Why do you enable old browsers?

[incrediBILL]

I'm just curious of all the reasons designers continue to coddle the older browsers.

If we all stop doing it, they'll be forced to upgrade when nothing works properly.

Let's face it people, those still using Flash 4 can't see modern videos, or worse yet they still have it's pre-cursor Shockwave installed.

Those technologies moved forward, the old code won't display the new files, yet the web pages works perfectly on all the browsers.

Not trying to start a Flash discussion, just using it as an example of how they force upgrades and eventually the latest version you need requires the latest browser, etc.

Here's the point:

When the new technology moves forward in browsers, instead of forcing everyone to upgrade like Flash did, us webmasters for whatever reason keep coddling people using the old tech.

It costs us TIME to implement, MONEY wasted on old tech, RETRO TESTING lots of browsers that should be buried, BLOAT all the retro code bloats CSS, javascript, HTML, etc., it's a big old mess and it's time to stop the madness.

Instead, why don't we just cut the umbilical cord and only keep code current for the last couple of browser versions? Even that's enough to make you go bats.

That's why I rely on things like Bootstrap and jQuery to worry about all those backwards compatibility issues and if their code fails, so be it.

I'm not spending one waking moment worrying about MSIE 6, 7 or even 8. They're all past tense.

Bottom line: If everyone stops supporting the old junk, people will have no choice but to upgrade to keep pace or simply stop using the web. We're responsible for the web not evolving as quickly as possible by enabling Neanderthals and Luddites to stay online.

[lucy24]

We exist for the user. The user doesn't exist for us.

[mack]

I see your point, if we stop building with older browsers in mind they "should" upgrade, or just go to the competing site where their browser works fine.

Does the average Joe surfer even know about the upgrade process, and what an "old browser" is. They just click the internet icon on the desktop and go surf.

Mack.

[incrediBILL]

We exist for the user. The user doesn't exist for us.

Really? Most cell phone providers top updating the smart phone OS about 18-24 months after it ships. If you want a later OS, you have to get the new phone. They make it very hard to keep using your old phone as the new whiz bang features won't work.

competing site where their browser works fine.

Note that I said "EVERYONE HAS TO STOP SUPPORTING OLD BROWSERS" - in the context of that scenario, what other reason would you have without worrying about competitor sites, which I don't based on sheer percentages and statistics of browsers hitting my sites.

Does the average Joe surfer even know about the upgrade process

windows upgrades MSIE, Firefox upgrades itself, so what does the average Joe have to know?

Only the average Joe still running XP before all the self-upgrading started, their time is done.

[rainborick]

The web developer/smartphone manufacturer analogy is a poor one. The web developer is trying to attract and support new users/customers where the smartphone manufacturer has already closed the deal, which is a very different proposition. The smartphone market so regularly abuses their customers that their update policy hardly matters anyway.

It seems to me that the issue of supporting older browsers is diminishing every day. The issue has always been older versions of IE, and unless you have an unusual user base, it really only means IE8. Statcounter shows its usage started 2014 at about 7% and has slowly drifted toward 5% since then, where I expect it to remain for the next year or so until it drops to true insignificance.

And if IE8 is the baseline, that's not so bad. You lose some advanced CSS selector options, some new 'display' and 'background' properties, and a handful of special effects, but it's general support for W3C standards is tolerable. It's rare that any shortcomings it has would seriously impair the user's access to a page - it just won't look as good as you intend. The only time I put any significant effort into supporting IE8 is for a client whose office is stuck with it, and even that's just a matter of using CSS3 PIE, which adds most of the features I need.

[LifeinAsia]

We exist for the user. The user doesn't exist for us.

Exactly. And people tend to forget that a lot of people do not have the option to upgrade their browsers, especially in a corporate environment, or are not tech savvy enough to do something that (to most of us) is a simple upgrade, or use the Internet in a shared environment (public library, Internet cafe, loaned computer).

Most cell phone providers top updating the smart phone OS about 18-24 months after it ships.

Most webmasters don't have a base of millions of users that they can force to upgrade. Most likely if they tried it, those users would just go elsewhere and complain about the site being broken.

People tend to use their computers much longer than they do their individual phones. But hey, if Microsoft subsidized a new computer (or even a new OS) for me, I might consider it...

[incrediBILL]

especially in a corporate environment

If they cannot use them to do their jobs, they'll upgrade, we enable lazy IT to stop upgrading.

, or are not tech savvy enough to do something that (to most of us) is a simple upgrade

As I already pointed out, most of it is automatic these days, not an issue. I got MSIE 8,9,10, etc. without lifting a finger.

or use the Internet in a shared environment (public library, Internet cafe, loaned computer).

Not a big source of revenue, I wouldn't be concerned about them.

Again, if nothing works for them the library will upgrade.

We're enabling this crap to continue by coddling them.

Almost every example is co-dependency caused by webmasters enabling old browsers.

Stop the insanity.

[ronin]

We exist for the user. The user doesn't exist for us.

I have sympathy for lucy24's position and am absolutely in favour of cross-browser-compatible, cross-platform-compatible, cross-device-compatible designs.

But I also agree with incrediBILL that continuing to support really old software means, inarguably, more work now and in the future - for no obvious benefit to anyone but the person who insists mindlessly on using that really old software.

When I started a new long-term project back in mid-2010 (yep, still working on it, four years later!) I resolved to build it with HTML5 & CSS3, I decided that I would spend a little time on graceful degradation but, basically, IE8, IE7, IE6 & IE5.5 could go hang.

Principally because it takes 5 minutes to update them and it's free.

My reasoning was that if you had a black and white TV and you didn't like watching in black and white and you could get a new, replacement colour TV for free and still couldn't be bothered to do that, then it was no-one else's problem really that you were stuck with black and white television when you wanted colour television.

[Fotiman]

I agree with rainborick. Any versions of IE < 8 have no significant market share any more, and IE8 has most of what you'd need today from a CSS point of view. I don't think supporting old browsers requires nearly as much work today as it did 2 years ago.

[martinibuster]

Money. The bottom line is the bottom line.

I don't give a crap if accommodating older browsers is inconvenient for developers. Too bad. It's about the money and only about the money.

Currently IE 8 is statistically insignificant. Money says ignore it.

[ronin]

Hmm. Economic justification (or lack thereof) can't be the answer to everything though, can it?

Sometimes things are not economically justified. They're still worth doing.

I very much agree in general with putting the bottom line first.

But if money said ignore accessibility, ARIA can't be economically justified for this project, I think I'd still want to do it anyway.

That's partly because individuals who have impaired senses are not in a position to be able to do much to change their situation.

While individuals with 8 year old browsers surely are.

So, at this point, who is still coddling the older browsers?

If there is no good economic argument for it, it's bad for efficiency and deadline compliance, bad for technological considerations like server space and bandwidth... isn't it time, as IncrediBILL suggests, to consign the older browsers to the dustbin of history?

[incrediBILL]

I don't give a crap if accommodating older browsers is inconvenient for developers. Too bad. It's about the money and only about the money.

Yeah, and you can't recover the money lost developing and testing for those old browsers.

I think it's a statistical situation and anything 1% or less isn't worth my effort.

Re: the B&W TV metaphor, the government switched all our TV to digital, so they either had to upgrade or get a converter, but in the end the days of old B&W are over.

Sadly, I still know some people using tube TVs instead of flat screens, but I know if their SD signal went away they'd all get HD TVs that day.

I'm doing HTML 5 all the way from now on for everything new I build and anything that can't display it is out of luck.

It's not that I don't want their money, but if they aren't keeping current they probably don't have any money to spend in the first place.

[lucy24]

I know if their SD signal went away they'd all get HD TVs that day.

Guess again. Some of us simply stop watching TV.

[piatkow]

IE8 was still accounting for over 5% of hits on my site in the last week, a fraction under the number of people using an iphone.

but if they aren't keeping current they probably don't have any money to spend in the first place.

You clearly aren't in the B2B market. Upgrading a blue chip company running well over 100 applications with maybe a dozen departmental configurations on thousands of desktops is something you do as seldom as possible. Apart from the direct cost it means diverting effort from business critical work. You don't get a budget like that just because the browser has been made prettier.

[n0tSEO]

Easy to solve: all browsers below a certain version will get a plain HTML template with little CSS and carry a line "Upgrade your browser if you want to enjoy our latest, wonderful design!".

If a visitor is only looking for content, they might not upgrade, but everybody else will. :)

[incrediBILL]

Easy to solve:

Still wasting time, money and resources making that easy solution.

I'm sure I could knock out a script that would script an HTML page down to raw text, which is even easier with HTML 5 pages, and just dump it on the screen, but then again I'd be encouraging the problem to persist.

Upgrade your browser if you want to enjoy our latest, wonderful design!".

I'd just send a single line "Upgrade your browser if you want to access this site!"

We've done it before, back in the Netscape/MSIE wars people swung back and forth until the browser companies fixed critical flaws as we blocked that browser and told people to use the competition.

Funny, if we were willing to do it then, why not now?

I don't know how far backwards Google, Bing and Facebook support browsers, but I'm sure they set a limit. It would certainly make life easier for the rest of us if just one major site raised the browser bar to only 3 past versions.

OH WAIT!

Google already does support only MODERN BROWSERS!

[googleenterprise.blogspot.com...]

For example, desktop notifications for Gmail and drag-and-drop file upload in Google Docs require advanced browsers that support HTML5. Older browsers just don’t have the chops to provide you with the same high-quality experience.

For this reason, soon Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we’ll begin supporting the update and stop supporting the third-oldest version

Also see:
[support.google.com...]

We support the latest version of Google Chrome (which automatically updates whenever it detects that a new version of the browser is available). We support the current and previous major releases of Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari on a rolling basis. Each time a new version is released, we begin supporting that version and stop supporting the third most recent version.

I'm not sure if this applies to Google search as well, but if people are finding your site via various Google technologies, those people are limited to certain browser versions.

If it's good enough for Google the bulk of the traffic, it's good enough for me.

P.S> A lot of the oldest browser user agents that hit my sites tend to be scrapers and bots that never upgraded their user agent. Therefore, in many instances you may be wasting all your time supporting scrapers!

Upgrading a blue chip company running well over 100 applications with maybe a dozen departmental configurations on thousands of desktops is something you do as seldom as possible.

Yes, I've dealt with that nonsense before (business, government, even the NSA) and they were spending a ton of money fighting bugs that didn't exist in the next version. We had some VERY heated debates over that nonsense.

I've also dealt with companies that do it right that and rolled out updates as they came along, the entire company ran the same software across the board and they were constantly upgrading. If issues came up that impacted everyone, they just rolled it back as easily. It can be done.

[Kendo]

Why do you enable old browsers?

So that users with old browsrs can access the site!

Just because you and your associates have a fixation about getting the latest as soon as it comes out, there are many managed networks still using much older versions of browsers. I often encounter these in corporate and educational networks.

Besides, updating to the latest verion can be a RPIA. For example, I don't like the look of the latest Firefox browser (who authorised that theme change?) and had to go to great lengths to restore it. Then when I want to debug JavaScript I now get a lot of new options (unwanted tools) for debugging everything including my Xmas dinner, but the JavaScript debugger of old was more accurate and simpler to use and comprehend. Chrome is useless for debugging so what other options are there?

That is why even tech savvy users stick with older browsers and if I hadn't recently rebuilt my workstation after deleting my archive of earlier versions, I would install and use a Firefox version between 16 and 23, and only install the latest version in a VMware partition that rarely sees the light of day.

[blend27]

@IB

especially in a corporate environment

If they cannot use them to do their jobs, they'll upgrade, we enable lazy IT to stop upgrading.

, or are not tech savvy enough to do something that (to most of us) is a simple upgrade

As I already pointed out, most of it is automatic these days, not an issue. I got MSIE 8,9,10, etc. without lifting a finger.

This is not how corporate world works at all. Try 72000 employees & contractors from all over the world, more than 70 countries, imagine a budget on that one. Some PCs are managed my by local techs, some by centralized help desk. There is a company wide effort to upgrade from XP(max IE 8) to Win 7(IE8+). That effort will take 2 years more, we are half way there though.

Meanwhile we have to write new & maintain old large apps(some from last decade or even millennium), apps that are IE7 complaint. Some of the larger older apps have reports that display reports with in reports, tables, where each TD has its own inline CSS that consists of 100+ characters. brlb brlb brlb ....

Some development Managers are stuck in the last decade and regard to BootStrap as JQuery and to JQuery as Modern JavaScript. As soon as that is mentioned in a meeting for a new App, higher management shots it down because they think it is JAVA and JAVA is viruses.

Default Win7 Image that gets loaded onto new machines is Browser Mode: IE 8, Document Mode: IE 7.. See the differences in GUI: [getbootstrap.com...] Try it in you IE 9. Hit F12.

Last Year one of the QA Managers was giving it a last try on a big NEW App in Firefox(none standard) and saw that TEXTAREA controls had ability to expand and did not in IE 7. That was marked as a Critical BUG in the system. Project Deployment to Production went on hold for 2 weeks until we could calm his inner ego down and explain to rest of None IT what was going on.


In a managed Corporate IT environment Browsers do not Upgrade themselves, if they do - Head of IT should roll. Turn over of none technical personal brings the challenges to AppDev, cause we are bombarded with browser compatibility question.


Wish it was that simple. I think it all depends on the audience after all. Other than that I like You points.

[graeme_p]

I think that, in general, since IE6 died users have been more inclined to upgrade, so browser support does not need to go as far back as it used to. Some sites may need to do more, but I think that "the last two stable versions of major browsers are tested" is good enough. If you support both Chrome and Safari you probably support all the minor webkit based browsers as well (I use one and it works on most site).

@Kendo, what about security updates?

[graeme_p]

There is a company wide effort to upgrade from XP(max IE 8) to Win 7(IE8+).

I hope you are paying huge amounts to MS for custom support - or are you just hoping for the best with regard to security?

[Asia_Expat]

I stopped supporting anything older than IE9. The beautifully simple new RWD design I'm working on for my sites would be seriously complicated if I was to support old browsers. I simply don't have the time or resources to create hacks et al. If I did have the time and resources, I'd be spending them pushing my online endeavours in a forwards direction, not backwards.

Since cutting off old, out of date browsers, the relief is palpable. I've also not noticed any detectable drop in visitors as a result, or conversions. People stuck on IE6, I really couldn't care less about them, it's their problem, not mine. If you want to use an analogue cellphone, you can't expect cellular carriers to provide analogue signals so your ancient phone will work.

[edited by: Asia_Expat at 1:51 pm (utc) on Aug 16, 2014]

[n0tSEO]

@incrediBILL - I think that old browsers can be redirected to the simplest version of your website (the mobile version, the no-JS version, etc.). It won't add time or money, but it could still help people browse the Web while *gently* pushing them to upgrade to enhance their experience.

There are people out there who stick to simpler or older browsers for a principle, so I don't think it's all about laziness here.

I know people who will only use Lynx or an old version of Firefox because their life is all about minimality. :)

[blend27]

@graeme_p

I hope you are paying huge amounts to MS for custom support - or are you just hoping for the best with regard to security?

Dell does it for a fee for large Enterprises(they make a pretty penny), for much less than $MS(believe it or not). There are plenty of professional firms that do the Job as well. $MS support is too,000,000.01 bloated. At the same time why would anyone employ/keep on retainer the company that sold you the soft that keeps .............

[JAB Creations]

I outright killed support for IE6 circa 2010, maybe earlier. I allow though hardly ever test IE7/8/9 though I tolerate it with an upgrade message for users.

If you do statistics based on the user agent and not DOM object detection then take your IE statistics and halve them for IE8+, take IE7's number kill off 80% and take IE6's number and kill off 90% and you will then have a rough idea of human visitors using IE instead of spam bots. I now literally get maybe one visitor a month using IE6 who isn't a spam bot and I have a very good mix between American and international visitors on my site.

I watch my visitors log and pay attention to what pages and browsers people use. I have one person from Kentucky that slowly upgraded to IE8 on XP from a school and eventually added Chrome frame (e.g. Chrome 14.0) to continue visiting my site. I'll also visit older pages and try to keep them up-to-date when possible.

Bottom line: older browsers are being dropped slowly though surely. For the professionals amongst us it is our clear right to set reasonable expectations for clients; I'm not supporting 10 year old browsers unless they want to pay me and what I dictate if I determine there is a reasonable price. A large part is also the developer/designer's ability to realize that backwards compatibility isn't horrible unless you're talking IE6 or you need RGBA for IE8 or older so your own skills and ability to understand how to implement things does come in to play...though most people don't write all of their web software from scratch like I do so that is a subjective point.

It's our duty as professionals to tell the client what reasonable expectations are. Think of your response to legacy support in a similar sense to what a luxury car dealer would say if you were looking for a limo to do extreme off-roading in the heart of the Amazon, it's simply unrealistic. I am not interested in just any client I can get and I try to make sure I don't end up in the financial position to be tempted to take those type of unrealistic "clients". Life is what you make, most of what keeps us from doing what we need to in life is not others but the internal reinforcement of the external.

- John

[skunker]

You guys are lucky.

I work for the US GOV and over 85% of government visitors use IE8 DESPITE having Chrome and Firefox installed!

[tangor]

I think that most of the older WEBSITES still support all the new browsers, so if those webmasters are still coding that way, or perhaps a little more "current", they will still continue to support today's browsers (all of them, including ugh! IE6+)

While slightly tongue-in-cheek, there is some truth to that. Not all websites have moved to CSS. There's a significant number of sites that simply don't require the bells and whistles. Thus, those older browsers rejected by the high tech sites will have a place to go... and they will, while that "old code" site continues to work wit the new gadgets.

[IanKelley]

I agree, it's time to move on.

At this point supporting older browsers really means supporting old versions of IE. Chrome and Firefox have had automatic updates built in forever.

In the small demographics where people still use ancient versions of IE, maybe it's worth worrying about, but as some have mentioned, the percentage of old IE visitors in most demographics is insignificant.

We're well past the point where most websites need to worry about outdated browser versions for profit/popularity reasons.

My feelings about this: yay!

[incrediBILL]

It's our duty as professionals to tell the client what reasonable expectations are.

We're supporting browsers older than companies are legally required to supply parts for appliances.

California Civil Code (section 1793.03) specify three-year minimum (seven years for sets or appliances priced $100 and up) for electronics and household appliances (regardless of warranty)

MSIE 6 - August 27, 2001 (13 years ago)

MSIE 7 - October 18, 2006 (7 years ago)

MSIE 8 - March 19, 2009 (5 years ago)

If your browser is old enough to get a bar mitzvah, it needs to be replaced.

I think MSIE 8 is sufficient as the oldest backwards compatible browser as far as MSIE goes as anything past 5 years isn't capable of dealing with reasonable technologies used in modern sites.

[keyplyr]

...why don't we just cut the umbilical cord and only keep code current for the last couple of browser versions? Even that's enough to make you go bats.

That's why I rely on things like Bootstrap and jQuery to worry about all those backwards compatibility issues and if their code fails, so be it.

Agreed on both points.

[Narsto]

I don't anymore. There's just too many issue with old browsers and is very time consuming to accommodate them all. I understand that we have to cater to all browsers even the old one but it's now at the point where it's impractical.