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Windows XP lives on


adrian
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The average Joe/Jane who still uses XP with ie8 will not even know how to "hack" the update thingy, so who cares?

I have simply decided not to care about IE6-7 since two years ago. Living much happier life now :)

Yeah, me too! I am even planning on stating in my TOS, that I only support the last two browser versions of any browser. If the client wants support for older browsers, it has to be in the contract and would add a certain percentage to the overall costs.

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It's not the average Joe/Jane I am worried about - it's the government sysadmins that are too lazy to upgrade their staff!

I don't support old IE on most projects, but some I still need to :(

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Hard to blame sysadmins only though. It's complex issue, involving developers and companies also.

OT: I think one of the reasons I don't have much interest in mobile apps - lock in to hardware and os. Happy to see most new apps seem to be hybrids, where only small part is native (nav + webview).

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Yeah, me too! I am even planning on stating in my TOS, that I only support the last two browser versions of any browser.

Just an opinion here, but I don't think that's the best route to take. Think of Chrome and Firefox. Yes, whilst they do auto-update, there are many PCs around where the feature has been turned off. A colleague of mine is still running Firefox 16.

I always do an analysis about the client's needs before I disclaim which browsers will be supported. From a general point of view, only browsers with full, native HTML5 support, and a good throw-in of CSS3, will make the list. That gives me IE9+ (sorry 8, but your days are over), Firefox 4 (though, I usually up that to 10, as it is not as old), and Chrome 25 (same reason).

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Just an opinion here, but I don't think that's the best route to take.

It's a pitty but web-development is not always about the best route. Time is limiting factor in the most development processes. And supporting unsupported browser features can have a negative effect on the behaviour on the up-to-date browsers. You've to weight your markup/design decisions carefully. 

The rule, stated by Owzim is  logical & easy to understand for both the customer & development organisation. This is a handhold for de 'average' website you build. And if the customer needs a bigger backward compatibility, the boundary is clear. So they know it's more work and they know the bill will be bigger.

To make a rule for backwards compatibility is a pretty good thing. Where you put boundary it's up to you, but it should be clear for both customer and developer.

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@Martijn: Agreed. As with most things in life, everything is specific when it comes to determining which browsers to support. Over time, and looking into the future, most developers will be moving to Owzim's 'rule' (as you put it). People are moving into an era of auto-updates, which helps us developers - especially those just starting out. I remember when I started, and it was such a nightmare to make IE6 behave. Everything is clearer now, knowing that nobody cares for it.

Personally, I don't believe in patches. If something doesn't work in IE8: tough. If a site needs a feature, and a browser doesn't support it, then we drop the browser. Unless, of course, the feature is really specific, and doesn't make a big difference to the end-user. So glad I will never see ie-fix.css in any of my code ever again.

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Personally, I don't believe in patches. If something doesn't work in IE8: tough. If a site needs a feature, and a browser doesn't support it, then we drop the browser. Unless, of course, the feature is really specific, and doesn't make a big difference to the end-user. So glad I will never see ie-fix.css in any of my code ever again.

That's exactly what I meant.

I'm fed up with people treating webdev different than any other industry in terms of compatibility. Apple seemingly drops compatibility every two years, for areas of their OWN products. WTF ...

I say you can't expect a b/w TV to display a color movie. I agree though, that sites should at least still provide access to the content, even if it's just a style-less one column thingy.

PS: web apps are a very different horse. When they use JS for the front end application architecture, you can't expect it to work without JS.

PS2: oh, and it's owzim, not Owzim :P

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@owzim (better?  :P ): I agree with the provision of content - though it would really be specific to each site. But, 99% of the time, you'd land up displaying the most important content in a very static way (your one column idea), and just display a friendly message that talks of dragons and the dark ages. And evolution.

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I'm pretty sure that I've mentioned this somewhere around here earlier, but I tend to refer to usage statistics when discussing supported browsers.

Define a minimum usage percentage ("at least 4%" for an example) and if a browser is below that limit, it shouldn't be too hard to convince the client that it's simply not worth it spending a lot of your time and their money fixing things for browser barely anyone uses anymore.. or, if you prefer to be sure, discuss that with the client beforehand and make sure that it's mentioned in your contract.

StatCounter is my current favourite when it comes to things like browser usage statistics; their data seems relatively trustworthy and they offer very good tools for filtering and displaying it (and even allow saving it as an image, exporting a CSV etc. for archiving or whatever other reasons).

post-175-0-12086100-1401819544_thumb.jpg

That's what the statistics from last 3 months look around here. Based on that alone I'd say that it's really not worth it to support IE8 (or 10, which people seem to have pretty much skipped). IE9 is a borderline case, so I'd only offer support for it if it's very important to the client (they're a large organisation using IE9 or have such organisations as clients etc.)

.. oh, and did I mention that I just love statistics? :)

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