One of the nicest things about Windows 8 is that each copy shipped is a guaranteed person who is not using I.E 7/8/9.
Hopefully the companies just now upgrading to Windows 7 from XP will also deploy I.E 10, but I'm not holding my breath. On the other hand maybe Windows 7 install media will come with I.E 10 incorporated into it. A man can dream.
I was helping out my wife the other day to use some work-related internal site via VPN. I had just finished putting a clean Win7+IE9 install on her PC only to find out that this large-ish enterprisey portal only works in IE8. Everyone always touts these reasons as why old versions stick around forever, but when you see one in practice you realize how crippling it can be for both sides because nobody necessarily even owns the site (e.g., built by outside consultants) and the end users have no real say to get it fixed. If there is no in-house technical owner, the chance of it being updated anytime soon simply because a new browser version is available is next to nil. I feel, in situations like this, it is probably not until the department/whatever head personally encounters the issue on a new computer that a top-down mandate comes to fix the situation.
Doesn't putting the browser in IE8 compatibility mode work? I guess it sucks for an end user to need to use a developer feature like this but could be the best option.
All the owners of the site would need to do is add this line to their HTML and it throws IE9 and later into IE8 compatibility mode:
I was surprised to notice that the BBC website does this. I noticed because a bookmarklet I wrote which requires IE9 won't work on the BBC site, which was quite disappointing.
Having done the equivalent for a gnarly enterprise web-app when IE8 came out (using mod_headers to inject the HTTP header equivalent) this isn't trivial and they may not have anyone with the necessary skills who is jumping to take on testing and support (everything which happens with that app for the next 6 months will be first blamed as an upgrade problem).
Beyond that, it doesn't actually work: some features won't be completely compatible so you're effectively creating a third browser to test and support. In the case of IE8, it was mostly IE7-compatible but it relied on the browser not throwing errors when JavaScript attempted to set syntactically invalid styles and IE8-in-IE7 still raised exceptions deep in a third-party library licensed by the app vendor. This app was made by a very large, wealthy company – we were paying mid-six-figures a year for "support" – and they preferred infrequent massive update releases, which meant that a week after I reported the bug (around the time Microsoft started pushing IE8 as an automatic install) one of their managers contacted us asking for the patch I wrote so they could redistribute it to other customers.
All the owners of the site would need to do is add this line to their HTML
No.
If they're in a situation like this, it's incredibly unlikely that anyone has the knowledge necessary to do this, let alone the time, inclination, or (perhaps most importantly for enterprise companies) business approval. The vast majority of enterprises cannot just publish production code at their own discretion.
IE9 has a way to put it into IE8 compatibility mode. Do these kinds of sites not work in Compatibility Mode? Press F12 to switch the mode. It's a good option for using a better version of IE while still supporting older sites.
Not only don't they capture all the quirks, but they introduce new ones. I had an issue a year back, I can't remember the exact details unfortunately, where IE8 in compatibility mode for IE7 was causing some weird behaviour that didn't happen in either IE7 or 8.
To make things even more confusing there is both a "browser mode" and a "documents mode", both containing all the versions of IE7,8,9 plus documents mode containing IE9-compatibility-mode whatever that is. Setting any combination of the two options is valid.
There's a sad story waiting to be written about the developers that have had to spend so much time deliberately introducing bugs into IE10 to make this feature work.
Nah, they just plug in the old Trident renderers. "Browser mode" changes the user agent, and "Document mode" changes the renderer. The JS engine remains the same, which is why you always need to test in the real deal.
As long as sites keep working on those ancient browsers while devs waste precious time spoon-feeding them - they will linger. I myself stopped caring about anything below IE8 a long ago (lately below IE9) and I ask everyone to do the same.
JQuery 2.0 is a great weapon against the legacy (support only for IE9+). I hope for its swift and rapid adoption in place of 1.x version.
It's important to note that Google's apps do not support legacy browsers any more. Last time I checked on my VM, the main Google search engine works perfectly fine in IE6.
The answers to this question will be skewed as a lot of people on here work at startups, with no interest or need to support legacy browsers.
I work at a digital agency, a lot of our larger clients still desire legacy browser support (sometimes as far as IE6). Since a lot of these clients earn some serious money, we could charge a ton and it'd still make business sense for the client to support these users. Also, some of the sectors we've worked in have had some very high IE6/7 numbers, especially in the legal sector.
To answer your question, it depends on who you ask. On here and on places like Reddit you'll find a lot of people don't offer full legacy browser support, but many of us still do because we are bound by our clients. Once Windows 8 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.
"Once Windows 8 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process."
Once Windows Vista starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.
Once Windows 7 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.
Heard it before. I expect some people to never ever leave XP, because they'll have one little activex control that their entire multibillion dollar operation runs on, and they will continue to insists a shrinking pool of vendors support it at all costs, because any expense is worth it compared to any downtime experienced by shifting their business process to anything resembling modern technology. They will be few, but they will still exist.
I appreciate that people will run XP/IE6 like an application environment rather than an OS for people to use, but by the time the new service pack hits it'll be coming up to 2014, when Microsoft officially ends support for XP, meaning those that run XP are on their own.
It's been far too long now, and even Microsoft want it dead and buried. When April 2014 hits I expect Microsoft to halt all support, and then I'd not be shocked to see XP targeted by virus makers in order to kill it off for good. Companies won't want to pay for their applications to be ported, but if the choice is to port or have their systems wiped out then I think they'll be left with no choice.
> I expect some people to never ever leave XP, because they'll have one little activex control that their entire multibillion dollar operation runs on,
What about the expense of the Chinese/Russian/Whatevercountry hackers totally owning them because they use IE6?
Unfortunately, where I am at our corporate standard says that we "fully support" IE 7. We've decided instead to make sure that the site functions in IE 7, but it doesn't have to render exactly the same. Our customer support group is still stuck on IE 7 for unknown reasons and since they use our product internally also, we can't break it completely. It's stupid that we have to stupport a 6+ year old browser.
Many companies are still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7. It's absolutely ridiculous, why not upgrade or just switch browsers? Can't be that difficult, surely?
My previous school uses Internet Explorer 8, I asked the tech why he doesn't upgrade the computers to IE9, he just said he doesn't have the time.
If they're running Windows XP, he probably doesn't - a lot of places have skimped for years and are now faced with replacing hardware and upgrading software to run Windows 7. The results will be good but it's a capital-P project.
Not strictly true. Our QA team are using Windows 8 and they typically decided to fire up a VM using built in Hyper-V containing one of the above each :(
No, Windows 8 has IE10 by default. They presumably have that VM to test IE9 and IE7 which are used on previous versions of Windows, but god knows why they put them on Windows 8.
Hopefully the companies just now upgrading to Windows 7 from XP will also deploy I.E 10, but I'm not holding my breath. On the other hand maybe Windows 7 install media will come with I.E 10 incorporated into it. A man can dream.