Why didn't anyone think of this before?






  • I wonder what rate they tax for IE6?



  • They should have made it an even 7% tax. And 60% for IE6!

    I saw this on Slashdot and wondered how obvious they made it?

    I've been tempted to buy stuff from Kogan since they do grey imports and are quite cheap, but I'm concerned about warranty, etc.




  •  IE10 is around the corner. It's time to levy that tax for real.



  • Brilliant. But indeed IE6 should have 500% the IE7 tax.



  • I read one a web designer's blog somewhere about them coding to web standards and explaining to the customer how (s)he adds a premium if the customer requires the site to work in IE6 - simply passing on the maintanence cost to the client and letting the client decide if they wish to engage customers with outdated browsers. It's kinda the same thing.

    I would love to see some sites show how development costs differ between varying clients (browsers), if only to explain overheads associated with mobile technology and set-top boxes. The web may be everywhere, but technology that interfaces with it is pretty inconsistent at present.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @Cassidy said:

    I read one a web designer's blog somewhere about them coding to web standards and explaining to the customer how (s)he adds a premium if the customer requires the site to work in IE6 - simply passing on the maintanence cost to the client and letting the client decide if they wish to engage customers with outdated browsers. It's kinda the same thing.

    If you're charging by the hour, then that premium is kinda automatic. I tell them it's going to be X hours to do something without IE6 support, and it's going to be X+Y if they want IE6 support. The extra time and cost has always driven them away from supporting the handful of people left on earth that still use IE6. IE7 support doesn't take nearly as much effort. jQuery supports IE7, so any DOM or AJAX nuances are abstracted away there, and I might have a small IE7-only CSS file I include via conditional comments. The only additional cost from IE7 is mostly from simply testing all the site functionality and making fine adjustments where necessary. Not nearly as hair pullingly stressful as the thousands of things that go wrong in IE6.



  • Those people are infantile jerks. They'll get zero sympathy from the typical consumer, who will immediately scream "scam!" There's no "amount of time required" to make pages render correctly in IE7. Just do what people always do when some of their customers use a legacy platform: code to the lowest common denominator. Android developers have to do this... 90% of the devices out there don't support "Ice Cream Sandwich" and they never will. There's no extra time required... they just ignore ICS-specific functionality because they know it's not relevant to their efforts.



    And are we trashing IE seven now...? It wasn't that long ago when I ditched IE6 because people kept telling me IE7 was a more modern alternative.



    Incidentally, I started using Oracle "Virtual Box" (horrible product... it has more wordy pop-up message boxes than any other program made since 1992) and one of the nice things about it is that I can keep a fresh XPSP2 / IE6 install available to myself at all times... I don't know about spaz-nozzle Web developers, but this is heaven-on-Earth for me. One of these days I'm going to find some time for Virtual Box IE6 web surfing.



    Overall, these people completely misunderstand the customer relationship. They're doing RETAIL. They're not anyone's IT jerk... thank God for that.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @bridget99 said:

    Those people are infantile jerks. They'll get zero sympathy from the typical consumer

    The "typical consumer" no longer uses IE7.

    @bridget99 said:

    Android developers have to do this... 90% of the devices out there don't support "Ice Cream Sandwich" and they never will.

    A.) Ice Cream Sandwich is less than 1 year old, vs. [I]6 year old[/I] IE7.

    B.) Ice Cream Sandwich is not supported on all phones, and thus costs money to upgrade. IE8 is available on XP SP2, is [I]free[/I], and should have even been an automatic update.

    C.) More than 90% of Windows computers out there support IE8. In fact, more than 90% of Windows computers [I]are[/I] on at least IE8.

    D.) I would be willing to bet in 2017, when ICS is as old then as IE7 is now, the majority of Android users will have at least ICS, and you will start to see new apps cater only to people who have at least Ice Cream Sandwich the same way you never see any new apps support Windows 98 or Mac OS9.

    @bridget99 said:

    And are we trashing IE seven now...? It wasn't that long ago when I ditched IE6 because people kept telling me IE7 was a more modern alternative.

    Am I correct to assume you used punch cards before IE6? In browser terms, 6 years old makes it about as modern as Pacman and mullets. IE7 is soon to be three generations behind the newest version of IE.



  • @bridget99 said:

    Those people are infantile jerks. They'll get zero sympathy from the typical consumer, who will immediately scream "scam!" There's no "amount of time required" to make pages render correctly in IE7. Just do what people always do when some of their customers use a legacy platform: code to the lowest common denominator
     

    This is your approach to accurately estimating cost/effort to meet requirements and managing customer's expectations?

    Ladies and gentlemen, you now understand why company profitibility is greatly influenced by poor decision-making.



  • @RHuckster said:

    @bridget99 said:
    Those people are infantile jerks. They'll get zero sympathy from the typical consumer

    The "typical consumer" no longer uses IE7.

    When I first saw this story on another site, I thought it was a bit weird.  Or maybe even stupid.  I knew that IE7 market share was pretty small (although to be honest I didn't realise it was only 3%).  Sure, people should just upgrade at least to IE8 since it's simple and free.  But what if the few people using IE7 just go ahead and pay the tax?  Now they are stuck supporting IE7, and if they are truly worried about development costs, just exactly how much money do they really think they are going to get from a 6% tax on a tiny portion of their customers?  It would make a lot more sense to simply not worry about implementing anything specific to old versions and pop up a notice -- "you're using an old browser, this site may not work properly".

    Someone familiar with this company has suggested that it may be more of a publicity stunt than actual policy.

     



  • @bridget99 said:

    There's no "amount of time required" to make pages render correctly in IE7. Just do what people always do when some of their customers use a legacy platform: code to the lowest common denominator.

    Tables?


  • 🚽 Regular

    @El_Heffe said:

    Someone familiar with this company has suggested that it may be more of a publicity stunt than actual policy.

    I totally think it's a publicity stunt. A lot of websites, even popular websites, simply stopped supporting IE7, sometimes even without a warning or notice. And the stunt working among my IT peers anyway, almost all of them have heard of this.



  • @RHuckster said:

    IE8 is available on XP SP2, is free, and should have even been an automatic update.

    While I wish they upgraded to something newer than IE7, some companies do require it because of legacy apps and changing to support a newer browser would be more expensive than to wait for the end of the lifecycle of the apps that actually need it. For the newer stuff we use Chrome and for the old stuff, IE7 and my estimate is that by the time the Sun dies we will be supporting IE10, hopefully. Thanks the gods I don't have anything to do with web development.


  • 🚽 Regular

    @serguey123 said:

    While I wish they upgraded to something newer than IE7, some companies do require it because of legacy apps and changing to support a newer browser would be more expensive than to wait for the end of the lifecycle of the apps that actually need it.

    A fair point, but you just gave a solution right after that: Use a newer browser for everything else. Also, while it's not perfect, a large number of backwards compatibility issues with IE8-9 can be fixed by going into compatibility mode.



  • @RHuckster said:

    A fair point, but you just gave a solution right after that

    Yes, but if you know corporate then you can imagine the ammount of wrestling and arm twisting that had to be done to achieve this, this is a recent development. Blood sacrifices had to be made in order to have another browser. My point is that some other companies have not achieved this yet...
    @RHuckster said:
    Also, while it's not perfect, a large number of backwards compatibility issues with IE8-9 can be fixed by going into compatibility mode.

    Hmmm, I'll think about it but I think it is cheaper to just keep a modern browser for everything else as the possibility of non inmediate errors is possible



  • @bridget99 said:

    There's no "amount of time required" to make pages render correctly in IE7. Just do what people always do when some of their customers use a legacy platform: code to the lowest common denominator.

    There is no lowest point denominator between IE7 and the other mentioned browsers. Same goes for IE8. I don't know for IE9 and 10, though.

    At my company we've completely dropped support for IE 7 and below. We drop any bug requests from people using IE6 or 7, telling them to update their browsers or switch to another one.

    Recently I tried making a change to the CSS applied to a small image in a page, and while things worked neatly and with little code in Chrome and Firefox, a lot of workarounds were needed to make things look nice in IE8. In the end, rather than changing the CSS, I decided to edit the image instead since I didn't want to pollute the code.

    And anyway why would anyone still be using IE7 on this day and age? I can understand people using IE6, it's the web equivalent for DOS when it comes to jurassic applications, but there's no excuse to keep IE7 on your mahcine.



  • What silliness. You can easily make webpages appear correctly in any web browser by not using the CSS and JavaScript codes and stuff like that.



  • @Renan said:

    a lot of workarounds were needed to make things look nice in IE8
     

    That makes me think of  aproblem with your CSS rather than IE8, since I don't know of any super-major bugs in in IE8 rendering. I can make a list off the top of my head for 6 and 7, but not for IE8.

    But maybe IE8 hasn't been used for long enough, being replaced with IE9 actually fairly quickly.

    @Renan said:

    And anyway why would anyone still be using IE7 on this day and age?

    Retarded IT managers.

     



  • @Renan said:

    And anyway why would anyone still be using IE7 on this day and age?
     

    One "answer" came earlier:

    @serguey123 said:

    While I wish they upgraded to something newer than IE7, some companies do require it because of legacy apps and changing to support a newer browser would be more expensive than to wait for the end of the lifecycle of the apps that actually need it.

    To my mind, IE7 is used by two groups of people:

    1. those that have to use it because some internal web-based application was coded to IE7 use and won't work in any other browser (including newer/older version of IE) without some significant rework
    2. those that choose to use it because "all my pages work in it? Why should I upgrade?"

    In the case of (1), I've spoken to organisations that can't upgrade due to ${internalBrewedAppName} when they really mean they won't upgrade because it'll break the app, and they won't pay the cost of enhancing it for future-proofing (read: "fixing to work correctly with web standards"). Oddly they can't present me with a cost breakdown; I'm willing to bet that the breakeven point had passed years ago. The usual questions were raised: insufficient testing, nobody had iPhones/iPads at the time, everybody used IE and firefox-loving hippies were shot, etc.

    (2) is largely (1) scaled from LAN to WAN. There were a large amount of IE6-optimised sites out there which didn't render properly in other browsers, including IE7 when released, giving people the impression that this new browser wasn't compatible with their gaming forums (partly correct, but for the wrong reasons) and clung on grimly to their beloved IE6. It wasn't until sites like Youtube et al upfront stated they would no longer be "supporting" IE6 did the diehards look to changing.

    A similar story is playing out with IE7: organisations find from browser stats that a lot of customers are still using IE7, so need to include workarounds to cope with buggy implementations. Because the site still works, customers have no incentive to upgrade. Catch-22.

    (we have to include some major hackery in our site because we deal with Govt departments that are still on IE6, and the feeling is that if we drop these workarounds then we'll lose this customer to another supplier that still supports IE6.)



  • Ok. I read your entire argument.
    Is it really very very very difficult to talk to user to go for some third party browser like Opera or firefox or Chrome and then have your app run on it?

    @Cassidy said:


    To my mind, IE7 is used by two groups of people:

    1. those that have to use it because some internal web-based application was coded to IE7 use and won't work in any other browser (including newer/older version of IE) without some significant rework
    2. those that choose to use it because "all my pages work in it? Why should I upgrade?"

    In the case of (1), I've spoken to organisations that can't upgrade due to ${internalBrewedAppName} when they really mean they won't upgrade because it'll break the app, and they won't pay the cost of enhancing it for future-proofing (read: "fixing to work correctly with web standards"). Oddly they can't present me with a cost breakdown; I'm willing to bet that the breakeven point had passed years ago. The usual questions were raised: insufficient testing, nobody had iPhones/iPads at the time, everybody used IE and firefox-loving hippies were shot, etc.

    (2) is largely (1) scaled from LAN to WAN. There were a large amount of IE6-optimised sites out there which didn't render properly in other browsers, including IE7 when released, giving people the impression that this new browser wasn't compatible with their gaming forums (partly correct, but for the wrong reasons) and clung on grimly to their beloved IE6. It wasn't until sites like Youtube et al upfront stated they would no longer be "supporting" IE6 did the diehards look to changing.

    A similar story is playing out with IE7: organisations find from browser stats that a lot of customers are still using IE7, so need to include workarounds to cope with buggy implementations. Because the site still works, customers have no incentive to upgrade. Catch-22.

    (we have to include some major hackery in our site because we deal with Govt departments that are still on IE6, and the feeling is that if we drop these workarounds then we'll lose this customer to another supplier that still supports IE6.)



  • @Nagesh said:

    Is it really very very very difficult to talk to user to go for some third party browser like Opera or firefox or Chrome and then have your app run on it?

    Are you bidding?


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