Save the Developers!

[jducoeur]

Thanks to TechCrunch for pointing out the new SaveTheDevelopers website. Its purpose is very straightforward: to help prevent programmer insanity by ridding the world of the scourge of Internet Explorer 6.

To the non-programmers in my flist, it may not be obvious why this matters -- after all, IE6 works okay, right? The problem is, while it looks okay to the end user, it is *horrible* to the programmers. It's wildly incompatible with the rest of the Web, in a myriad of subtle ways. Seriously: making a sophisticated webpage work on IE6 can take as long as writing it in the first place. (There's a standard joke in the business that you spend 50% of all web-development time wishing a horrible death on Bill Gates for inflicting this thing on us; it wouldn't be funny if it wasn't so true.)

Historically, though, the pain of IE6 couldn't be avoided: too many people are using it, so you have to support it if you're going to have commercial success. It's okay for the end users, who get the support, and it's okay for Microsoft -- since the programmers are supporting their wretched code, Microsoft doesn't have any real problem. But for the programmers in the middle, it's a miserable experience.

I have to think about this pretty seriously for CommYou. I'm almost up to that point in the system, where I need to go waste a couple of weeks making the thing work on IE6 while *not* breaking it for everybody else. I'm tempted to simply not. Facebook already discourages you from using IE6 (because little bits and pieces of FB break if you use it), so my user base is already being pushed in the direction of either upgrading to the not-quite-as-bad IE7 or switching to a better browser like Firefox or the suddenly-more-relevant Safari. (Or, for the true geekerati, Opera.) Spending those weeks on actually *deploying* CommYou would be much more productive.

So here's a question (I'm not going to bother formalizing it into a poll): how many of you are using IE6 regularly, and actually care about that enough that it would be a problem for you to upgrade? I'm guessing that most users of IE6 are, at this point, just using it out of inertia more than anything else. Given that it's finally down to a minority of Web users (albeit a fairly large minority -- still 30+%), I'm thinking of just putting in a SaveTheDevelopers banner and instead working on making the product better...

ETA: Good food for thought -- thanks to everyone. It sounds like the main argument for IE6 is that a moderate number of people are forced to use it at work. That may well be enough to convince me to provide some minimal support -- enough to make it functional -- but not worry about making it work as *well* as with the more modern browsers. We'll see, but thanks for all the input!

Comments

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

There are people who still use Internet Explorer? (;

[talvinamarich.livejournal.com]

Mac.

Firefox.

Since FB is already deprecating IE6, you have a good basis for doing likewise. If it was fully supporting it, yeah--I'd say you were out of luck.

In this case, work smarter, not harder. Migrating browsers is not really such a painful thing, these days.

[dlevey.livejournal.com]

I use IE6 only in those few instances when I can't avoid it. If I may use a rather graphic image here (forgive me), I don't think there's enough lube in the world for someone to be able to force it on me full-time.

[cellio]

+1. (And when forced, I will first try the IE Tab extension in Firefox.)

[dreda.livejournal.com]

Everywhere else but work I get to run a sane browser. Across the board, my employer uses IE6 and actually is disinclined to upgrade to IE7, because so much web-based stuff (financials, mostly) has been hacked to work with IE6 and nobody wants to dive in and make it work with IE7.

(People use Firefox on the sly, but it is officially unsupported. We are also WinXP across the board, because IT is gunshy of Vista, which is also officially unsupported.)

[qarylla.livejournal.com]

There are probably a fairly large number of IE6 users who are like me. I use IE6 at work (they are not ready to upgrade to IE7) though I don't use it anywhere else. There are a large volume of users who are on services like Facebook (or LiveJournal) all the time from work and often those computers are a version or two behind the most current.

[calygrey.livejournal.com]

I am an inertia user. I cheerfully used IE until it became too unworkable a nuisance. For the last year and a half I've used Firefox.

[dsrtao]

I never use IE6. :)

[anastasiav.livejournal.com]

ditto what qaryllasaid. Many FB users are on at work or school, where they are forced to use whatever the IT dept wants - and, often, its IE6.

I'm surprised that (if FB does developer support, which I don't know that it does) that FB can't supply any data on percentage of users by browser.

[alexx-kay.livejournal.com]

I only use IE6 for a particular HR application at work which demands it.

[corwyn-ap.livejournal.com]

Whatever I have to say to get you to not support it, I will.

I use it only for checking my websites. Any pressure to get people off it is welcome. Those people who can only run IE6 at work? Forget about them, they should be working rather than goofing off anyways, right? You are catering to the technogeeks to start with anyway aren't you?

Is that enough?

[jducoeur]

Not necessarily -- but the jury is still out. It's also possible that I might strike a middle ground, of supporting IE6 just enough to make sure the product is *functional*, but not worry about the fine-detail level of making it pretty. (That is, IE6 bugs may get triaged really ruthlessly.)

We'll see. It's proving to be an interesting discussion, and while I may not have much respect for IT departments that haven't pushed out IE7 yet (I can argue that Vista is a bad idea, but IE7 looks like an improvement in every respect), they are a reality I can't affect. So the question is how much I am willing to compromise to support them...

[mindways]

I use IE6 all the time at work, because we develop and support a webapp of which a large chunk is (a) IE-only, and (b) used by banks, which tend to be both measured and conservative in their upgrade habits.

For personal use, I tend to use Firefox / Opera / Safari, in about that order of frequency.

I wholeheartedly endorse your abandonment of IE6 support. Admittedly, in its day, it let you do things that no other browser could accomplish in *any* way, and MS commanded such a huge share of the browser market that you could (and many sites unfortunately did) develop for it alone. But for some time now, there have been better ways.

(Gads. I remember when the v4 browsers were the hot shit, and dropping IE3 support was controversial. How time flies.)

[crschmidt.livejournal.com]

I think that the target market of Commyou users is more likely to use things other than IE6 than the web at large, and I think that it's not worth the effort to support IE6 anymore.

We still support it in OpenLayers, but MetaCarta's R&D projects are already starting to move away from supporting it, and our IE6 support in our main product documentation recommends Firefox for better performance/behavior.

[doubleplus.livejournal.com]

I only use IE of any version when a site requires it. I think that's still IE6 on my home machine, just because there were some things I didn't care for in IE7 when it first came out, and I use it infrequently enough that I never bothered to see if they've fixed them.

[meranthi.livejournal.com]

I use IE 6 at work, since that's what we got. It takes a long time to upgrade anything in a company this large, so we're a little behind the times. I use Firefox at home, when I'm on my personal machine or IE 6 when I'm on the laptop, largely because that's what's there and I haven't bothered to get Firefox on it yet.

[jenwrites.livejournal.com]

Ugh, I hate IE6. We have to support it at work, alas, because most of our users are still using it. I personally don't, though. I do most of my web surfing on Firefox, and when I need IE, I use IE7.

[laurion]

Let's look at your userbase:

We can discard Linux and Mac users as irrelevant to the question, as there was never a version 6 for either, and if you want to bring up the topic of IE 5, I need a baseball bat.

Vista never had IE 6. XP now forces an upgrade to IE 7 if the person is accepting updates. Win2k has no option for IE 7.

So your IE6 using market share consists of people using an unsupported by MS version of Windows, or people with an out-of-date, security weak version of XP.

So you have every right to downright ignore IE 6, and tell people to either upgrade their XP, including the update to IE 7, or to migrate to an alternative browser.

Opera is a lot of fun for the features it invents, but the biggest space it occupies is non-computer devices. How many people do you think are likely to use CommYou from their Wii? On the other hand, there may well be people trying to use it from their cell phones or Nintendo DS, so Opera is also one to test for, especially the way they run everything through a proxy for those mini-browser users.

[jducoeur]

Yaas. Really the main reason I care about Opera upfront is the hardcore geekerati, who tend to be early adopters and many of whom are partial to it. But it's a fairly marginal player, especially because I don't expect this client to be great for mobile use. My medium-term plan is to write an alternate client specifically for mobile use -- radically stripped-down with a focus on much lower bandwidth than the main client (which is something of a bandwidth hog). So while I'll probably put a *bit* of effort into Opera, it's not going to be a major focus upfront. Fortunately, since it's relatively standards-compliant, I expect I can support it decently well without too much pain.

(The real change is that Safari has potentially moved *way* up in importance in the past week. I'll be very curious to see what the iTunes push does to its market share...)

[laurion]

Safari *has* moved up. And a lot of people (including Apple fanboys) are *not* happy with how Apple abused what was nominally a software updater bundled with iTunes as a conduit to installing Safari. It was a dirty tactic to grab marketshare. That said, a lot more people now are possibly using it, and the reviews of the Windows version are considerably more vaforable than the beta windows version that was out. And of course, it is one of the dominant browsers on the Mac OS side. Hopefully, being as standards compliant as it is, you shouldn't need to expend much effort on it.

[pryder]

I'm not using IE6. But then again, I never did. I've never been a regular user of ANY version of Microsoft Internet Explorer; I have always preferred Netscape, then Mozilla, and now Firefox, because they (mostly) work better and offer me a consistent cross-platform experience. (I've just about always had at least three operating systems readily at hand.) When something doesn't work right in one of those, I reach for Opera, or perhaps Konqueror if I'm on a Linux box or Safari on a Mac. MSIE is a last resort, normally used only to run Windows Update.

[dryfoo.livejournal.com]

First of all, Microsoft has no qualms about telling visitors to their help websites to go to hell if they try to use any other browser than IE. No reason not to return the compliment, is there?

Next, do you really expect a lot of your early adopters and contributing users to be IE6-bound?

The only way IE6 is going away is if it stops working. The iron law of reality. If you're not ready to formally announce that your thing won't work with IE6 then announce that it won't work with it yet, and then keep kicking that can on down the road. Forever.

[jducoeur]

Yeah, I may well take pretty much that approach -- or at least, provide just the minimum support necessary to make CommYou functional under IE6, and triage the resulting look-and-feel bugs pretty mercilessly, potentially never getting to them. That may be the best compromise under the circumstances: giving the people who have no choice the ability to use IE6 when they must, but focusing my efforts on better browsers...

[dryfoo.livejournal.com]

I just finished putting up the new website for a Cambridge neighborhood group A4NC.org. It's a fairly simple page layout, clean, not at all "busy", no complex functionality, and by God if IE6 doesn't screw it up anyway.

You started this discussion just after I'd decided to "solve" my IE6 problem by completely ignoring it. I double- and triple-checked my code, and convinced myself it wasn't my problem, it was MS. So you catch me already somewhat flamey. But honestly, how much of their garbage do they just expect the rest of us to clean up for them?

Put your time into making your product wonderful, something you're proud of. If MS wants you to retro-crap it for IE6, let them buy you out for several million $$ first.

[jducoeur]

In principle, I agree. In practice, I have to think about my own market -- remember, CommYou is intended to be my livelihood, so I have to take a fairly cool look at the question. I don't *want* to support IE6; the real question is whether I still have to. We'll see...

[msmemory.livejournal.com]

Well, *I* seem to be IE-6-bound at work, at least pro tem. Which means that Justin's obvious test case of chatting with me in a spare window is going to be run under 6.

[baron-steffan.livejournal.com]

To the non-programmers in my flist, it may not be obvious why this matters -- after all, IE6 works okay, right?

Um, no. Even to a user like myself (QBasic was as sophisticated as my programming ever got), IE sucks obvious blatant rocks. I use Firefox, thank you. Even at work (well, my last job, anyway) I took it upon myself to download the Netscape suite, then Firefox and Thunderbird, so I could avoid IE and Outlook.