
WordPress Discontinues Support for Internet Explorer 6 - ssclafani
http://www.readwriteweb.com/hack/2011/05/wordpresscom-discontinues-supp.php
======
steve19
They are only discontinuing support for the admin part of the package which is
very javascript heavy. The default frontend theme will, I am sure, continue to
support IE6 for a long time.

~~~
dave1010uk
The new Twenty Eleven theme [1] doesn't fully support IE6 (there's comments on
that bug) but I believe it works OK in it. As WordPress is completely
themeable, there will probably be themes that support IE6 for years to come.

More interesting (for me at least) is that WordPress 3.2 will require PHP5.2
[2]. WordPress had lots of legacy code for PHP4 that made coding plugins for
it a pain.

[1] <http://core.trac.wordpress.org/ticket/17198>

[2] <http://wordpress.org/news/2011/05/wordpress-3-2-beta-1/>

------
hxf148
It's funny, I have been around so long in this game that I remember never
really liking Netscape, ever.

IE3 in some ways made web dev fun and interesting again. Then IE4 took over
and I was pretty happy using it as Netscape grew fat and slow. Netscape 4 was
ok and that was the short lived first era of decent browser consistency.

I don't remember much about IE5, head down developing and skipping classes but
I do remember when MS broke all our hearts with IE6. It started out all so
well then it turned to mush and our faces melted as we glimpsed the future
carved in exceptions and special handling.

Web dev from then until very recently has been haunted and stunted and
repeatedly annoyed by efforts to include IE6 "Support". Out of a perverse
loyalty to doing things well in all browsers and an employer's choices have
meant that I have been one of those making an effort all these long dark
years. Ten years with a corporate network that I believe is still running IE7
in compatibility mode today taught me lots of useless IE skills and.. creative
thinking.

Thanks WP for joining the kill IE6..7..8 effort. 9 isn't bad but they will
probably screw it up.

<http://infostripe.com/harold>

~~~
cubicle67
Not sure if you're aware of it, but the reason you're being down voted is not
because of your comment (which is fine), but because you've included a link to
your blog which adds nothing to the discussion and is generally not viewed as
a positive thing

[edit: 1 - I upvoted you because I thought your comment was good. 2 - at the
time of writing your comment looked to be at about -2 but now it's back in the
+ve]

~~~
hxf148
Ahh sorry about that I sign my link as a sig all the time out of habit. I
guess in a way it could be related as that link is a project I work on that
has minimal intentional IE6 support. :) I'll remember that tip regardless.

~~~
yuhong
You can put it in your about in Hacker News.

------
grandalf
This is fantastic news. Now if only Google would release Chrome for Win2K to
un-obsolete many valuable Win2K licenses.

~~~
bzbarsky
For what it's worth, Firefox 4 runs fine on Win2K last I checked.

~~~
grandalf
Only with FF 4 has the browser been speedy enough to run on the typical kind
of hardware sold with a Win2K license. Chrome is extremely fast and would un-
obsolete so much more hardware even than FF4.

~~~
bzbarsky
Chrome uses way more memory than Firefox 4. So it may in fact not run all that
well on some of the lower-end hardware....

------
barnaby
Cool! Wordpress are becoming part of the solution.

------
ck2
There they go trying to be "hip" again, thinking they are important enough to
cause trends.

They also stopped supporting PHP 4.4 which means hundreds of thousands of
legacy installs no longer do automatic updates because their update code
(purposely? lazily?) has a few lines that don't work under PHP 4.

IE6 is one thing to go "meh" about but WordPress installs that do not do fast
easy updates are time bombs.

~~~
code_duck
I can think of several large sites or organizations who have dropped IE6
support in the past year.

There's nothing lazy about not supporting PHP 4. It is outdated and flawed,
and the last release was in 2008. PHP 5 has been out for over 5 years. The
fact that those sites are timebombs is not WordPress's fault or their problem.

~~~
ck2
For modern code that starts off with PHP5 it's fine and understandable to
restrict versions.

But WordPress is an "ancient" legacy mess and does not have any advanced code
that benefits from PHP5 - you actually have to go out of your way to break it
for PHP4. There is nothing in it that cannot be fixed for PHP4 without one
extra line or two.

Note that 99.9% of WordPress3 works on PHP4 - only the security updating fails
- and it fails in an uncontrolled way, not because it checks for the PHP
version and stops - it actually fails silently (which is also typical WP
style).

There are hundreds of thousands of shared servers that are still running PHP
4.4.9 just fine and WordPress has a responsibility to make sure security
updates keep working if it's easy enough to maintain (and it is).

~~~
ceejayoz
The best thing WP can do, security-wise, is ditch PHP4.

~~~
uriel
The best thing it could do security-wise is ditching PHP.

~~~
code_duck
Not really, since that would of course mean a complete rewrite. The code is
only as secure as it's authors make it, too - Python or Ruby are not magic
bullets against XSS or SQL injection. While it would be fantastic to have
WordPress in Python, and for the crufty and backwards bits to be cleaned up,
old code that has been tested and audited is surely more secure and bug free
than a brand new code base.

