Thread

I don’t think I ever said ALL the blame goes to Microsoft. I said much of the blame. If people are paranoid to upgrade, perhaps there is a reason for the paranoia. I know I’m never paranoid to upgrade Firefox, but anything Microsoft, I think twice about it. IE8 as an example… upgrading that means that in order to test in IE7, I probably have to do some sort of funky emulation or whatever. Not all that fun. If backwards compatibility were properly thought about, upgrading shouldn’t cause old apps to stop working either. Microsoft gets bashed a lot, but often it is deserved. I’m working on a Vista laptop right now that I have to constantly clean up the files on and defrag the hard drive so that it doesn’t “stall out” in processing every minute or so… and this is a laptop that was designed to run Vista. Also, after IE got a “major security upgrade”, it started crashing all the time which made me finally fully resort to using Firefox as my default browser. Just this morning, a video that crashed IE caused a full computer reboot. Same video crashed Firefox, but all I had to do was restart Firefox.

Anyway, sorry for the Microsoft rant, but that company causes hours and hours of lost productivity and making sites IE6 compatible is just another example of it. Decisions like EE’s help to force upgrades, despite people’s reservations, so I definitely applaud it.

Finally..IE6, rest in hell !!!!!!!

What i get from Leslie’s answer in the start of this thread http://ellislab.com/forums/viewthread/110687/#558515 is that the ControlPanel will not specifically be made compatible with IE6 (or older).

If your IT-department still is <strike>holding</strike> clinging on to IE6, then nobody will forbid you from actually customizing and tweaking the CP-themes and its scripts and CSS to support any Chihuahua- or Gorilla-breed browser.

I’m just thinking out loud here… I haven’t got access to Dev Preview of 2.0 (my client is anxious to get it, so I’m anxious to preview it…) But if it’s anything like 1.6.*, there are themes for the control panel, yes? And if so, all a developer has to do is spend some time developing an IE6 compatible theme for the control panel and this is no big deal. Is that too much of an assumption?

I have no problem dumping IE6. As long as it doesn’t effect end-users, he should be happy, though.

Sounding great. Can’t wait to see 2.0!

-Daniel

But if it’s anything like 1.6.*, there are themes for the control panel, yes?

Yes.

And if so, all a developer has to do is spend some time developing an IE6 compatible theme for the control panel and this is no big deal. Is that too much of an assumption?

No, that’s correct. They just won’t ship with EE by default.

No, that’s correct. They just won’t ship with EE by default.

Right, so I really don’t see how this could be a big issue. 😊 If I have a stubborn client that requires IE6, I just charge him more and setup an IE6 compatible theme. 😉 (And chances are, someone just needs to make a theme that supports IE6, and then distro it and become someone’s hero (and possibly rich… 😉).)

-Daniel

In my latest project I’ve dumped support for IE6 also, only to discover the amount of people that still work with it. So I’ve delivered IE6 support for an extra budget. For the front end this can be done, because I know how I’ve made it.

For the backend it might become very hair-pulling, because it very likely won’t be a simple setup to deal with. To me it means that I cannot offer a CMS on EE2 to about 50% of my customers, if I’m not able to solve IE6 misbehaviors. I could demand FF or IE7 as a standard browser, but when you make a site for an organization, this is something you just can’t force. Either you don’t know who are using the CP or if they are working on systems that just don’t allow IE7, like windows 2000 or any software installation at all. The latter is my main reason for using a web based CMS system.

I’m sorry, but I think that this is a poor decision.

We all hate IE6, but if Expression Engine wants to live in the enterprise world, it has to support IE6. Doing otherwise simply seems like it’s either “we’re too cool for that” or that it only cares about smaller organizations.

That’s fine, America thrives on its small businesses, but tossing IE6 support for the admin interface does not seem like a wise choice if EllisLabs wants to service corporate clients.

I’m sorry, but I think that this is a poor decision.

We all hate IE6, but if Expression Engine wants to live in the enterprise world, it has to support IE6. Doing otherwise simply seems like it’s either “we’re too cool for that” or that it only cares about smaller organizations.

That’s fine, America thrives on its small businesses, but tossing IE6 support for the admin interface does not seem like a wise choice if EllisLabs wants to service corporate clients.

This is an argument often given in favor of IE6 support; we’re familiar with it, and it fails to pass mettle in terms of whether or not that means ExpressionEngine can be used in the corporate sector.  First, if the institution absolutely demands IE6 for the control panel, then 1.x is probably a better choice for them anyway, as they obviously are not the type of organization to jump on new technology.  Second, nothing is stopping you, or anyone else, from creating new themes or applying CSS modifications to supplied control panel themes to provide IE6 compatibility.  It’s just not worth our time and effort to support - that doesn’t mean that you have to draw the same conclusion, nor does our decision limit what you and your company choose to support in deploying our products.

I’m sorry, but I think that this is a poor decision.

We all hate IE6, but if Expression Engine wants to live in the enterprise world, it has to support IE6. Doing otherwise simply seems like it’s either “we’re too cool for that” or that it only cares about smaller organizations.

That’s fine, America thrives on its small businesses, but tossing IE6 support for the admin interface does not seem like a wise choice if EllisLabs wants to service corporate clients.

You’re making a lot of assumptions here that I simply don’t agree with. There is certainly an enterprise market that doesn’t require IE6. We know this because we already serve it. Its a smaller market than than the traditional “enterprise/corporate” market but its a lot bigger than most people realize.

We feel the wise choice is to do business with people and teams that want a solution focused on best practices in terms of stability, security, and performace… neither of those words describe IE6 even a little bit.

There are plenty of CMS choices out there that are backward focused simply to serve the behemoths that refuse to change. We’re not going to be that company and we know for a fact there are plenty of “nimble behemoths” who are behind our decision to drop IE6 and focus on what’s best instead of what’s entrenched.

I haven’t read through this thread so forgive me, but all I can say is good for you.  I was just explaining yesterday to a client that 80%+ of my front-end “debugging” time is spent getting things to work (let alone look) right in IE6.  I say take it out back and shoot the damn thing.

Good move.  We stopped wasting time with IE6 four months ago.  It’s awesome!

FWIW, 12% of our users on eCalc (a EE powered site) are still using IE6.

This made me curious so I looked it up. For us, it’s 1.5%.
I had never looked it up in the past… and I just realize how much time I have wasted on compatibility problems for… well… nobody.

This is not directly related to the post but… are you planning any support for mobile browsers?

This is not directly related to the post but… are you planning any support for mobile browsers?

Just as 1.x’s control panel can be used without significant difficulty by modern web-enabled smartphones, the same is the case with 2.0.  As for a mobile-specific theme, the initial release will not likely have one, but I’m fairly confident that one will be available in a short time, presuming there’s a demand.  Whether supplied by us or a third party is to be determined.