
Browser Market Pollution: IE[x] is the new IE6 - joshuacc
http://paulirish.com/2011/browser-market-pollution-iex-is-the-new-ie6/
======
simonsarris
I saw this on paul's G+ and rolled my eyes.

Oh guffaw. The time has easily come where we are allowed to say "no" to
several browser versions, or at least ignore them. Even Google has dropped
support for IE6.

Supporting several browsers does not mean that a website has to look perfect
in all those browsers. My sites will look good on the latest version of
Chrome, IE, Opera, and Firefox.

Users of IE6/7/etc are already self-inflicting harm on their own web
experience, why should we care to cater to them? They can have the website I
display, but I'm not building the site for the past.

I don't care if previous browser users see the Best Of All Possible Websites,
as long as they see something. And since I'm developing Canvas apps, I don't
care if some of them see anything at all.

I imagine IE will reluctantly take the road of Chrome or FF and be more
insistent about updates, especially outside of the corporate world. I also
think that in the future the consensus will be that there isn't anything wrong
with dropping support for aged browsers, and just displaying one "simple" site
version to them.

~~~
nirvdrum
I've never really understood the outward hostility Web developers display
towards their clients, audience, customers, etc. Your job is to deliver the
best experience you can for people viewing Web pages. If given all the
information at your disposal, the costs don't outweigh the pros for your
audience, that's one thing. But not doing it because it's hard or you just
don't feel like it is a bit childish (please note I'm using "you" to mean the
prototypical Web developer here -- not you as in simonsarris).

We all have to do things we don't like in our jobs, that's just part of it
being a job. I can even accept a certain amount of healthy advocacy. Encourage
people to upgrade if you'd like. But outright refusal to do your best because
your customer doesn't run the browser you wish they did is just a very odd
tactic to take.

~~~
adambyrtek
In the real world time is limited and expensive resource, and the more of it
you spend catering to a small fraction of users, the less you can spend on
improving your service in other ways – possibly more beneficial to the end
users.

It's a matter of trade-offs that have to be made based on intended audience
and information available. No need to be offended.

~~~
nirvdrum
Sure. Like I said, if you're actually measuring it, then that's one thing. But
supporting older browsers usually isn't that hard if you know what you're
doing. Obviously there are some features that you just can't backport and
there's not much you can do there. But more often than not I read comments
like "as a policy, I just won't support IE < 9."

In any event, the cost argument is the purview of the business owner
perspective, not the Web developer. And it's hard to look at in isolation. I
don't know that many sites that wouldn't love to have another 5% of traffic.
Yeah, it may cost more to support older browsers, but driving traffic to a
site costs money, whether through ads or spending time on inbound marketing.
Trying to bump conversion rates on your existing traffic costs money and time
as well.

There's obviously a balance to it. At the extreme end, I know of businesses
that support anything with > 0.5% market share because at the volume they
operate at, it's worth millions. At the other end, I see startups fight tooth-
and-nail working on their funnels, while throwing away legitimate sources of
revenue.

~~~
adambyrtek
It's rarely all-or-nothing. For me "not supported" means that the site wasn't
extensively tested on a given browser or it doesn't offer full experience, not
that it doesn't work at all. Another issue is whether those enterprise IE6
users are really the target audience of your startup.

Anyway, it seems like we both agree that it should be a deliberate decision.

------
masklinn
> IE6 has been a source of pain for… I'd say four years.

We're in late 2011 right? That puts Paul's "IE6 being a pain" in late 2007,
right after the original iPhone was released.

By that time, Firefox 2 was a year old, Firebug was 18 months old, and Safari
3 (the first version with acceptable Javascript support) had just been
released, making Drosera (which would morph into the Webkit Developer Tools
the next year) available.

Hell, by late 2007 _IE7 was a year old already_. And a significant reason why
the IE project was restarted (and IE7 produced) is developers getting fed up
with IE6, its bugs, its antiquated tools and its lack of progress, and Firefox
had been getting more and more traction since its 1.0 release in late 2004.

IE6 has been a pain for at least 6 years now. 2005 was Firefox 1.5, the
announce for the IE project restart and the grand opening of On Having Layout
[0], the tail end of the long, slow and painful discovery of IE6's innumerable
rendering bugs, DOM and javascript limitations (anybody else remembers Drip
and Joel Webber's "DHTML leaks like a sieve"? That's January 2005), painfully
slow runtime & al.

Of course it makes sense that 2005 would have been such a sticking point: the
web community had been playing around with CSS since ~2003 (CSS Zen Garden
released that year) and was wrapping up the IE6 CSS bugs compendium (see
above-mentioned On Having Layout, pretty much the culmination of the effort).

Late 2004 and (especially) 2005 it started to turn its attention from styling
to behavior, which lead to the rebirth of Javascript and the creation of
modern javascript: AJAX coined (and seminal article on the subject published)?
February 2005. Opera Desktop free and ad-free? April 2005 QuirksBlog? December
2004. The killing of "DHTML"? 2005[1].
<http://simonwillison.net/2005/Jan/5/swissMaps/>
[http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index....](http://www.mezzoblue.com/archives/2005/01/06/dhtml_05/index.php),
... the javascript frameworks explosion was also 2004 (Dojo) through 2005
(Prototype, Mochikit) to 2006 (jQuery, YUI)

[0] <http://www.satzansatz.de/cssd/onhavinglayout.html>

[1] <http://adactio.com/journal/938>

~~~
DrJokepu
Actually, by late 2003 Phoenix (which is what Firefox used to be called back
then) was already an impressive little browser (it was little back then) and
IE6 was already horribly outdated and clumsy for those of us who grew a
penchant for alternative browsers (the others being Opera and the Mozilla
Suite).

~~~
masklinn
I completely agree, but developers-wise it was not a complete pain in the ass
yet: it was the "looking forward to meeting you" browser for the development
community (having just been renamed Firebird), the community was mostly in its
IE5/Mac high and getting started on understanding CSS and trying to get rid of
tables.

This would lead down a long and painful road re. IE6, but I think it was just
getting started and not feeling it yet. On the Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox front,
Chris Pederick's Web Developer Toolbar was still a year away.

(there were, of course, visionaries community wise: PPK published "Separating
behavior and structure" in April 2004[0], and the "javascript prophets" were
getting out their suggestions on getting event handler bindings out of
HTML[1], it's a long gone time when Opera's javascript support was billed
"poor" and the first version of Safari had little CSS support and no ability
to execute any javascript worth running)

edit: after thinking about it a bit more, i still think 2003 is too early for
the IE6 pain point, but my 2005 might be too conservative as well. So I'd put
the early pangs in early to mid-2004 for the "wider" community of developers
interested in web technologies.

[0] [http://www.digital-
web.com/articles/separating_behavior_and_...](http://www.digital-
web.com/articles/separating_behavior_and_structure_2/)

[1] <http://www.sitepoint.com/structural-markup-javascript/>

~~~
yuhong
And BTW, the year 2003 was when MS said that future versions of IE would come
only as part of OS upgrade/updates.

------
AshleysBrain
The 72 browser versions thing is an exaggeration. For _your_ websites, add
this tag: <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="IE=edge" /> \- and you
force IE to use that version's latest documents mode. So good point about IE's
slow adoption, it really is annoying and holding back the web - but for _your_
websites, you can easily force the document mode of your choice, avoiding the
crappy emulated modes.

~~~
paulirish
Absolutely. That line is critical to avoiding pain. Library authors don't have
that option, unfortunately. :/

But even if we ignore the compat versions for now (and quirks mode (and
almost-quirks mode)), we still end up with up to 10 IEs in play
simultaneously.

~~~
AshleysBrain
Good point about library authors... that's a headache!

------
wrs
You kids these days don't know how good you have it. Back in the day, when
applications ran on the computer instead of in the browser, we would have
killed to have only 76 different configurations to support. (And I'm not
joking, though I am smiling ruefully.)

~~~
dredmorbius
Pshaw.

 _We_ had _one_ computer. And _one_ program that ran on it. And we _liked_ it
that way.

(OK, but we had a gazillion VMs so we could all run our one program on our one
computer, except that we could never schedule any CPU time).

------
bittermang
> How many browsers would you like to support?

I don't support browsers. I support standards. I stopped performing hacky
compatibility gymnastics long before Google made it cool to boast how you
weren't supporting IE6 anymore, and my workflow and sanity has improved due to
it.

~~~
bittermang
To extend my point, I don't care if the user wants to use Firefox or Chrome or
even IE. The rendering should be consistent across the board, and the browser
should be about the user experience. Add ons, syncing, other such features.

Imagine if this applied to the world of televisions. If people didn't buy Sony
TVs because they didn't display channels as well as Sharp or Panasonic. If you
had to render your video with some hacky kludge so the colors displayed right
on a Samsung and an LG. That would be insane.

~~~
mappu
Remember the "web-safe" 216-colour palette? :(

------
billybob
This sounds terrible, but it seems to me that nobody will let it get that bad.
It's infeasible to support 70+ browsers simultaneously; no dev shop can afford
that. So they would either pick versions or choose some common set of features
to support. If this meant that IE users got crappy experiences, despite
developers' best efforts, people might finally start ditching IE. (A man can
dream, can't he?)

But I think the IE team will find a way to prevent this.

------
Macha
IE6's entrenched position came from the fact that (a) it was the latest
version of Internet Explorer for a _huge_ amount of time and (b) its status as
the IE dead end for Win2k and below.

When IE7 came out, any company that still had any Win2k machines had to keep
designing with IE6 in mind if they wanted their new apps to work on all their
computers. (I'm making the assumption that if they were relying on IE
previously, they couldn't just switch to Firefox or something).

Now, IE8 I think most people can accept is going to end up in IE6's current
place. It's the IE dead end for XP, a hugely popular OS. But IE7? None of
those companies that don't upgrade upgraded to IE7. Home users that upgrade
will also have installed the IE8 upgrade. So you're left with what? Unpatched
Vista installations. These are much rarer than unpatched XP installations
simply because Vista had a shorter lifespan, and Windows Vista to 7 is
sufficiently undramatic an upgrade for the types of people who would take
years to go from XP to Vista.

So so far we have:

    
    
      - IE6 will drag on as long as XP does.
      - IE7 won't last particularly long. While it's popular now,
      earlier Vista computers will be replaced in the close 
      future (2-3 years), causing it to lose market share to IE8.
      - IE8 will have a long lifespan, although probably not as long as IE6.
    

IE9? IE9 has never been shipped by default with any version of Windows. That
means anyone who installed it did decide to upgrade. These users will likely
upgrade away, meaning in the future, IE9 will be even more of a non-issue than
IE7.

IE10 will likely also go the way of IE7. While it will be installed by default
on Windows 8, the amount of dramatic changes in W8 will scare off many of the
companies that are slow to upgrade.

So in 5 years time, what versions of IE will realistically you need to
support?

    
    
      - IE6 (maybe - probably, hopefully, enterprise only at this stage)
      - IE8
      - IE10 (enterprise will never use it because Win8 is scary and different to them
      so for home users only)
      - IElatest-1 So IE13 or something?
      - IElatest IE14 or something.
    

Needing to support IE6 and IE10 will likely be mutually exclusive, so that's 4
versions for sites targeted at home users and 5 for sites aimed at both
enterprise and home users. Still ugly, but far from 72. And all those versions
will be dead in the timescale that the article is using. Insofar as IE6 will
ever die, anyway.

IE6 for home users will be dead at that point. Most of those old early XP
computers will be "broken" and replaced, even if "broken" is just slow and
annoying. Using XP in five years will be like using Win98/Win2k. Yes, people
do use them. No, they aren't a large enough group for most to worry about. I
even have a small amount of hits from Netscape 6. I haven't a clue what my
page looked like for them, and don't care.

In theory, if even IE is aiming for at least yearly releases from now on, no
future IE will end up in the position that IE6 is in, and that IE8 will find
itself in, as upgrading your browser frequently becomes a fact of life. The
compatibility modes will be much less important too, as the shorter lived the
browser, the less likely that the compatibility mode for it will ever be used.

(Sidenote: Sorry for the kludgy lists. HN has no proper formatting for them,
and they were causing horizontal scrollbars)

~~~
melling
IE6 is down to 1.25% in North America. It's dead. Please stop supporting it so
people really get the message.

IE7 is 5.25%. Probably slow moving corporations. Some of these guys won't
upgrade to IE8/IE9 until they're forced to. So, let's stop supporting IE7 so
they're forced to upgrade.

IE8 will be around for a couple of years.

IE9 is around 11.5%. Probably consumers who will gladly upgrade to IE10.

[http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-
monthly-201008...](http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version-eu-
monthly-201008-201108)

~~~
CWuestefeld
_IE6 is down to 1.25% in North America. It's dead. Please stop supporting it_

I wish. Our B2B ecommerce system has 34% IE6 usage, as of last week (although
this has shrunk by half over the past year or so). I cannot tell 1/3 of our
users to shape up -- especially since the ones that aren't upgrading are doing
so because they're so big it's incredibly difficult for them. In other words,
the ones still in IE6 are also the 800lb gorilla customers, to whom we can't
make such demands.

~~~
nitrogen
How well would they respond to enticements instead of demands? I'm thinking
something along the lines of "get these new features for free if you upgrade
to an HTML5-capable browser."

~~~
rhizome
Yep, progressive enhancement. Have features that only show up for modern
browsers, and announce them separately or at the top of any upgrade/version
announcement or changelog.

------
melling
"Doctor, doctor it hurts when I have to support 10 versions of IE"... errr...
"Then don't that!"

Only support the last two version. Warn people who come to your site that they
are using an outdated and unsupported browser. Point them to Chrome, Firefox
and Opera, which are all free.

Cut the Gordian Knot:<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gordian_Knot>

~~~
paulirish
As IE6 has died, I think we've kinda lulled into some sort of complacency and
I don't see heavy campaigning for browser upgrades currently.

I'd be happy to see it, and like I mention, prompting a IE7 user to upgrade to
IE9 is currently just irresponsible.

------
pavel_lishin
> Meanwhile, you won't have to worry about supporting Firefox 6 or Chrome 13
> in November.

You sure about that? Just because they're not officially supported doesn't
mean a significant number of people won't still be using them.

~~~
bzbarsky
As of about a week ago, when Firefox 6 was the current release, the Firefox
numbers looked like this (source is
[http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/msg/d1d4...](http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.planning/msg/d1d4aead06dfe1bb)
):

    
    
      Firefox 5 is < 10% and dropping.
      Firefox 4 is < 5% and dropping.
    

Those are percentages of Firefox market share, not overall market share. So
those correspond to somewhere around 2% and 1% of overall users respectively.
Note that in November Firefox 6 will be in the position of Firefox 4 right
now.

Also from the same post:

    
    
      The uptake curve got steeper between 5 and 6, which means
      more people are updating faster.

~~~
surrealize
"The uptake curve got steeper between 5 and 6, which means more people are
updating faster."

You have to wonder how much of that is a selection effect. Since there was a
change in the upgrade tempo in firefox, you'd expect to see the uptake curve
get steeper even if overall user behavior hasn't changed, because the users
that were on 5 when 6 came out would tend to be the more adventurous ones.

Edit: in other words, ff 5 didn't have as much time to accumulate less-
adventurous users as ff 4 did, so the 5->6 transition will appear faster than
the 4->5 transition.

~~~
bzbarsky
Yeah, that's a good question. It's hard to disentangle the effects given the
available aggregate numbers. We'll see how things look going forward.

------
dendory
Honestly, IE doesn't worry me anymore. Chrome does. Seems like every month
there's new Chrome-only experiments, and Google provides Chrome-only
extensions like offline Docs. Is it too much to ask for cross browsers sites?

------
d2vid
FUD - you don't have to support every browser. And it's especially
disingenuous to say that if you're developing websites/web applications you
should care about, say, IE20 users running in IE 5 compatibility mode.

~~~
alanh
I had a similar thought, but as the author points out in a thread here, it
_is_ still largely legitimate for library authors.

------
SurfScore
I think that this article puts a large amount of speculation that M$ will
continue to operate the same way. While I dont think anyone wants to BET on
them doing the right thing, the people upstairs do understand money, and they
also understand two of their biggest competitors (Google and Apple) both put
out better browsers than they have. IE9 showed that they at least understand
the importance of the web browser, and I would hope they would continue along
that path with 10. Another thing is that web browsers are rapidly changing and
evolving, I know Google is involved with a program now that allows C++ to run
natively in the browser. In 2019, browsers could be COMPLETELY different than
they are now. Backwards compatibility could become a forgotten term by that
point, or browsers could operate totally different than they do now. I think a
lot of what was written is true as far as the pain of past browsers, but
speculating on the future is often a fool's errand.

------
pixelcloud
I thought this was interesting.

<http://caniuse.com/#search=flexbox>

IE isn't going to have advanced CSS3 support until version 10! However,
Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Mobile Safari, and Android browser all support it
already. It just seems that Microsoft is incapable of staying on the edge.

~~~
smackfu
The important part on that page is: Working Draft. Microsoft has committed to
supporting standards, as soon as they are standards. It's certainly arguable
whether it's a good idea to implement draft standards that people write HTML
for that then change under them.

Also, this kinda seems like cheating: "While only recently a W3C
specification, this system has been in use for some time by Mozilla and Apple
for interface purposes." So they codified something that Mozilla and Apple
were already doing, then said that older versions of the browsers already
supported the non-existent standard. Impressive.

~~~
carbon8
_"Working Draft. Microsoft has committed to supporting standards, as soon as
they are standards."_

As you can see in the example pixelcloud cites, Microsoft does in fact
implement features based on working drafts. They are already doing this with
CSS3 transforms and will be doing so with CSS3 gradients, animations,
transitions and flexbox. Therefore, that doesn't actually appear to be the
issue at all.

 _"It's certainly arguable whether it's a good idea to implement draft
standards that people write HTML for that then change under them."_

Well, we are discussing CSS here, and that's what vendor prefixes (which
Microsoft uses, too) help avoid.

 _"So they codified something that Mozilla and Apple were already doing,"_

This is basically how the CSS3 standard progresses. Browser vendors implement
a vendor-prefixed feature, and that feature works its way through the
standards process. In fact, Microsoft does the same: <http://caniuse.com/css-
grid>

------
dredmorbius
The thought that occurs to me is that the adoption graph has a lot less to say
about the suckage of supporting IE6, and a lot more about the suckage of being
a Microsoft user.

Users of other browsers are on systems and/or workplaces _which allow them to
upgrade their browsers within reasonable time as new versions come out._

The MS-dedicated shops (and yes, I'm aware that most are large hidebound
organizations, enterprises, and/or government entities) _are stuck in their
own labyrinths of fragile, massively interdependent, legacy systems._

This suggests to me that the modern vs. legacy browser war may actually be a
proxy for ossified vs. agile organizations. There's still a great deal of
power in the ossified side, but it will be interesting to see how comparative
advantage plays out over the next 5-10 years (assuming the zombie apocalypse
doesn't strike first).

------
jfoster
IE is out of step with the other browsers and no longer has a majority market
share.

So there's two options: 1\. Innovate quickly and have access to amazing new
browser features, but only cater to 60% or so of the market. 2\. Support 100%
of the market, but with considerable more effort (slowing you down).

Both approaches are legitimate. I prefer the first one, but the users who
can't use my sites are going to want something equivalent for their outdated
browser.

------
aj700
Briefly: facebook timeline is terrible. Even Chrome can hardly cope with all
the javascript and reflowing as you load a profile page. There's no way in
hell IE6 on XP will be able to cope with it -- the rendering engine, OR EVEN
the cpu. Maybe that's the whole idea - Facebook could be Microsoft's best way
of forcing people to abandon IE6 (and so XP). Semi-seriously, semi-approvingly
I ask: Conspiracy?

~~~
robryan
I don't think Facebook has supported IE6 for a long time, at least that was
the case when I tested it 6 months ago.

~~~
aj700
you're probably right and I didn't know that. But all of what I said probably
applies to ie7 or even 8.

------
unreal37
<http://www.sitepoint.com/browser-trends-september-2011/>

IE 7 is less than 5% market share now, almost the same as IE 6. I don't see
how this predicts a future with 72 versions of IE. And how is this any
different than Firefox? I am running Firefox 4 on my office computer - can't
upgrade because of IT policy.

------
NHQ
You're wasting your time if you worry about legacy browser support. Period.
For every legacy browser out there--a number which only grows in spurts when a
browser becomes "legacy"--there are maybe a 1,000(,000) shiny new browsers
being shipped daily. Which do you care about? A stagnant legacy count, or a
growing demand of new, mostly compatible, mostly upgradable browsers?

------
HardyLeung
When I first read that there are 76 browsers to support, I was thinking...
Hmm, yeah this versioning thing is going out of hand. But it was Chrome + FF +
Opera + Safari + 72 versions of IE. Seriously? Projecting all the way to IE20
(2022) with a compatibility mode between any two versions of IE?

------
hussam
Help me understand this, is the issue that IE users are not willing to upgrade
to newer versions? or is it that Firefox/Chrome force users to upgrade while
IE doesn't?

Why is the fast release cycle a problem for IE but not for Firefox and Chrome?
why are the adoption charts different for IE than the rest?

~~~
MortenK
The issue is mainly with the large companies, who primarily seem to be using
IE. Due to their size, they can't auto-upgrade without incurring massive
costs.

For the average consumer, it's not really a problem.

------
Lagged2Death
_So in a few years from now, you'll be supporting one version of Chrome, one
version of Firefox, one of Opera, (probably) one of Safari, and ten versions
of IE._

I think the nightmare scenario couldn't possibly play out this way. We've all
seen what really happens when there are too many browsers to support; web
developers drop all pretense of supporting the least popular browsers, which
would in a case like this be Opera, Safari, and maybe Chrome. And sites put up
banners telling users to upgrade to the latest version of IE.

------
hvs
"Personally, I'm totally happy supporting the latest version of each of the
five browsers."

Yeah, so would we all. That's not really an argument.

------
madmaze
The Google Chrome version adoption chart very much drives home the difference
between chrome and IE!

------
fady
a dose of reality, and it's really a shame.

