

Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of the past - lancashire
http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3097-developing-for-old-browsers-is-almost-a-thing-of-the-past

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AndrewDucker
By moving to IE9 he's discounting all corporate customers who haven't moved to
Windows 7 yet.

This leaves them with only one option if they want support on a long-term
supported browser, which is the recently shipped Firefox Enterprise Support
Release.

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WildUtah
>>>By moving to IE9 he's discounting all corporate customers who haven't moved
to Windows 7 yet.

Nonsense.

Chrome and Firefox will both run on XP.

~~~
AndrewDucker
You'll notice the second sentence there, which talks about Firefox ESR as the
only option if they want a long-term supported browser. Many large
corporations will not switch to a browser which updates itself more often than
they can easily test it against all of their internal apps.

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batista
Those corporations tend to be a pain to work, have lots of internal crap apps,
and don't use external stuff like Basecamp anyway. Good riddance.

~~~
untog
They also have a ton of money. You might not want any of it, but some do.
Continuing to support IE7/8 for that reason makes sense.

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huskyr
I think the title is a little bit misleading. The moment you can drop support
for browser versions is pretty dependent on the requirements of your client,
and your visitors. 7% for users with IE8 or lower is a pretty tech-savvy
crowd, many developers might not have the luxury of dropping support for IE8
because many of their visitors still use that browser.

~~~
eropple
Agreed. There's still a very significant portion of China using IE6, for
example. If you've got an international focus on non-developers, it's not
really even close to feasible to drop IE6-7.

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mrspandex
I'm so sick of websites not even attempting to render in a browser not in
their whitelist. Please give me a button that says "I understand the risks,
but I want to try anyway."

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dhh
We don't do that. We only discriminate against browsers we know will have
problems. Like IE6-8. So what we're running is actually a blacklist.

If you show up with a browser that's not one of the big four, we're just
letting you in on your own accord.

I completely agree that whitelisting for browsers is bullshit.

~~~
51Cards
I think cutting IE 8 off is a little premature. I agree it's a hassle to
support but I think of for example Rogers Cable, a client of mine still
sitting on locked down XP across the entire office base. You just cut their
6000-ish employees off at the knees. They can't install another browser even
if they wanted to, and I'm sure that same situation exists in a lot of other
corporations.

~~~
edash
The original Basecamp isn't going anywhere, so those 6000-ish employees won't
be out a thing. They'll just need to advance a few IT years to be able to use
Basecamp Next.

From the article:

"We know it’s not always easy to upgrade your browser (or force an upgrade on
a client), but we believe it’s necessary to offer the best Basecamp we can
possibly make. In addition, we’re not going to move the requirements on
Basecamp Classic, so that’ll continue to work for people who are unable to use
a modern browser."

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hodder
The multibillion dollar organization I work for just updated to IE8 from IE6
last week. We aren't allowed to use new browsers or chrome frame for
"security" reasons. ha!

~~~
randlet
Lucky you! I work at a large hospital with (likely) 10k+ computers running XP
and we're still stuck on IE6.

I'm not sure what the plan to migrate away from IE6 is but my guess is that it
will be a massive pain for our IT department.

I have to imagine that IE6 will continue to limp along for a number of years
to come, but hopefully large organizations will have learned a lesson about
depending on a specific browser version (or a specific browser for that
matter).

~~~
sek
Is Chrome Frame an option?

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johnbender
My understanding is that IE has a significant market share among users with
accessibiliy needs (came up in conversation after the recent jquery 2.0
browser support discussion). While that may not be important for 37 signals
it's an oft overlooked side effect of dropping version 8 support.

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badmonkey0001
Now the problem becomes mobile browsers... (hover vs. tap, tiny resolutions,
differences in form controls, sometimes crippled features that work fine in a
"pc" based browser, fluid layout choices, float issues)

There will always be madness.

[edit] Took me a few to find this link again. Do compatibility charts like
this look familiar? <http://www.quirksmode.org/m/css.html>

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kenrik
IE6 may ye rest in peace... (or hell)

