And yes, there are people out there still on IE6. And I'm so glad I have the power to delegate so that **** is no longer my problem

While I'm sure there are a few exceptions I'm pretty convinced supporting IE6 is a horrible business decision for any company that's not focused on China (and even then it's probably still not worth it).

http://www.ie6countdown.com/

Re:ember vs backbone
3s I googling found me this quote which I'll paraphrase. "ember is a full end to end solution that includes a template engine with bindings. Backbone is the lowest common denominator set of functions and pattern to be productive and is template engine agnostic"

Re: longer to load a page
I agree with shoelace here.their are studies that show faster loading websites retain users better.

IMO the benefits of using a common framework outweigh the performance gains you get from homegrown solutions. It's easier to hire developers that know the stuff and it's definitely better for marketing yourself. When I interview ppl who tell me the rolled their own MVC framework in this day and age I literally do a *lolwat*

And you're really lucky if that's your decision to make...

Do you guys really work at a place where you can show someone that IE6's market share is ~1% of your users and that supporting it will take X days (or weeks) and they still choose to support IE6? Mind boggling.

Anyway, even if its not your decision, it's still a horrible business decision.

There are also studies that show fixing bugs and adding features retain users better.

Nice troll.

My point was in response to those who didn't care about an extra 30k sent to the browser.

he's not trolling, the point is that 30K does not result in any noticeable difference

Maybe semi-trolling.

But yeah, that was my point. And that even if it did make a difference you still have to weigh the benefit against the cost (in time and in lack of bugs fixed / features added).

Just ignore those customers. Has to be +EV.
Lobby management to ignore those customers if you don't have say in the matter.

This, if google can so can you
http://support.google.com/a/bin/answ...n&answer=33864

Our biggest client - more than 50% of our revenue - is a massive corporation with offices in nearly every country on Earth. They still use IE6 in places, therefore all projects we do for them must support IE6. And they do have a large presence in Asia/China.

The only real issue with the decision from a business perspective - we would go out of business without this client - is that we don't charge enough for complex layouts that have to work in IE. We do some pretty impressive **** with it, though.

Yeah, that sounds like one of the few exceptions.

Although I feel like you nailed the way to handle this - pull out the cost of supporting IE6 and make it clear to your client what they're paying to support it.

Here's my take on IE6:

For my own sites, I don't give a two flying hoots if IE6 or IE7 renders perfectly correct. Yes, the sites gracefully degrade, but since my stuff isn't exactly meant for corporations and focuses almost strictly on regular users, I don't feel like it's worth my time. Of course, if I saw a huge portion of people using IE7 on my sites, then I would change my opinion.

Now let me tell you a little about my industry: I work in a supplier channel (don't call us "middle men") and essentially we sell to distributors who then do whatever it is they do with the product.

There's an interface that is the main marketplace of the industry. This interface is web-based, and it sort of acts like amazon, but enhanced with more industry-specific features. The distributor logs on and shops around for stuff to buy from suppliers.

This portal's market share? 100% of all suppliers and 66% of all distributors use this interface. Yes, they are the monopoly of the industry. There's actually a duopoly in the industry for this particular shopping experience, but the other company is a desktop application.

The web-based company just updated their site, and they "encourage" you to download the latest version of firefox. They believe so strongly in their users using firefox that the site doesn't even work in IE, Chrome, or any other browser. I'm not even kidding. You can log in and that is it. Wanna shop, browse, or see your dashboard? Go download firefox or it ain't working (Interesting aside is that the entire site is table layouts and slow a mud, but whatev's). The developer of this company believed so strongly in firefox and creating a different future for the industry at large that he decided that there should be no other available functionality.

Another portal that just recently opened has the same exact restrictions. Much better site and much better interface, but the point is that both of these companies decided to be forward thinking and do their sites in this style, dissing all other browsers but FF.

I have access to my company's browsing data, and one would think that, since 60% of the people use the monopoly interface since they really don't have another choice, that 60% of our visitors would be using ff as well. Or at least, the majority.

The stats?

IE: 60%
FF: 25%

IE6: 4%
IE7: 17%

Do you know how many hits that IE6 makes up per month? Thousands and thousands, and I work in a very small company. Now consider a large company that has 1% of all users using IE6, and you can see how many thousands of web views they receive every month.

There's something interesting buried in this statistic. Actually 2 things: The first is that most of the web hits on our site is done in-house, so that means that the user share of IE6 and IE7 is way higher. The second is that those, uh, silly 1% of "all customers" that are using the site? Think about it: if 1% of "all customers" are using this much site, then how many unique companies with IE6 is using our site every month? Who is that 1% hold-out? Big Corporations. YOu know, those uh... 1%'ers that hold all the money? You want decision-maker to abandon them?

Now you can see that although the 1% is small over-all, in many (I'd be far from shocked if it's most) businesses, it is a huge portion of total company income, and no, we don't have a ton of users from China.

And what if you have a site that recieves 100,000 hits per month? Well, 1% of that is 1,000 hits per month. That means that some company, with frumpy IE, is using your site 30 times a day! But this assumption is actually wrong. Why? Because Average Joe is using some other browser, but the big C's are still using what they've always used, and that is IE6. So, the web-user statistics are going to be much higher than 1% no matter how you chop it. So, reality is that 1% should be adjusted to something considerably higher, like 5 to 10%, and that 1% company sure has a ton of power.

So, what would you want me, or anyone in decision-making positions, to do? You want me to march up to the big cheese and tell him that IE6 is an obsolete POS and that we should upgrade our stuff? This is the same as saying it's okay to **** any woman in the world, including your mother. That's the hand that feeds our mouths, and many business's mouths, in the world. Do you expect me to tell a large client they better spend their money to upgrade their stuff so I can be happy and modern? Is that a joke?

I couldn't possibly say screw that "only 1%" because they are simply too large for all I know until some very strong evidence to the contrary presents itself. How can anyone expect me to take a risk like that without being 99.5% sure? That decision can cost my company a large client, tons of money, and my coworker's jobs, and I most certainly can't have any of those 3 items, especially the job losses, on my conscience.

Sitting on the other side of the desk is a totally different ballgame, let me tell you, and yeah, it sucks to go against my own personal wishes, but if I never went against my own wishes and wants, then I'm not making any decisions, and I can guarantee you that I am not the only marketing guy in the world who doesn't think like I do, considering so many are, in fact, familiar with programming (marketers crunch data all day), user trends, and have a certain prediliction toward keeping fresh and current. All of a sudden reality hits, and you have to go around looking stupid, read all the bs online about how "we" are making poor decisions because "we" bow to the lowest common denominator. I call bs unless you actually know what it's like and see the data for yourself. If you still feel the same way afterwards, then your brain is disconnected from reality.

/rant!

It's not all about saying upgrade or fu vs IE 6/7 dave. If you design your site with progressive enhancement in mind then there is no issue and you'll support them without having to do anything special for the most part.

The idea is to serve what can be perceived as the best possible page based on the browser serving the page, then let the browser render the page as it was designed to do with as little monkey patching as possible.

Think of a page in layers, from the ground up you would have something like this:

#4 Extensive Javascript
#3 Minimal Javascript
#2 CSS
#1 HTML

Layer #1 is always going to work on IE 6/7.
Layer #2 is mostly going to work on IE 6/7 but there's definitely going to be some styling that gets ignored (rounded corners, etc.).
Layer #3 is mostly going to work on IE 6/7.
Layer #4 is probably going to be crippled/non-functional on IE 6/7 so the obvious solution is simple... don't serve layer #4 to IE 6/7.

So where does that leave you with IE 6 or 7 in the end? You get a fully functional page that doesn't look as modern/cool as it does on more modern browsers.

There's 2 crowds of internet users who are stuck using old browsers.

1. The hipster dude at the office and due to corporate bs he's locked to using IE 6/7.
2. The random old person who's using windows XP because that's what their relative setup for them years ago.

#1 understands that at home most sites look/respond better but he's not going to blame your site because almost every site is worse at the office.

#2 couldn't care less that your layout does not contain rounded corners, they can barely read what's on the screen anyways.

First, big enterprise software with centralized decision makers is probably the main exception where supporting IE6 makes sense.

Second, Dave, your rant misses the number one point that many other people miss. You compare a scenario with two exactly the same products but one of them supports IE6. That's not what the question is in the vast majority of cases.

Not supporting IE6 (and all older small market share browsers) means building fewer other features, it means fewer bugs fixed, it means a longer testing/dev cycle, and so on. In most cases you can probably invest the money you save not supporting IE6 into other things that make you more money.

Anytime a small percentage of customers takes a much greater proportion of resources to serve a business needs to thing long and hard about dropping those customers.

Dave: The question is not "how many people visit my website in IE6" it's "How much money do those people make me". If the answer to that question is less than the cost to support IE6, then it's easy to ignore them.

Similar to my last point, its actually not even just this. There are lots of things that businesses can do that will make them money - the goal is to find the things that you can do that make you the most money.

I would add even on top of this that there is a significant morale cost to your developers by making them support IE6. It can just be a miserable experience, it can make them feel like they work at a ****hole backwards company and just hate their job, etc. The hidden impact can be pretty huge imo.

Definitely, great point.

easy under.

Yup

Got a school project to develop a webapp with at least one api and basically had free reign to do whatever I'd like. It's due in a couple weeks and here's what I got so far: http://www.theaustinmunro.com/DIG450...erProject.html .

Biggest issue right now is there is a set image size and some of them look squishy while some look fine. It's supposed to be able to work with a mobile device easily so I tried to keep it compact. Any thoughts/comments?

Cool, fast, and responsive. Very nice.

For images there are two things you can do.

Pick height or width and leave the other blank. After playing with your app you should probably just have width and let the images naturally adjust their height.

You could use something like image magick to crop all of the images to a certain height/width. I've found this to actually be pretty good. Just about every programming language has an image magick wrapper/library. Be aware that this process is slow and you want to do it ahead of time and not on the fly.

Easy fail but it's close to 2.5. The answer is 3 + myself, 4 if you want to include someone who wasn't a developer on the project but was involved in development decisions.

The most successful site I've worked on had 15,000 active members back in 2000. The site was involved with gaming (not poker) but that's as far as I want to go with hinting at what site it was. The site is long gone though and it was started/ran by a friend and myself.

I wouldn't work as a corporate developer even if they offered stupid amounts of money. I have a few friends who are involved in large corporations. The horror stories he shares with me make me want to throw up. If you want to talk about unproductive, you should go ask some random devs who work at large (but not Google-like) corporations hah.