Time for the IE7 tax :)
Hello IE7 it was nice knowing you - but Enough is enough so now from 2012 me or my company geek Royale wont support ie7 for clients unless they are willing to pay for that "extra service".
I first introduced this taxation back in 2009 when ie6 was about to die a blog and it worked remarkable well - no one suddenly wanted that ie6 specific markup & css.
This decision is one i have wanted to take in a loooong time and now that microsoft gave us all a surprice x-mas presents: they decided to take of the gloves and forcing ie6 & ie7 to be upgraded to ie8 (on xp).
Its the final straw + the recent drops in the danish marked from 15% around the summer 2011 to 5% in november, and with an upcoming update its time to move on.
what about those that cant upgrade?
Now some might come and cry about the poor people that cant upgrade and boohohohoho - sorry its not my problem anymore - go find another company that wants to do that or have the resources to keep supporting dead code.
As a small company you really need to choose you what you want to use your time one.
its to time demanding to keep crappy browser support So if a client wants to keep support for ie7 then they simply have to pay for that as an added value.
What about ie8
Well unfortunately microsoft didnt gave us all the ultimate xmas presents and realeased ie10 on the xp platform, so it looks like we have to be stock with ie8, its not optimal. Its still gonna be a PITA that it dont support border-radius shadings animations & all the hot css3 & html5 thingies. So it looks like pie still have some miles more in it
So Drupal8
Hey Drupal now ive cutten off ie7 - so how about we kill support for it NOW in Drupal8?
What happend to the basic principle of not hanging on legacy crap code - developers you have no idea of how much shit we now can remove from the theme layer & how happy the theming community would be.
Hell ill even promise to bitch 15% less in 2012 if the dude with the pointy hair pulls the plug for ie7 support in drupal8 core.
original grafik - the glue eating ie & the browser wars :)
btw fire fox 3.6 - youre on the list to
Happy update
Patch #1217788 by droplet: drop IE7 support from Drupal 8.x.
yup ie7 is not supported in Drupal8 :)
drop it:
drop it: http://drupal.org/node/1217788
Fully agree
IE6 and 7 support should be left to rot in one of those open-air french sewers where it belongs, or alternatively handed over to any contrib masochist who fancies a break from the crocodile clips and hot poker. I can't believe its 2012 and we're still bloating code with hacks for those excrement-plastered browser effigies.
Totally agree with your "tax"
Totally agree with your "tax" from a web dev perspective.
However I was really surprised when we dropped IE6 support in Drupal 7 because one of the largest growing Internet markets is China which somehow has an IE6 market share of 25.2% (I think its because there's so much piracy in China and cracked versions of Windows can't update IE). I realise "everyone else" is doing "the drop" but it makes me wonder how web dev in China is going and how it could of been a foot in the door for Drupal with everyone else dropping IE6. In saying that I'm not putting up my hand to be the Drupal IE6 maintainer :)
But I do like to think of it from a marketing perspective with the total worldwide market share for IE6 and 7 at 12.13% it may not seem like a lot. But if you start talking about a 12.13% drop in sales it quickly makes it worth the cost of supporting older browsers no matter how much I hate them.
to be very honest . i really
to be very honest . i really dont care about marketing
We cant let the drupal core platform suffer based on what a they are doing on pirated software in china.
and if someone wanna step in and make a drupal8 now supporting ie6 well then they can go ahead, theres even a market for them, where no one wanna pay anything ;)
I realise your comment "to be
I realise your comment "to be very honest . i really dont care about marketing" was just you being brash and not really thinking about what you were saying, but I'm gonna argue my point anyway :)
The whole purpose of a website is to complete a set goal. For some sites that goal is a commerce transaction, for other sites its raising awareness of their cause. If dropping browser support causes a 1% drop in conversions that's enough for many clients to care. I have clients who spend weeks doing multi-variant split tests to gain small increases in conversions and if supporting old browsers gives them that larger increase its worth the support. So instead of thinking about the percentage of users that use a browser we need to think of the percentage of lost conversions vs the time it takes to maintain. The maintenance might win out but lets at least think about what those numbers really mean to our Drupal clients.
I agree with your "must work but not look alike" concept.
No i care about the web.
It was not just me beeing honest, or not thinking or whatever!
I am actually thinking about every word im saying,even that its with an accent & spelling errors So let me put this really straight:
I dont care about marketing convertion rates or other market Business yadi yadi.
Its not my line of work or passion & will ever never be.
If you want that kinda discussion i guess theres better blogs to visit.
Im a webdesigner, so my focus is on getting sites done & maintainable - as long as we have to support web browsers like ie6 & ie7 (and ie8) that have been holding the web back for years - then were stopping the web evolving, and were making the business of beeing a webdesigner so much harder on ourself,that is how the business have been now for 13 years - and im sick n tired of it.
Im in the field where its about making shit websites looking good & as close to eachother as posible and now were adding the mobile browsers to - well then something gotta give.
If you want to support lets say ie4.5 for for macos9 ( i had a client a couple of years ago that wanted that - even that the OS9 at that point were dead) - well fine with me go ahead, add all the little tricks, that gonna cost you xx% more developing time. Theres nothing wrong with that.
But if have to support another webiste with an old crappy browser, then im gonna be adding a % on top of the price. simple as that.
Drupal supporting ie7 - well Drupal8 is probably gonna be out in 1.5 years from now, at that point ie7 will be dead dead dead dead. So to add all those little tricks to get IE7 to behave as the rest of the browsers, will cost the core developers a ton of time, will force us to write code that is not as optimal as it can be & basically make a version where we have to carry around BS code for yet 3 more years - so the ie7 hacks will be in drupal in 2015 for no reason at all.
Its really pretty simple: do you wanna support old browsers that no one uses anymore, or the mobile platform? . somethings gotta give - unless its expected that the frontend developers just pour more work into it & make it magically work - well i will if somebody wanna pay for that service of supporting dead browsers, then ill gladly do it.
Belive me clients dont understand why it dosn't look that same, why theres missing shadows & transitions on the old machine from home, and they really dont care about the explenations about browsers etc. "just fix it youre a geek right" is the normal attitude.
IE6 support was dropped in D8, not D7
Just to clarify, IE6 support was removed from Drupal 8, likely out sometime in 2013. Unfortunately, D7 still has to carry that legacy baggage until Drupal 9. SNIFF. Should be plenty of time for people to upgrade. :)
hopefully we wont support dead browsers ...
i surely hope thats a thing we can take up for reconsideration later in the process - say about in 4 months after microsoft have forced the ie6 & ie7 up to a ie8 version.
It would be foolish to keep supporting a browser thats used by no-one (besides some hacked xp versions) - not to say a complete waste of resources in the frontend community.
This will be holding us back - a more progressive way would be a "must work but not look alike" on non compliant browsers - then ppl can fix that in their loca themes instead so drupal dont carry around legacy code for old aged out browsers.
ooh well on the other hand when D8 is out in around a year or so ie7 is totally gone & dead anyway & we can just rip those .theme.css files out & get out css cleaned up.
Hopefully we can at that time officially rip out the support (a year after everybody else)
its still a waste of effort & debugin time, to support a browser we know is dead when d8 is comming out in 2013 - we could use that efford for so much other good stuff.
if we look even further i surely hope that when d9 comes out we are not talking about browsers anymore but features that they (the browsers) must support.
So get 'er done!
Please don't take this the wrong way, but man. If you spent half as much time complaining about continued IE7 support as you did testing and reviewing droplet's patch, we'd all be much further along. :) Just saying. :)
trüe
he he true that ;)
its been 13 years of ie bitching -hard habit go get out of
Oh, that's not so bad then. I
Oh, that's not so bad then. I remember reading it in the issue queue but I guess I got my commit times mixed up.