes).
"The huge costs associated with all of those tools, both in latency and complexity, aren’t fixed features of the landscape."
Which is the crux of my argument, really. Webkit (and it's variants), Gecko, Presto, Trident, etc keep churning out newer versions of their browser, which change the landscape repeatedly. However, none of those browser engines works exactly the same nor implements the same set of features. And, they likelihood that they ever will seems less crucial to me with each passing year I'm in this business.
With that in mind, it seems pointless now to rail on Microsoft for being so far behind the curve. And believe me, I was a huge participant in IE6&7 bashing. Now...meh. I don't like those browsers any more than I did before. I have simply accepted that there will always be a myriad of features that are and are not implemented across the browser landscape. That includes IE8 and IE9 as well as other browsers.
"A world where browsers move faster allows those costs to come down over time and gives us a way to spend that complexity/latency budget on new things."
This concept, if the standard web user cares (not a savvy geek type) may very well play out in a "survival of the fittest" for all browsers. That's the nature of evolution and the web is in a huge upheaval of evolution. This is a snapshot in time of the process.
The biggest unknown at this time is: do users care about the "cool new" stuff? If they do, then they will do what is necessary to make it happen. (corporate environments excluded)
One solution is that MS releases a version of IE (9? 10?) that has a compability mode where it behaves like IE6. The IE 6 sites can provide info that it needs IE 6, or if the browser finds an old API. For all other pages it uses the latest and greates rendering engine.
Anyhow, why do we count on users making a conscious choice to upgrade their browser to get a better set of deployed renderers, anyway?
Anthony: fixed.
Thankfully though it looks like IE6 is finally really dying.
But, that's conjecture on my part. I haven't seen any public stats to point things one way or another; have you?
I do think its part and parcel of what we do, as annoying as it is I think we need to just suck it up and support older browsers when it makes sense to do so. Encouraging people to upgrade is one thing, but if a significant number of users are on IE8 then just saying sorry please come back with another browser is shooting yourself in the foot. If IE8 is anything like ie6 the stragglers wont be people who dont WANT to upgrade, but people who CANT because they are on work managed machines or use systems that only support ie8.
I still see plenty of new web apps that use unpleasant pre-css formatting stuff like font tags, and various html4 table formatting stuff.
A minority of pages even validate.
It's no surprise the IT departments are loathe to upgrade when the apps they have to support are such a house of cards.