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Aussie Online Retailer Impose IE7 Tax
First time accepted submitter Techy77 writes "Online retailer Kogan will impose a new tax on its customers that visit its website using Microsoft's outdated Internet Explorer 7 web browser, which means they will spend 6.8 percent more than customers on browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome. From the article: 'Kogan said his company was able to keep prices low by using technology to make its business efficient and streamlined. however its web team was having to spend a lot of time making its new website look normal on IE7.
"It’s not only costing us a huge amount, it’s affecting any business with an online presence, and costing the Internet economy millions,” Mr Kogan said.
“As Internet citizens, we all have a responsibility to make the Internet a better place. By taking these measures, we are doing our bit.”'"
Wouldnt it just be as effective to block IE7, or stop making effort to code for it ?
While I am sure there will be people complaining, I do have to say I think this is a good idea. It helps get people to using more up to date web browser and stops dragging things along. It also helps keep prices low by making those people help pay the extra coast to keep there outdated browser still working for this their site.
If it encourages folks to upgrade to v8 or v9, I imagine microsoft would be pretty happy with it actually. They've been campaigning for people to stop using v7
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Then we can can go back and eradicate the outhouse developers who wrote code that doesn't run on browsers other than IE7 in business environments and for which there is no budget to develop new costly solutions.
IE 7 is not standards compliant. So, therefore, IE 7 is proprietary internet graphical interface, that can display content from HTTP servers, that is encoded using microsofts proprietary content protocol.....which may be similar, but is not HTML/CSS.
Microsoft chose to do this, in order to try and leverage msHTML into the open internet. They failed. However, the mess they left is still around. Why shouldn't online retailers charge more to customers who insist in using proprietary clients, to cover the cost of converting the standards compliant HTML, to the Microsoft format?
If it's just an extra charge, it's not a Tax. Tax is imposed by Law. Get it Right.
Myu:
...gets you shot.
Not only have they campaigned to get people move from v7, Internet Explorer 9 and 10 are actually pretty awesome browsers. They're finally lightweight and share similar design to Chrome and Firefox, they are standards compliant and they feel great to use. On top of that they are currently the most secure browsers because of heavy sandboxing, JIT hardening and so on. Microsoft did a really good work with the new versions.
The same amount of effort will be required to make the site IE7 compatible, but there will be less people paying to cover that cost. Eventually I suppose it would come to a point where the tax would need to be so high that everyone will have upgraded or left.
(1.21 gigawatts) / (88 miles per hour) = 30 757 874 newtons
I'm on IE6 and don't have to pay the tax lol.
Summation 2
So what implications does this have for proprietary mobile browsers? Companies can suddenly decide, 'fuck it, I'll just charge them more for not using my browser of choice'?
Whilst nobody cares about IE7, the wider implications of this are potentially pretty onerous.
"They're finally lightweight and share similar design to Chrome and Firefox, they are standards compliant and they feel great to use."
But do they have Adblock, Noscript and Ghostery?
Do I have to pay anything extra?
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Which begs the question why was the world's largest and wealthiest software company not able to do a "really good work" with previous versions? They didn't know how? Couldn't be bothered? Enjoy causing mischief?
Of course they can. They can charge you whatever they want without giving any reason whatsoever. And you can take your shopping somewhere else. In the end, it probably won't be done on a large scale because people can compare prices on the internet rather easily.
I agree with you on your main point however: Philosophically, this sucks.
Many users who run IE7 either have a.) no choice or b.) no idea what is IE7/IE8/IE9 and the differences between them.
Instead of imposing a tax on them which confuses non-tech-savvy end-users, why not display the "IE7 not supported, please follow these instructions to upgrade"?
This tax probably unnecessarily increases complexity in their billing systems, which is never a good thing.
So what implications does this have for proprietary mobile browsers? Companies can suddenly decide, 'fuck it, I'll just charge them more for not using my browser of choice'? Whilst nobody cares about IE7, the wider implications of this are potentially pretty onerous.
The wider implication as I see it is as people are economically encouraged to use standards-compliant browsers, companies are economically encouraged to produce them. If the surcharge is truly based on support for non-standards-compliant browsers, it shouldn't affect only IE7/M$. For Kogan to point directly to IE7 is a pretty good PR stunt though.
Aren't you effectively telling your customers... Try our site in ALL available browsers to see which one gives you the largest discount? Today they are charging for IE7, tomorrow for Opera and the day after that for Firefox?
Internet Explorer 9 and 10 are actually pretty awesome browsers.
That might be so, but I don't like them because I need Windows Vista or Windows 7 to be able to test my web apps with them, unlike most of the other browsers which are cross-platform. They are locked in to Microsoft and force developers to run Windows if they want to ensure compatibility. I can't even use the ancient Windows XP laptop I keep around for the IE6, 7, and 8 testing, because for some reason they've decided the newer browsers won't run on XP (for marketing rather than technical reasons I expect).
If thier intent is to make a political statement, they will succeed.
If this is a business strategy, it will fail the same way that U.S. health care (ACA) will fail if you require companies to take all subscribers but do not require all people to subscribe.
As a business strategy, they are spreading the tax across IE7 users, a population that is not required to use thier site. IE7 users may choose to go elsewhere ("being insulted" and "higher costs"), which means the *fixed* cost of the support (web site maintenance) is spread across a smaller number of users. From here, basic economics: the fixed cost results in a higher per-user tax. Resulting in fewer users. Cycling to a higher tax again. (This will be true regardless of whether or not some IE7 users upgrade to use their site -- as long as some IE7 users go away, they have a reduced user population and a higher IE7 tax.
The end result will be no IE7 users and fewer users in general.
So they might as well jump to the endpoint: Don't bother coding for IE7 (saving cost), don't tax users (since they aren't using the tax to fund IE7 support), and as long as the drop in revenue/profits is less than the drop in cost, the strategy is successful. A simple log review will give them an estimate of IE7 usage on thier site. This should drive their decision.
It's an interesting idea, although the percentage seems quite high particularly if they already support IE7 - ongoing efforts to maintain compatibility are probably not that expensive. It can be a real pain at the HTML/CSS build stage though.
I wonder instead if this is an attempt to get a bit of press coverage, like RyanAir who every now and then state they are going to do something outrageous like charge for using the toilet on their aircraft. They never go through with it, but it generates a lot of press interest and further promotes their image as a low cost no frills company.
Nope. IE9 uses the 3d desktop compositing which is only available starting with Vista.
Peter predicted that you would "deliberately forget" creation 2000 years ago...
Varying opinions on what "really good work" is.
bickerdyke
Changing the user agent won't necessarily work because the browser will still lack support for various JavaScript objects and various CSS selectors. Changing browsers before checking out will probably cause the site to issue you a different set of cookies, which means a different shopping cart.
So does firefox, and i imagine chrome uses something similar. Both of these work on XP, and OSX, and Linux...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
And there was absolutely no way they could implement this in a way that would work on earlier versions of Windows, or on other operating systems?
Funny that Chrome, Safari, Opera etc. don't have the same issues. I believe Chrome also uses 3D acceleration when available?
Browsers are chosen, disabilities are not. That's a huge difference.
If that's the case why are they wasting all this time and money supporting IE7 when they could simply stop supporting it and put a message saying "this website will not work with IE7, please upgrade to IE8 or later or one of these other browsers.."?
Because it's a hassle to keep multiple versions of Windows Internet Explorer installed on a single PC: IE 7 for the web applications or ActiveX applications that one uses at work and IE 8 for browsing public web sites while on break. Or because you're not a member of the Administrators group on the PC that you use daily and therefore lack privileges to upgrade IE or to install Chromium Browser, Firefox, or Opera.
This is a stunt, pure and simple. IE7 use is trivial and you can readily conclude that people who haven't upgraded in 10 years are NOT the primary customer of a computer retailer. People that cheap, don't buy stuff.
The owner of the company is well known for pulling publicity stunts. And hopefully most aussies got a better sense of humor then the whiners above.
As for those saying he should instead display a warning, the site does exactly that, http://www.afr.com/rw/2009-2014/AFR/2012/06/14/Photos/724adc40-b5bf-11e1-a3fb-e6c175e978e8_IE%20tax--236x197.jpg
I wonder why so many are offended by a joke, maybe a lot of them really shouldn't be on this TECH site because they still run IE7 themselves?
This is NOT a business plan or a real tax. It is a publicity stunt to create traffic at the cost of non-existent customers. You don't think that this company really thinks that after a plain warning that customers will be charged more, IE7 users will really pay the increased price? Mind you, they are IE7 users. In reality Kogan looked at their stats, saw a tiny non-significant IE7 usage that their web dev team still had to develop for at greater cost then this groups produces in profit and decided to stir the pot, get some free publicity and be considered by anyone with a sense of a humor as a bunch of all right blokes.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Well it depends how they do it...
They chose to code their site to standards, and that then covered any properly written browser...
They had to do a lot of extra work to support IE7, and i imagine any other non standard browser that didn't have such a user base would simply not work at all. It's only fair that users who are more expensive to support, have to pay more to cover the extra support they require.
The alternatives are either:
Everyone else subsidises the extra development work required to support nonstandard browsers...
They simply don't support non standard browsers at all, which will make the (usually fairly technically ignorant) users of those browsers just think the site is broken.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
IE is about the only browser which is both non standard enough to require extra work to support, and widely used enough that doing that extra work is economically viable...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Microsoft provides Virtual PC images for a range of IE + Windows versions to test your website with.
Check it out at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=11575
1) Unknown company(lets call it B) reads story about another unknown company(lets call it A) becoming known by saying something about IE support.
http://tech.slashdot.org/story/12/05/29/1222235/startup-skips-ie-support-claims-100000-savings
2) Unknown Company B makes up it's own press release about IE support
3) Unknown Company B becomes known
4) Profit.
Instead of FUD is it too hard to address his points? It kills me in what is supposed to be a technical forum that someone who claims IE is awesome with some examples why is a troll and a response that "IE sucks" is 5 Insightful. We all know /. hates Microsoft. Fine, we get it. But come on, don't mod like an AC.
IE8 is a free upgrade available for all versions of windows that can run IE7.
I dare bet Microsoft itself would rather their IE7 users upgrade to IE8 as well.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
its web team was having to spend a lot of time making its new website look normal on IE7
That's a common problem with "new" web sites. Try writing an "old" web site. It will do everything you need it to do, but it'll be faster, and run on every browser. It can still look very pretty, too.
Or, at the very least, test in increments using various browsers, instead of once you're finished. When I was in college, incremental testing easily made the difference between passing and failing a programming course.
People have been saying IE is awesome and much better and fixed all the problems of last version, since the the second release. They've been wrong the entire time of course. At this point, why bother with it?
To be really fair to microsoft, IE4 was the best browser of its time, by such a wide margin it just annihilated the competition for about 5 years. IE3 was also about equivalent to Netscape 3 if a little inferior.
Since then, it's been downhill, and then catch up. Still not there yet, but thing actually do improve.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Switching between black and white skin color is rather... involved. Switching gender, sexual preference, height, natural hair color is equally difficult, if not impossible.
Upgrading to a different browser, on the other hand, is what most people do quite regularly. Usuallly it involves a few minutes at most.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I've used them (with VirtualBox). They are large and slow, and it would probably be easier to buy a cheap Windows 7 laptop instead.
I hate having to go through all of this for one browser, when supporting Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera is so easy in comparison.
It also costs money, where the others are free.
So. There's that.
Admit nothing. Deny Everything. Make Counter-accusations.
But come on, don't mod like an AC.
AC gets mod points now? That could explain a few things.
Anyhow, not being the GP, I can't presume to speak from him, but from what I can tell, the new IE is far from lightweight as his parent post says. The binary is small, because all the code has been made part of the OS itself. It gobbles up a couple of hundred megabytes preloaded with the OS before you start it. To see the real difference, install a fresh OS, reboot three times to get the startup program paging files created, start the browser and check the system's memory usage.
Then upgrade IE, and repeat.
Then upgrade IE again, and repeat.
Faster - for some things, certainly. The best thing since sliced bread? Hardly. Too many incompatibilities and peculiarities, especially in CSS handling and scaling.
Which begs the question why was the world's largest and wealthiest software company not able to do a "really good work" with previous versions? They didn't know how? Couldn't be bothered? Enjoy causing mischief?
Because they defined "good work" as "locks everyone into a Windows-only monoculture".
Skin pigmentation != Browser choice.
If you want a proper analogy, this is like charging a customer more because they want to pay with Amex, which is quite common here because Amex costs retailers more than Mastercard or Visa transactions.
Please consider this account deleted, I just can't be bothered with the spam anymore.
Don't lie. The reason that browser had any market at all was that M$ had illegally abused its desktop monopoly to stifle competition in the browser market. Quite simply, every desktop computer sold came with a copy of Windows, and every copy of Windows came with a copy of MSIE. Netscape, the then superior browser, could not compete with pre-installed.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
But come on, don't mod like an AC.
AC gets mod points now? That could explain a few things.
Anyhow, not being the GP, I can't presume to speak from him, but from what I can tell, the new IE is far from lightweight as his parent post says. The binary is small, because all the code has been made part of the OS itself. It gobbles up a couple of hundred megabytes preloaded with the OS before you start it. To see the real difference, install a fresh OS, reboot three times to get the startup program paging files created, start the browser and check the system's memory usage.
Then upgrade IE, and repeat.
Then upgrade IE again, and repeat.
Faster - for some things, certainly. The best thing since sliced bread? Hardly. Too many incompatibilities and peculiarities, especially in CSS handling and scaling.
they think it's lightweight because the controls bar in the application takes less space..
anyhow.. if it supported webgl, then it would be up to par. as it doesn't, we're once again held back by the awesome ie that has catched up to where browsers were 4 years ago. "yay!"
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
the mental disabilities that steer one to using particular browsers are not chosen.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Mod parent up to infinity. It still feels slow, still asks 99 questions to launch the first time, x64 / x86 versions on 64-bit windows are fubar and have plugin compatability problems or issues opening any pages at all, and its ugly. I think microsoft gave up around IE5, to be honest. It was the last time I liked IE.
so don't set your user-agent string to 'super-wheelchair-fun-time' and enjoy the low prices the rest of us get????
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
From a security and performance stand point, IE is probably in the vanguard where the core browser is concerned. This is especially true on 64-bit platforms where you have ASLR and DEP; in that environment even if some does get out of the sandbox by some method its unlikely to get them anywhere. There is some weakness in Microsoft's ASLR implementation, in that the "low part" of the pointers remain predictable.
IE does not have addons you mention. The lack of ability to modify IE without binary extensions is a drawback. Not having grease-monkey equivalent is keeping off IE on my Windows box.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
They aren't targeting people, they're targeting a certain feature.
As a developer, I really don't give a rats ass if IE is lightweight or fast. All I care is that I don't have to dedicate extra time on layout or code that works flawlessly in 4 other browsers. IE9 is damn near at that point already, with IE10 we will have finally arrived.
Wasn't there a story some months back about stores charging higher prices to those shopping from an iPad? Nothing to do with supports, just targetted pricing: Market research determined that iPad users would be willing to spend more in general (Presumably the penny-pinchers wouldn't buy iPads), and so it made business sense to use this correlation to determine more optimal prices on a targetted-for-the-user basis.
i also wish i didn't have to use stupid web-based apps that break if you use anything other than ie6/7 as part of my job and i could upgrade past 7 on my work pc.
i spent five minutes thinking and all i got was this crappy sig
Should you be shopping on PCs you don't manage? If its work related, then I think they may allow for a browser upgrade to save a 6.8% fee. This is how you finally push businesses to start keeping up with progress. Are they still stuck on XP? Well then download fucking Chrome/Opera/Firefox/Safari!
Public school systems in the USA require students to have certain vaccinations in order to enroll in the student-body. Is this fair? For the benefit of man-kind, vaccinate your children and educate the bastards. Its the same thing. For the benefit of the tech industry, we need to enforce certain things. If that means forcing a browser upgrade/change, then so be it. Continuing with old tech is harmful to more than just the people using it. The website could kindly suggest upgrading to the newest version of IE. If that is not possible given the version of the OS, suggest an alternative until the OS can be upgraded. This keeps the anti-competitive levels low. I would suggest the same things for old versions of other browsers as well.
As for the ADA? That's besides the point.
Yes, kinda: http://www.iegallery.com/en-us/trackingprotectionlists
>kindly tell me which open source project you have actually worked on a release of.
About a dozen, several award winners. I've had projects included in the cover CD's of major Linux Magazines (more than once).
And your point is er... bullshit. The problem you cite only exists for people who don't play by the rules. If your code is free software you will never have to support any distribution but your own. You know why ? Because if it's good and users want it then other distributions will build and include it FOR you.
The problem here only exists for proprietory software that won't ALLOW those distributions to build for them.
Even then the distributions will make an effort if they are allowed. If you don't give them the code they will try their best to provide a working package - and bear the support burden on your behalf - if you at LEAST allow redistribution.
If you don't allow redistribution or support, then guess what- the reason Linux is hard to support is because you refuse to do things the linux way. No linux developer tries to support multiple distributions, we build on our favourite, and let the other distributions who want to include the stuff package it for us.
Even for the few others, there are options - Icculus has done great work porting and maintaining cross-distro installers for many games on Linux - all we need is for the companies to LET us.
We don't even need them to PROVIDE Linux versions, just ALLOW us and we'll do the work to support linux FOR them. The community has proven that over and over with every company who did allow them.
The difficulty of gaming on Linux is a direct result of the publishers ultra-copyright-and-drm model.
Even Blizzard with their proprietory programs which do at least allow redistribution (and relies on web-authentication to ensure compliance) has their games running very well on Linux and they don't even have ports. People actually go out of their way to provide patches for wine to support blizzard games (Diablo 3 worked on release day !)
Basically - if a game doesn't work on Linux, it's because the publishers shot themselves in the foot, they don't have to DO anything, just ALLOW the community and we'll do all the work FOR them - and even if it's only 1% extra sales, an increase of 1% in sales at ZERO cost, is a bloody huge margin.
Unicode killed the ASCII-art *
I used to work for a company some time ago and I clearly remember the amount of days those web dev spent just to get the website looking like all the others. I was surprised by the amount of days and headaches those guys spent just so that IE6 and 7 would look like all other browsers. But fortunately, the company was paid to do so, and their clients paid them....thank god they did.
If even MS dropped support of the old versions, why is everybody else expected to continue it? I would gladly encourage the use of an "Please update to any current browser" popup, complete with a warning that the site probably won't properly display. If enough sites drop support for this anachronistic excuse for a browser, more people would update or use a secondary browser. There are internal web apps in many companies, that through lack of foresight require IE7 or even 6, but nothing stops you from using another browser for the real internet. That way you won't even face the problem of having different IE versions on one machine or the security issues of using a seriously outdated piece of software on the public internet.
Browsers are chosen, disabilities are not. That's a huge difference.
Most non technical users still have absolutely no interest in finding or using an alternative browser to the one labelled "Internet" on the computer they buy.
I have some sympathy with this viewpoint, as I have zero interest in downloading and trying out an alternative web browser to the one I got on my phone. I just don't care as long as it mostly works.
Also, if I was forced 9say) to use an old version of IE at work, I would be less than thrilled with a potential online store if it tried to add additional charges to my shopping. I would simply cancel my order and never use that site again even when I got home and could use whatever browser I wanted.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I can see you're trying to joke, but the sad thing is that many of your examples are true:
Restaurants - Tax for not wearing the right clothes.
Many restaurants won't even let you in if you're not wearing the right clothes, and if they do you can expect sub-par service because you don't look as good. And don't forget restaurants that automatically add 18% to your bill if you have more than a certain number of people in your group!
Tax for asking for modification to your orders.
Again, many places already will charge you more if you ask for a modification that causes them to spend extra time on it or use more expensive ingredients.
Stores - Tax for not wearing the "approved" shoes, since you are causing more wear on the floor.
Again, you won't even be let in if you're not wearing shoes at all.
Government - Tax for being obese.
There's one that's actually not true! Unless you count the heavy taxes on the types of food and drug products that obese people tend to consume more of.
Tax for not being married.
Let's talk about filing income taxes jointly, and how I went from owing the government about $500 per year to them giving me a refund of $1500 after I got married.
Tax for not belonging to the right religion.
So did you know that religious organizations don't have to pay taxes on their property, among other things? And many states have legislation that makes it so that you can't hold public office if you're not religious at all.
Schools - Taxed for being stupid.
The parents of stupid kids may not be taxed individually, but the money spent on kids who repeat years comes from somewhere...
Karma: Terrifying (mostly affected by atrocities you've committed)
People are lazy and I expect many of the IE7 users just couldn't be bothered to upgrade / change their browser. I doubt that this will actually make the company a lot (if any) extra money from the IE users. Neither do I think this is the intended effect. The idea is to give them a reason to upgrade without alienating them to much.
If they just dropped support, people would probably just shop elsewhere. Adding a easily available extra fee might might actually encourage an update without loosing the customer. Once the IE7 user base is low enough, you can simply drop support and start saving money.
Ah, OK, now I got it. So we are supposed to support them now not so much for doing "good work" but because they are no longer purposefully doing bad work?
I know IE9 and 10 have a "compatibility mode" for sites like that. I don't know about IE8, though. Although that's only an issue if you're stuck on XP... which you very well may be, if work-critical web apps only work in 6 or 7.
I had a sig once. It was lost in the great storm of '09.
To be really fair to microsoft, IE4 was the best browser of its time, by such a wide margin it just annihilated the competition for about 5 years. IE3 was also about equivalent to Netscape 3 if a little inferior.
Not true. They forced installation by tying it to everything possible. It came with all Microsft apps, of course, but they also tied comctl32.dll to it so if you wanted to use new GUI controls in your app you ended up having to install Internet Explorer in the end user's machine as a requirement of your app. eg. I remember installing Autocad and being forced to install IE at the same time.
Reff: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/hh298349(v=vs.85).aspx
See how many versions of the dll have "Internet Explorer" associated with them.
Since then, it's been downhill, and then catch up. Still not there yet, but thing actually do improve.
They didn't upgrade IE for about ten years. Their OS monopoly, dirty tricks (above) and OEM license deals meant they didn't need to make any effort to get it onto machines. It was pretty hard to avoid it, and impossible for OEMs to install anything else by default.
No sig today...
Did anybody else misread this? The message of a text truly is created by both the writer and the reader.
They would if it wasn't illegal and it wouldn't kick of a PR nightmare.
But browser choice is not skin color, and brower choice is not being disabled, and browser choice is not any of the other things the government has protected from discrimination.
Pizza hut charges me more for delivery than pickup. So does the local Chinese place. Charging more things that cost more is harldy a new idea.
Well IE every time there is a new version it is much improved... The problem is the length of time between the updates.
We were Stuck on IE 6 for way too many years, IE 7 Was much improved, however it came with the Vista Stink, and they kept too much of the IE 6 compatibility. IE 8 was much better then 7, and was on par with the other browsers at the time, the same with IE 9 and IE 10... But they have release cycles in years, while firefox and chrome have release cycles in months, so When a New IE comes out, all those cool new features, we are already use to, because Chrome and Firefox already released them.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
http://www.vaclib.org/index.htm
I'm not an advocate of such-- but it's not "REQUIRED!!!" you can get out of it.
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
;)
Seriously , if it matters what version people are using then it must be a badly designed website.
If Google really cared they would fix Android Chrome to reflow text, instead of discriminating
If not supporting older browsers saves more money in development and testing costs than it costs in lost profit, it's a good decision. Any halfway competent Internet retail should be able to make this calculation, if... they can accurately project the number of lost sales. The real questions is, "How many of my customers will reach the page where the "tax" is displayed, notice it, and then say 'To hell with this'?"
I was a web developer in the IE4 era, and I had Netscape (versions 4 and 4.5) and Internet Explorer (version 3.5, 4, and eventually 5), even Opera (2 and 3) all available to me (I spent a lot of time in each). I preferred IE; not only did I work less hard to get pages to render correctly, but it was faster and had better features. IE remained my favorite browser through the 6 days. Netscape / Mozilla was such a huge pile of bloat that even though I liked it ideologically, I still didn't care to use it day-to-day. It really wasn't until Firefox came along that I finally found a browser I was willing to use day-to-day that wasn't IE. Of course now Firefox is the pile of bloat that Mozilla used to be (but in a different way), so today I use Chrome.
IE achieved dominance only in part due to desktop monopoly abuse. It also owes a lot to the fact that for quite a while, it really was the best browser.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
I agree with the grandparent. IE2 was preinstalled. Upgrading to IE4 was possible via Windows update (but not the default) and since it was such a large download I didn't do that - it would have taken about an hour over my modem. On the other hand, both IE4 and Netscape 4 came on magazine cover disks. I had both installed, but ended up using IE4 because NS4 was crap. Opera might have been better, but I didn't try it until a few years later. Most of the people I knew at the time had similar experiences: they tried both and found IE4 superior.
That doesn't mean that Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly to get it installed, but that doesn't alter the fact that it really was better than the competition back then...
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
Charging for extra for delivery is nothing the same. That's like saying I can purchase my Amazon basked for £10 cheaper if I collect it myself.
Fragmented web standards are nothing new either, suck it up and roll with it. I don't bill my clients a higher rate just because a new law came into force that makes my industry more complicated - what makes some script kiddy with a copy of Dreamweaver and a PDF W3C certificate so goddamn special?
IE8 is a free upgrade available for all versions of windows that can run IE7. I dare bet Microsoft itself would rather their IE7 users upgrade to IE8 as well.
So what?
Why don't people here understand that most users do not give a flying fuck about what browser they're using?
They don't want to worry about what brand of washing machine they have when they buy washing powder, or what specific model of engine they have wwhen they buy petrol either. Anyone selling online is oiperating in the world of consumer product sales, not theoretical computer science debates..
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Not that Microsoft didn't abuse their monopoly, but Netscape made a helluva good job of shooting themselves in the foot to the point that for the Mozilla reboot they decided to outright scrap the Netscape code base and start over. And I can attest to that, the last incarnations of the Netscape 4.x series were horrible, buggy, unstable abominations that deserved to be put out of its misery.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
It's right there in the summary, though. It's not an "ideological" thing, it's because it actually costs more money to support IE7 than not.
The web developers have to put in extra work to support a dead browser on a dead platform. This costs money. Why bother, if you're not getting paid for it?
Restaurants - Tax for not wearing the right clothes.
OK, not that one, but they might refuse to serve you
Tax for asking for modification to your orders.
Many pizza places do that as standard procedure, and I have seen in other places to.
Stores - Tax for not wearing the "approved" shoes, since you are causing more wear on the floor.
That is slightly silly, don't you think?
Government - Tax for being obese.
Not government, but many health insurance companies will
Tax for not being married.
There is a tax deduct for being married, so yes this exists
Tax for not belonging to the right religion.
Many churches expect their members to donate money to them. But the government won't collect that money for them (unless you live in Germany)
Schools - Taxed for being stupid.
If you need to take courses again, it will take longer and cost you more. If you need extra tuition it will cost you. If you drop out you loose your investment. So yes there is a tax on stupid
They would get zero on my business as i would take my business elsewhere if someone tried that stunt with me. It is as bad as demanding i have flash installed to buy stuff, which i also refuse to do, and take my business to their competition.
Remember we are the customer, and we are the reason you exist.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
Upgrading to a different browser, on the other hand, is what most people do quite regularly. Usuallly it involves a few minutes at most.
And remember all the outrage when a lot of web banking sites /etc. used to require IE? It wasn't that long along, and there was plenty of outrage about how people should be free to use whatever browser they want to use, that it isn't fair to do so, etc., even when most of those sites were doing so because they were using security controls that only worked in IE. If it wasn't fair to require one browser then, why is it fair to tax one browser now?
I hate to be picky about word use, FSM knows I play fast and loose myself, but isn't it time to drop the use of tax as a word that is synonymous with fee and go back to the traditional meaning?
Tax: a sum of money demanded by a government for its support or for specific facilities or services, levied upon incomes, property, sales, etc.
If it encourages folks to upgrade to v8 or v9, I imagine microsoft would be pretty happy with it actually.
It doesn't. There's a screenshot in TFA -- they only link to Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera (in this order).
Who cares. In the modern world every OS comes preloaded with a web browser, and not only is it included by default it's expected by the users. There are plenty of web browsers out right now that don't come preloaded, and they are immensely popular. Yes, there was a case due to microsofts practices to ensure new pc's only had windows, but the bundling of IE was hardly the nail in the coffin that people think it was. All they did was put themselves ahead of the curve. Netscape couldn't compete because of their own business failures. Not because the OS came with a browser. If this was the case the same argument would hold true today, and it most certainly does not.
I'm glad IE users are having to pay, it's time for IE users to move on to a better web experience.
Let me guess: you've never heard of AppLocker, which can be set to disallow running executables from removable media or from folders writable by non-administrators. It's been part of Windows (under the name Software Restriction Policies) since Windows XP.
Charging for extra for delivery is nothing the same. That's like saying I can purchase my Amazon basked for £10 cheaper if I collect it myself. Fragmented web standards are nothing new either, suck it up and roll with it. I don't bill my clients a higher rate just because a new law came into force that makes my industry more complicated - what makes some script kiddy with a copy of Dreamweaver and a PDF W3C certificate so goddamn special?
I bill my clients for my time. If news laws (or crappy browsers) require me to spend more time I will be charging for it.
I think they incorrectly predicted what customers wanted.
Well then don't buy from Microsoft since they did not want to take the extra time required to make their browser almost standard compliant until the 10th major release.
Thankfully, there are developers who do care about the users more than their own convenience. The ones I buy from.
This statement makes me believe:
As we all know time is money and a business person willing to waste time makes no money.
Rather buying from developers wiling to waste time and pretending they care more about your uses, you should be supporting the developers that care about making a better more convenient enviorment for all users and web developers alike and who are more concerned with saving you money.
They would have to fork the code. Then it wouldn't be IE9. When they developed a new browser they made a decision to not support an obsolete operating system. So what?
That browser only ran on one platform....
Or, just write standard HTML and don't worry about which browsers support it.
By that logic, MS Paint should be the most used photo editor, and notepad should be the de facto text editor.
They're not an IE developer. They're a web developer. Their only responsibility is ensuring that there's no rendering issue in IE9 or IE10. Or in really rare cases, a performance issue with JS. Otherwise, what works for Webkit works for IE now - more or less. This is a huge deal.
So let me get this straight. You charge a tax because it took you some extra time and resources to market your website to users using IE7. Sounds like taxing for the expansion of your business. Bad form.
Who asked you to support them? I believe the GP only asked that we be honest about the current state of IE.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
IE9 is a lot of things, but lightweight ain't one of them. It's slow to start as compared to Chrome on most of the hardware I've used it on.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
On the basis that the site in question aren't solicitors, or any other form of professionals that bill on a time basis, I find this to be irrelevant. They make money on selling items, their customers are not paying for a service, they are paying for a product. Hopefully this idiocy will prove to be wholly deleterious and they'll get hammered for it.
By Ruslan Kogan's own admission, a mere 3% of his customers use IE7. If he's so wound up about how much time he's spending on that 3% then either he should be a businessman and just stop wasting time on it or stop being such a whiny bitch looking for free advertising by proxy.
If the customers in that 3% actually WARRANT the added work to support them, then this highwayman 6.8% tax wouldn't be considered because their commercial value covers the extra work.
Bottom line, the guy's a moron flogging a frankly stupid idea that is utterly indefensible from a philosophical standpoint and a total non-issue from a business standpoint.
Another issue is that I am sure that some people still use Windows 98,95 or maybe cough 3.x. These operating systems won't be able to get current versions of IE. Of course Linux users never have this problem.....
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
No. They knew customers (users, developers, publishers, literally everybody) wanted compatibility with standards. No need to "predict" that.
They decided they should expend some of this goodness, with their own goal of taking over the internet and creating proprietary standards that were widely used and enable them to lock out other operating system and browser vendors.
What they were incorrect about is where to balance the scales. They went way off the deep end, and subsequently everyone stopped taking them seriously and starting using alternatives. They now find themselves having expended most of their advantage, and again having to actually give people what they want, and play nicely with everyone.
If they manage to build up a near monopoly user base again, you should absolutely expect them to start pushing in incompatible and proprietary extensions and other anti competitive tactics to grab the market. This has been Microsoft's fundamental doctrine for decades.
Actually, there used to be an IE for Mac.
.sig withheld by request
This thing is indeed pretty harmless, but it scares me that vendors can set different prices based on arbitrary criteria
Companies do this all the time. It's perfectly normal and perfectly legal in a wide variety of circumstances. If you've every bought an airplane ticket, you've experienced this. Any time you can segment a market you should expect it to occur. The proper name for it is price discrimination. The word discrimination has acquired a bad connotation but it really is a neutral term that economists use.
We'd be in for all kinds of confusion, as comparison sites and review sites could no longer be objective.
Whatever makes you think they were objective in the first place?
They are not the first site to try this. I have come across tons of examples in the past where chrome got you one price and IE got you a different price. I actually keep 5 browsers installed to check this out from time to time. None of the Big brand retailers have done it yet that I have soon but it is only a matter of time.
Basically, you could just change you user agent to be the one that the company wants (I know I can do that on my android phone), and not get the fee. But, if your web client does that then it will probably also be standards compliant, so would not be a problem.
Thankfully, there are developers who do care about the users more than their own convenience. The ones I buy from.
Ah, I see. That comes out of your pocket though, right? Or perhaps to be one of "the ones you buy from" I need to eat the cost of supporting obsolete software myself, you know because I care about the users?
But until IE was bundled with MS Windows, Netscape was able to make money selling the browser. (I got it free from my ISP, but I'm assuming they paid.) Since Netscape didn't have a cash cow like Windows to cover their browser development costs, they were hurting to try and compete with IE development.
Anyway, the real issue was never really the browser, it was the server and application platform. Netscape had a (premature) idea that they could could become the OS-agnostic development platform, and MS was worried about that. Both companies tried to extend the browser with improvements specific to their platform, but because of the MS monopoly, Netscape had no real chance against fun stuff like ActiveX.
Opera was better. I was a poor college student and bought an Opera 3.x license for ~$30 in '98 because it was that much better (and faster!) than NS4 and IE4.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
IE9+ is pretty much standards compliant out of the box and requires little to no effort to support over chrome, FF, etc...
IE8 got us about half way there..
IE7 uses the broken box model and, ergo, a pain in the ass..
They're not taxing IE in general, only IE7.
You've explained why everyone had it installed, but not why everyone used it. Their bundling ensured that IE was installed on every computer, but it didn't prevent the user from simply installing and using an alternative. The quality of IE4 did.
looks like it's back to IE6 for me
how many pairs of boxer shorts should you own?
I'm a Web developer myself, and cannot tell you how much time goes into making a website IE7-and-under-proof. If we as developers only had to develop for W3C-compliant browsers, our lives would be so much better, and we could spend the additional time on better designs (and more sleep).
A toilet cleaner gets paid to clean toilets, not decide which colour shit he'll mop up and which he'll leave in the bowl.
Get over yourself.
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
Maybe IE10 is nice, I haven't used it, but IE9 is an absolute random suck-fest of usability. I'm eager to try IE10.
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
You mean 10 other browsers!
I object to power without constructive purpose. --Spock
They have? I will update my XP box to IE8 then....
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
IE does not have addons you mention.
Which leads people to install all kinds of dodgy bits of software to compensate. I had a dev of Korean origin, when I got his laptop back he had 7 different programs (not extensions, programs) for spell checking in Korean in IE because a lot of sites he used were designed for IE only.
Also, it was managements decision that staff had no restrictions on what they could install on their laptops, but that's an argument I see both sides of.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I'm sorry, but what would've been wrong with "please upgrade your browser, it's ancient and insecure" like used to be done? Maintaining compatibility at all is perpetuating its use.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
The guy that said they are "actually pretty awesome" browsers now. I am pretty sure he is suggesting that people should be using them now.
Which is why in 2012 Walmart.com thousands of items branded for use with a Windows PC ---but only fifty or so for the Android tablet.
Part of that is because a Windows PC is far more likely to have an optical drive for installing proprietary commercial applications (read: Microsoft Office and retail PC games). Proprietary commercial applications for an Android device, on the other hand, are typically downloaded through the Internet from Google Play Store or Amazon Appstore. The rest is that a lot of Android devices appear to lack a USB host port for connecting peripherals.
rather than tweaking layouts, writing exception rules or writing work around for one browser that holds less than 30% of the market
That's a pretty fat tail there!
Yes, Pareto principle and all, spend your efforts on the 20% that give 80% of the income.
But if you alienate a substantial part of your user base, you won't attract the ones you have coded for either. All they will have heard about it is bad things. Because the Pareto principle works both ways - the 20% who are dissatisfied will cause 80% of your losses.
And, in any case, if you have to make special exceptions for IE in the first place, you're Doing It Wrong. Use subsets that are supported across the line, and write HTML/css so it degrades gracefully. It's not hard. Really.
This is true. I really hated IE and preferred Netscape. Then, Netscape 4.x came out. 4.5 in particular was a hideous, bloated, unstable mess. Things like CSS positioning and JavaScript would randomly crash the browser. It was so unstable as to be unusable. Given that there were very slim alternatives at the time, I grudgingly turned to IE, which wound up being snappy and--hey!--stable. You'll get no argument from me that its default security settings were terrible, but I knew how to lock those down. At least the damn thing worked and rendered pages in a reasonable manner.
Eventually, Firefox came around and I switched to that for several years. More recently, I've gone to Chrome.
Check out my world simulator thingy.
IE being better funded isn't an abuse of desktop monopoly. Sure, maybe it's the profits from the desktop monopoly that facilitated this, but Microsoft funding a project doesn't make that project a monopoly abuse.
IE also had the advantage of really only striving to support a single platform - Windows, allowing them to do a lot of platform-specific optimizations as well as have a less complicated code path. Plus it had the advantage of having an in with that platform's developers (especially evident since IE4 was the browser version which introduced Windows shell integration - something I went out of the way to avoid prior to Windows 2000 when it was baked in by default). Sure, there was Mac IE and such, but it always lagged dramatically behind (in version number, compatibility, and features). Mostly I think this was just Microsoft hedging their bets.
Slay a dragon... over lunch!
> held back by the awesome ie that has catched up to where browsers were 4 years ago
That's a substantial improvement. IE7 was more than twice that far behind.
Even better, IE now gets upgrades by default, so the percentage of users who are multiple major versions behind has been rapidly dwindling as the last of the pre-SP2 Windows XP systems finally give up the ghost. There will always be a few systems out there (due to low bandwidth connections that are never on for long enough to complete the download, plus periodic OS reinstalls, not to mention the few users who deliberately turn updates off), but it's a much smaller number now than it was even three years ago.
Consequently, it's becoming much easier now for a web developer to credibly argue that it's acceptable to relegate antediluvian versions of IE to "tier 2" support (where the site only has to be usable and is allowed to "look wrong" and be missing a few features). In other words, we're getting back the useful concept of "graceful degradation" that we used to take for granted in the early days of the web. We're allowed to take advantage of (relatively) new features again. Which is kind of nice.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
He's talking about Admuncher, not IE (I'm guessing you browse with ACs below the threshold?).
There are two problems with this. The HTML5/CSS{2,3} specification is in places undefined. Two examples: in CSS, border-styles are basically left up to the browser. In HTML5, video codecs.
Secondly, if your clients and users are the type that are mollified by things like, "Well, that's a browser bug -- my code conforms to the specs," then where can I find more of them? At the unicorn store perhaps?
Those who advocate genocide deserve every protection afforded by law, and none afforded by common human decency.
So what implications does this have for proprietary mobile browsers? Companies can suddenly decide, 'fuck it, I'll just charge them more for not using my browser of choice'? Whilst nobody cares about IE7, the wider implications of this are potentially pretty onerous.
If you're too lazy to either upgrade your browser, or use a different one supporting standards, they will charge an IE7 tax. It's not like changing to a modern browser takes effort. XP loses paid support soon so that means IE7 is not supported.
> every time there is a new version it is much improved
There was one exception, actually: IE4 was a great deal worse than IE3. It tried to introduce some primitive CSS support, but it was so broken that it ended up making websites completely unusable where in IE3 they would have been usable (albeit not beautifully styled). Also, IE4 introduced the nightmarish "integration" fiasco that resulted in junk like not being able to open multimedia content in your usual media player because IE was in bed with the new and horrible Windows Media Player. There were also issues related to Windows Explorer. Oh, yeah, and wasn't IE4 also the release that introduced "friendly error messages"? Gah.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
Which 3rd party utility?
They used it because:
a) It was right there in a prominent position on the desktop of every PC.
b) Netscape totally screwed up right about the same time by deciding to start over. It wasn't that IE was a super-duper browser, it's that the competition was busy shooting itself in the foot.
No sig today...
if you have to make special exceptions for IE in the first place, you're Doing It Wrong.
LOL, I love this, you're obviously not a web developer or you would really understand the true issues here. You don't or you wouldn't be making such a blatantly stupid statement.
Use subsets that are supported across the line, and write HTML/css so it degrades gracefully. It's not hard. Really.
This is also stupid, if you were using a subset of HTML/CSS supported across the line you wouldn't have to write HTML/CSS that degrades gracefully. We write code that degrades gracefully because we support Internet explorer, which doesn't ad-hear to web standards.
I'd like to say sorry your failing to understand the true problem, but it's obvious the true issue is you just refuse to see what's wrong with your line of thinking. Go develop some web sites for clients looking to implement the latest standards and technologies, then come back and argue how important it is to support 20% of the market rather than just telling them to upgrade to a modern browser.
But doing the extra work for IE is not economically viable. As a web developer, I spend at least as much time modifying my CSS to make IE happy as I do developing the site in the first place. So my labor is doubled, which means my costs are doubled. And for what? Vendor lock-in. That is not of any benefit to me.
IE is only where it is because of illegal tying of the OS to the web browser. As many people have said, most users just use the browser that comes installed on their computer.
âoeIn theory, theory and practice are the same. In practice, they are not." â Albert Einstein
People have been saying IE is awesome and much better and fixed all the problems of last version, since the the second release. They've been wrong the entire time of course.
Not really. For example, IE6 was an awesome browser for its time, when you compared it side by side with its primary competitor, which was NN4 - a bloated browser with poor standards support. IE6 became the problem when it remained the dominant browser as standards evolved further, and as competing browsers implemented those standards better, and became better in general (at perf, memory consumption, safety etc).
It gobbles up a couple of hundred megabytes preloaded with the OS before you start it. To see the real difference, install a fresh OS, reboot three times to get the startup program paging files created, start the browser and check the system's memory usage.
Then upgrade IE, and repeat.
Then upgrade IE again, and repeat.
If you seriously believe that the above is a correct metric for measuring memory consumption of anything meaningful, you should shred your geek card immediately.
Hint: IE is still a userspace application. Regardless of what may be preloaded by the OS, the memory used by IE will still be reflected in iexplore.exe. In general, preloading of libraries can affect the startup speed, but never memory usage.
The address bar is only at the bottom in Metro version of IE10. The desktop one, so far as I can see, looks exactly IE9.
There are rules about when charging specific customers more is illegal. Just think about charging black people more than white people. This is very similar case.
Why stop there? Charging people in the first place is already discriminatory - after all, it means that you only serve people with enough money to pay.
Compatibility view mode first appeared in IE8.
Actually no.
IE 9 is the fastest browser for graphics and FF just recently added acceleration and you have to enable it inside Chrome. Some things like font rendering and SVG graphics acceleration are still behind in non-IE browsers.
IE is not longer a piece of shit.
But sadly the grandparent does need a copy of VirtualBox or VMWare around to test his browsers. Big deal even if you did use Windows fulltime. I am working on a corporate oriented network project. My code needs to work with IE 9 and FF and Chrome ... as well as old corporate locked down IE 7,8, Safari, and FF 3.6. I have a VM to do this which is annoying but a fact. XP wont go away until 2014, and even then I am sure millions of locked down FF 3.6 with its +40 exploits unpatched and IE 8 will still be around for at least 2020 when Windows 7 is retired. You can't leave these users out.
Perhaps charging more for older IE user is not a bad idea. For a startup or sole proprietorship why should I spend time for free? Time is money and if I have to hire someone who knows 10 year old workarounds then the customer should pay for it. If he/she doesn't then tell the sysadmin to get off his ass and use an up to date browser.
http://saveie6.com/
No he went on bashing MS because of IE 6 so therefore they must be evil etc.
Nevermind the fact that CSS was new and alien in 2001. The box model finalized by the W3C came out after MS included what it thought would be the box model already in IE 5.5 and 6.
IE 6 has limited CSS but it differs because standards were not standards yet and kept chaning in 1999 - 2001 when IE 6 was in development. MS is not evil per say, just that IE 6 is from a different era in internet history and should not be used anymore. ... after IE 6 was done then yes MS was evil and stupid and opened the door to Firefox. That was a bad mistake
http://saveie6.com/
WebGL is not a web standard and is a big security risk. Infact arstechnica last year ran a demo where it showed the contents in the ram in full webGL! It is not ready yet and I agree with Microsoft on this one. I think CSS 3D might be a better alternative.
IE 9 is where Firefox and Chrome were in 2010. It is not 4 years behind at all. IE 9 was made in 2009-2010 so that makes sense. Ms does not update its rendering engine every 6 weeks and I bet those who gripe about that whine about Firefox being auto updated all the time. Well which is it?
IE is on an annual release and IE 10 is about done and scored 364 on html5test.com. It is at the same level of where current Firefox and Chrome is and yes, it will go behind until next summer when IE 11 is released but that is not a bad thing.
Hate IE all you want but it is not going away. It is the only browser appropriate for work as evident but the few who have FF still using FF 3.6 because of the way it autoupdates and the fact nothing has GPO, .MSI, or active directory support.
As a webmaster as long as it works who cares and yes Grandma can have a similar browsing experience as yourself with another browser. Why is that bad?
http://saveie6.com/
Most of IE 6 in marketshare statistics is all in China. No one in the US uses it besides big multi national corporations. IE 6 is no longer worth it to support. IE 7 is still big if you write corporate websites but I am hoping by this fall you can ignore that too.
IE 7 is very small and all the grandma's and the golden +50 age crowd need to be upgraded with Windows Update. They are the ones who run these old browsers and hate anything new.
http://saveie6.com/
Do you charge them more?
I am working on a site with many of these users as it is corporate oriented. I am thinking of charging more as I do not have time to downgrade that damn thing for free and hurt those who see IT as an investment rather than an expense.
You do need to charge more for their time or you wont get anyone good and why should they work for free over a certain amount? If you needed a home renovation and you had outdated electrical wiring discovered that needed to be replaced before you add the extra room with more outlets what would the contractor do?
Think he would say, well arth1, you said $10,000 so thats what is it. I will pay for an electrician to come rip out the walls on my own watch because I am greateful to serve you and work?? Hell no. He would say wow, I am sorry but if you need new wiring it will cost you $2,000 more for an electrician and for me to hire a buddy to rip out the current wiring in the walls. It is outdated etc.
Same concept as you are not making the same web 1.0 crap on IE 6 anymore.
http://saveie6.com/
Not hard?
I have a whole book on this topic with CSS seriously. The layout model is buggy, IE 6 will wrap text and sometimes boxes together, Ie 6/7 will put double margins. If you specify a pixel based layout old IE will use doubles to store the data leading to rounding errors, while other browsers store them in floats that dont have this problem. This leads to spacing differences as well.
I am not a hardcore developer and just learning. Modern browsers can cut your workload in half with cool features that you do not have to imitate with Adobe Photoshop due to the lack of feature X. That saves A TON of time.
You can have them degrade gracefully only if IE 6 and IE 7 followed the current W3C standards in which they don't. IE 6 was not bad when it came out but the way the standards moved since 2001 was not how IE 6 and sometimes 7 do things.
Yes, something that is more time means you need to charge more. Time = money. The ones you hire from already charge you extra and I bet if you told them to halt IE 6 and 7 they would give you a discount. You just do not realize it.
I am not saying this to bash IE out of ideology, but rather the facts. You can't have something smooth and complex like www.arstechnica.com work easily in IE 6 without major expensive effort and lots of hacks and tricks on a old browser.
http://saveie6.com/
You are right and that pissed me off at the times too.
However, Netscape still trailed on until it became outdated and bad. 1997 was the year IE truly became better and Navigator was stuck at 4.5/6/7 until its death in 2003. It stagnated for 6 years!
IE got better and better.
Hmmm sounds familiar. An old non standard compliant browser that is outdated sees a new competitor? IE 6 became the new Netscape and Firefox the new IE. Just like before it took 6 years to overun it. It was not just bundling. I tried to use Netscape as I used Linux but it was an inferior browser to IE 6 in the early 2000s. It wasn't until 2005 before I switched to Firefox full time.
http://saveie6.com/
No, IE is not part of the OS. No component of IE is part of the OS either. IE is a standard userspace application composed of a UI, and a bunch of shared libraries - it's the GUI wrapper for Trident. Just as Safari is not part of OSX either, but merely a standard userspace application that wraps WebKit. Ditto for Chrome, or Konqueror/KHTML.
Now, the preloading thing you refer to is another red herring, because Windows will actually preload any application you use frequently (and just after freshly installing Windows, the only apps installed to preload are the Microsoft shipped ones, so what do you expect?) You can negate this effect by turning off something called SuperFetch, which prevents Windows preloading anything, even IE.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
No, the reason that browser had any market at all was that Netscape was fucking awful. And don't get me started on the whole $20 for a browser thing. And Netscape's non-standard support (<blink> anyone?)
But hey, don't let facts get in the way of your anti-MS bullshit-fest. And you call the MS-fans shills.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
Regardless point B. states one is better than the other. I get into flamewars with folks saying IE 9 SUCKS! It is no different than 6.
They then point to some internet benchmarks and show IE 9 lacks some things. That doesnt mean it sucks. It just means it doesn't get updated every 6 weeks bla bla bla.
I hated IE back then but started using it around 2001 when the writting was on the wall. IE 6 was a better browser and hated the fact. But the web worked in it and didn't misrender and Netscape was not coming back. Yes I got hacked with it and had to reinstall XP with extra security settings when using IE 6.
I did so out of choice as it was the only browser that supported CSS. It did AJAX and was ahead. Not because the blue E was on the taskbar. I kept Mozilla only because it was the only game in town in Linux.
Firefox was not ready until 2005 before I could dump IE 6 and by then I was happy to do so. IE was just better before it was left to rot. The fact that IE has less than 50% marketshare and is declining still shows the bundling is not why it won.
http://saveie6.com/
Didn't IE 5 invent AJAX, dynamic html, and RSS or activeDesktop or whatever they call it? I started taking IE serious around 5.0 after 4 was conceivable equal.
http://saveie6.com/
Developers and publishers, yes. But you vastly overestimate how much users give a shit about "standards" (by which I mean you think users give a shit at all).
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
IE10 won't be available without Windows 8 though.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
The second. God you "OMG MS shill11!!" people need to get over yourselves.
For a site about things like basic rights, Slashdot users sure do like to censor "dissent".
MS is switching to an annual release cycle.
IE 10 is already RC and I am surprised slashdot didn't mention ... ok maybe not :-)
I think yearly release cycles are the best and I left Mozilla after the 6 week upgrade fiasco. Even yesterday I started getting all sorts of errors as FF was updated to 13 and Foxit PDF reader was more dated and I use it as a plugin.
It is more hell with corporate apps. My great hope is now that IE follows standards again that a newer browser wont bring hell like it did in the past. Many corporations are terrified to update it as a result of these bugs and standards changing.
Yes IE will be outdated for a year right before its new release but a year is not so bad. 6 years! Now that is a different story altogether.
http://saveie6.com/
MS did not choose to make it incompatible.
The box model that W3C interprets was made after IE 6 was already in development. CSS was really new and no one used it besides for a simple style of font size or something dumb. This was in 2001 when web 1.0 ruled keep in mind.
The rest are just bugs and dumb things like using doubles instead of floats to store pixel and decimals of data that lead to rounding errors in IE 6. IE 7 fixed some but they were so far behind they couldn't fix all. Microsoft admitted IE 6 was so insecure that it was paramount to not let hackers in first and we can fix the rest of the bugs in IE 8.
http://saveie6.com/
Want to know what it will look like?
Go to www.slashdot.org in IE and then click the button next to the arrow for compatiblity mode? See that? That is what slashdot.org looks like in standards CSS and html in IE 7 mode.
The divs where the links on the left are all over the place. To get it to work requires special CSS sheets with IE 6 specific rules to tell it where to layout etc. This requires extra work and shows standard HTML works in all but old IE.
http://saveie6.com/
Stores - Tax for not wearing the "approved" shoes, since you are causing more wear on the floor.
Most people wearing normal shoes - no extra charge.
A track and field runner wearing track shoes (with spikes underneath) should be charged extra or banned.
Many squash courts used to ban black soled sneakers because they nearly always left black marks on the courts that were hard to clean off.
Because it's impossible that he's doing an experiment and seeing how many people with stick with IE7 even when it results in them being charged extra?
Maybe he just wants to see how many of them stick with IE7, how many swap to a different browser, and how many leave altogether. Since it's only 3% of his customers he can likely survive the worst case of they all leave never to return. But if he finds that most just swap browsers he can drop the IE7 support completely and just put up a message saying to use one of this list of browsers.
But charging extra for arbitrary reasons is perfectly defensible. As long as the reason isn't a protected group anyway. "Just because" is defense enough.
So you have no idea what you're talking about. Why bother posting at all?
IE4 was the first DOM-based browser, which marked the new era of modern browsers. Navigator 4.08 was a monumental piece of crap that crashed every hour and couldn't do any thing dynamic at all. I think you're confusing IE4 and IE3. Or you just don't know anything about browsers at that time.
Write boring code, not shiny code!
IE is still installed on nearly every computer sold over the world. And yet it's losing ground. Your entire argument has been disproved day after day in the past five years. Don't you look around?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
IE4 was the first DOM-based browser, marking a new era of browser design and DHTML. It was one entire generation ahead of Netscape. That is the reason it prevailed.
Today IE is still installed on every PC sold on the planet. Yet, it's not prevailing anymore. So what gives?
Write boring code, not shiny code!
Of course they wouldn't need to fork the code - it's possible to make use of new features in the operating system if available but fall back to the older methods.
Requiring Windows Vista/7 specific features will lock the browser to Windows and will make porting to other operating systems, should they choose to, difficult. As I said, other browsers have no problem making use of specific operating system features for acceleration and still being cross-platform.
Windows XP has a 25% share so is a long way from obsolete.
if you were using a subset of HTML/CSS supported across the line you wouldn't have to write HTML/CSS that degrades gracefully
You must be a post-milllennium web designer, because no one else would be so ignorant. You need to make it degrade gracefully because (and this is what many web developers don't get) you have no control over the client. He might be on a monochrome device, he might have a different DPI setting than you, he might be using a 9600 bps GSM connection and runs with pictures turned off, or he might be behind a transparent proxy that strips javascript. Or anything else that you haven't anticipated and thus can't code for.
So yes, degrading gracefully is prudent. If sticking to the standards, most of that job is done for you automatically, but you still need to keep it in mind. Even when following standards, you are given enough rope to hang yourself with.
As for my line of work, I am a senior system administrator by trade, but have developed my share of web sites. They generally work and keep on working even when new technology arrives.
I also have spent more time than I should have fixing web sites that "designers" have committed, that broke when a new browser came out, or didn't support larger fonts, or didn't work on a manager's iPad, or...
we support Internet explorer, which doesn't ad-hear to web standards.
"Ad-hear"? Given the hyphen, this can't be a typo. A Freudian slip?
I have a whole book on this topic with CSS seriously. The layout model is buggy, IE 6 will wrap text and sometimes boxes together, Ie 6/7 will put double margins. If you specify a pixel based layout [...]
This might come as a shock to some of you, but you may want to make a site that does not depend on pixel perfect placement of elements, but where flow and scaling is the domain of the client, not the developer. Where presentation makes sense even if the client does it wrong.
Stop trying to match up elements. Make a design that doesn't require this. And for dog's sake, never mix fixed and scalable elements and expect clients to handle it the same way. This is probably the #1 flaw in UI design.
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If you seriously believe that the above is a correct metric for measuring memory consumption of anything meaningful, you should shred your geek card immediately.
Hint: IE is still a userspace application. Regardless of what may be preloaded by the OS, the memory used by IE will still be reflected in iexplore.exe. In general, preloading of libraries can affect the startup speed, but never memory usage.
You are obviously not a sysadmin or OS designer. The amount of memory you see for a process is not what that process caused to be used. It's (simplified) what it itself takes up in resident text pages, plus stack, plus dirty pages that it has allocated, plus the pages of libraries it has open.
Not the pages that other processes have allocated, nor pages allocated by the OS itself, and for shared memory it's either counted multiple times or not at all.
The only way to accurately measure memory use of non-standalone applications is by measuring the impact on the system. It's easy to construct an example where the displayed process memory usage is an order of magnitude or more off. Doing so is now a homework assignment for you. Come back when you've done so, and have understood the rock in the river.
You must be a post-milllennium
I see how it is now. You're old and threatened by younger developers. I should have guessed by the "get off my lawn" attitude. I've been developing since I had my first computer (an Atari 130XE) when I was 7, nearly 30 years now. I've been developing professionally since 2001. None of that accounts for they disregard you're showing to anyone using a modern browser in order to support the 20% of people that don't want to move into his millennium.
Personal advice, you might want to consider retirement. It's probably the best thing you can do for your company.
I know:
http://www.mozillazine.org/talkback.html?article=1708
Well, you're right that they wouldn't necessarily have to fork the code. But it would add complexity to the code they would have to write and take manhours away from their main effort, which is to implement their new features and take advantage of the new OS features in Windows Vista and 7. And the return on that investment is what Microsoft bases their decisions on. They are, after all, a for-profit company.
How much money do you suppose they would make getting IE9 vs. IE7 installed on that 25% of installed base? Remember, these are legacy systems owned by people who are demonstrably reluctant to buy into new technology. I think Microsoft made the right call based on return-on-effort.
It isn't all the same comparing Microsoft's decisions to other browsers because Microsoft still dominates the desktop market that IE is designed to run on. They don't HAVE to customize their browser to make it run a variety of operating systems to achieve a large market share. All those other browsers are from companies who have to work in a fragmented OS environment to achieve any market share at all. Microsoft has an advantage and it's silly to compare how they behave in that situation to companies that don't have the same advantage. Of course they will behave differently.