
Gracefully Dropping Support for Dinosaur Browsers in Trello  - joeyespo
http://blog.fogcreek.com/project-asteroid-gracefully-dropping-support-for-dinosaur-browsers-in-trello/
======
tezzer
I just got a report from NASA's systems admins saying they have approved IE9
for general rollout to the work force. The key paragraph:

"Beginning Tuesday, March 25, Internet Explorer (IE) 9 will be deployed to all
ACES Windows computers. Not only does IE9 improve the security posture and
comply with federal requirements, but it also has a new look and many new
features. While there are later versions of IE available, the EUSO and HPES
must do due diligence in analyzing each version from a security and
compatibility perspective to ensure the protection of NASA systems. The ACES
team will continue to evaluate and roll out the latest and safest versions
possible."

So I had to laugh when the article stated, "Some of the browsers we supported
at launch just can’t be considered modern by today’s standards. I’m talking
about Internet Explorer 9 specifically."

~~~
dspillett
Our largest clients (both large banks over here) are still on XP+IE8 on their
standard desktops. At least we are no refusing to support anything older
(there are still pockets of IE7 at RBS it would seem) but I'd love to refuse
to support IE8 too...

~~~
JohnTHaller
You should start refusing on April 8th, at which point Windows XP is
unsupported and insecure.

~~~
wila
I'm betting it will be just as safe/unsafe on April 8th as it is on April 7th.
Yes people should have gotten off XP by now, but real life isn't always
perfect.

There will not be a massive XP infection on April 8th, it will come at least a
few weeks after that ;)

~~~
computer
It might very well come on April 8th, since malware authors who find exploits
in the period leading up to that date would wisely wait until right after the
no-more-patching cliff to release their new 0days.

~~~
JohnTHaller
Considering how many Firefox flaws were saved up for the recent hackathon
(since the rewards are 6x what Mozilla usually pays as a bounty), I'm betting
on at least a couple critical ones being unleashed the day after, though it
may take some time for them to be caught.

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avenger123
I am starting to wonder if the overhead of doing an API first design is that
much more than integrating your domain model into the web app directly. The
benefits of having an API backend really seem to shine in the scenario that
Joel is describing.

Branch a version of the codebase for the older browser, remove all the support
for old browsers from trunk and off you go.

I think the main decision that Joel has made is that they will not shoehorn
new features into the older browsers and instead force them to upgrade if they
want the new features. May not work for other web apps but seems to be a good
compromise.

~~~
mandlar
Are there any other known examples of websites that follow this API first
design? I would love to see more discussion about this design choice.

~~~
avenger123
I think the biggest example would be Amazon. The biggest advantage I see is
that Joel's approach still allows some level of iteration on the domain model
and all the associated business logic.

It seems that mobile is pushing this type of design as it makes the most sense
(so Facebook, Twitter and Google follow this approach quite a bit). It looks
like the logical next step is why can't the desktop browsers be just another
"View" as is in mobile.

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themoonbus
The worse problem is IE8, which is the highest supported version on XP, and is
a way bigger piece of crap than IE9... especially with XP's still high market
share.

[http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/03/weeks-...](http://arstechnica.com/information-
technology/2014/03/weeks-before-expiration-date-windows-xp-still-has-29-os-
market-share/)

~~~
JohnTHaller
Windows XP is abandoned on April 8th. A large number of the Windows XP
machines still in use are in China (nearly all pirated). The other ones can
often be safely ignored for most businesses as they're not going to be
customers anyway.

~~~
joshyeager
I'm not sure why you think that the non-Chinese XP machines won't be potential
customers. In my experience, the largest remaining IE8 (and even IE6) holdouts
are big enterprises and government organizations. Those organizations are also
some of the richest potential customers out there.

For our product (enterprise task and workflow management), we see about 2%
IE6/7 and about 5% IE8 in our customer base. Of those customers, most are
planning to upgrade away from XP sometime in the next year or two.

~~~
JohnTHaller
That's why I said often. If you specifically deal with a US govt agency or
large corporate customer with a poorly run IT department, you may very well
still need those customers. But for most consumer businesses, Windows XP users
aren't really going to be customers.

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Joeri
Internet time moves fast, but not that fast. No way is it that hard to support
IE9, and no way that a three year old browser can be classified a dinosaur.
IE9 has a modern fast ES5 javascript engine, sufficient css3 support, canvas,
inline svg, and fixed most of the IE-isms in earlier versions. Unless trello
is porting their codebase to webgl i cannot imagine it being that much work to
support ie9. Supporting ie9 is simply part of the cost of doing business.

~~~
mixmastamyk
The article states support isn't being dropped, rather IE9 users are being
shown to a land frozen in time. Not a bad strategy I'd think.

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radicalbyte
I don't understand why Microsoft haven't created a special application servear
for old IE versions. If an Enterprise could install a server which provided IE
via a Remote Application window it would allow them to upgrade to the latest
version of Windows.

Remote Application is already used to provide support for legacy apps, much in
the same way that terminal emulators are used to access legacy mainframe
systems.

~~~
Hrundi
Microsoft provides free* virtual machines, each with a specific version of IE.
Not quite the same thing though, but they are actually pretty cool.

[http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools](http://www.modern.ie/en-
us/virtualization-tools)

* not sure if an enterprise can use them though.

~~~
saraid216
If you go up to the main site, you'll notice there's a "free 3-month trial of
BrowserStack". I _think_ this effectively means that enterprise is fine.

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ForHackernews
IE9 is a dinosaur? Loads of locked-down corporate intranets still run IE6.

~~~
chc
The fact that one is from the Triassic while the other is from the Cretaceous
doesn't make the latter less of a dinosaur.

~~~
droithomme
I can't think of any dinosaurs that first came into existence 3 years ago in
2011 and were the most recent dinosaur of its particular kind available until
September 2012, 20 months ago. It seems like a terrible metaphor to say
everything more than 20 months old is a "dinosaur". It's such a bad metaphor
in fact that I wonder for the sanity, competence and/or neutrality of anyone
seriously advocating it. I doubt anyone genuinely and sincerely believes that
things more than 20 months old are all dinosaurs, even tech things. On the
other hand, I would not be surprised at all if such terms were used as part of
a propaganda or agenda driven attempt to mislead people. That sort of thing
happens a lot.

~~~
chc
This seems rather hyperbolic. What sort of agenda do you imagine I have that
would make me want to propagandize and mislead people? Am I part of a secret
cabal that seeks to enslave the sheeples by encouraging them to keep their web
browsers reasonably up-to-date?

(For clarity, I wouldn't normally describe a two-year-old browser as "a
dinosaur," mainly because the 5-year-old inside me thinks dinosaurs are too
cool to use their species as a pejorative. But I would describe one like IE 9
as "fairly outdated," which is just a less goofy way of saying the same
thing.)

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wila
Interesting to see that users using Vista are already being seen as 'should be
dropped'. AFAIK Internet Explorer 9 is the highest IE version on MS Vista.

Not that I like IE or Vista, just seems to me that there are a ton of people
out there with IE9 as max IE version.

~~~
jessaustin
It makes me wonder why Ms bothered tying the browser to the OS in this way.
It's not as though the Justice Dept. is going to haul them back into court to
explain their fibbing about how great it was to tightly couple the OS to a
particular "strategic" executable that runs on it. Was that really a concern
when they came out with _Vista_?

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wil421
How do they determine what browser version users are on so they can show the
right version of jellydoughnut-xx?

~~~
wizzard
He kind of skips over this, but the way he says you don't even get served the
"collection of files" until your browser is determined makes me think they're
using the request header.

So maybe that 8.48% decrease is just people starting to spoof.

I feel like if you're savvy enough to be using Trello and yet still on IE9,
there might be a reason you haven't upgraded.

~~~
Scorponok
What, so you spoof your client so you can get a version that's unusable in
your browser because of its poor feature support? That doesn't sound like a
great idea.

~~~
wizzard
If you're desperate for new features, you might not care if the CSS is a
little wonky.

~~~
thedufer
That's not a good idea, for the record. We dropped IE9 so that core features
could drop IE9 support, not to save a little CSS work. In the near future
Trello will become quite unstable in IE9.

