One of the nicest things about Windows 8 is that each copy shipped is a guaranteed person who is not using I.E 7/8/9.
Hopefully the companies just now upgrading to Windows 7 from XP will also deploy I.E 10, but I'm not holding my breath. On the other hand maybe Windows 7 install media will come with I.E 10 incorporated into it. A man can dream.
I was helping out my wife the other day to use some work-related internal site via VPN. I had just finished putting a clean Win7+IE9 install on her PC only to find out that this large-ish enterprisey portal only works in IE8. Everyone always touts these reasons as why old versions stick around forever, but when you see one in practice you realize how crippling it can be for both sides because nobody necessarily even owns the site (e.g., built by outside consultants) and the end users have no real say to get it fixed. If there is no in-house technical owner, the chance of it being updated anytime soon simply because a new browser version is available is next to nil. I feel, in situations like this, it is probably not until the department/whatever head personally encounters the issue on a new computer that a top-down mandate comes to fix the situation.
Doesn't putting the browser in IE8 compatibility mode work? I guess it sucks for an end user to need to use a developer feature like this but could be the best option.
All the owners of the site would need to do is add this line to their HTML and it throws IE9 and later into IE8 compatibility mode:
I was surprised to notice that the BBC website does this. I noticed because a bookmarklet I wrote which requires IE9 won't work on the BBC site, which was quite disappointing.
Having done the equivalent for a gnarly enterprise web-app when IE8 came out (using mod_headers to inject the HTTP header equivalent) this isn't trivial and they may not have anyone with the necessary skills who is jumping to take on testing and support (everything which happens with that app for the next 6 months will be first blamed as an upgrade problem).
Beyond that, it doesn't actually work: some features won't be completely compatible so you're effectively creating a third browser to test and support. In the case of IE8, it was mostly IE7-compatible but it relied on the browser not throwing errors when JavaScript attempted to set syntactically invalid styles and IE8-in-IE7 still raised exceptions deep in a third-party library licensed by the app vendor. This app was made by a very large, wealthy company – we were paying mid-six-figures a year for "support" – and they preferred infrequent massive update releases, which meant that a week after I reported the bug (around the time Microsoft started pushing IE8 as an automatic install) one of their managers contacted us asking for the patch I wrote so they could redistribute it to other customers.
All the owners of the site would need to do is add this line to their HTML
No.
If they're in a situation like this, it's incredibly unlikely that anyone has the knowledge necessary to do this, let alone the time, inclination, or (perhaps most importantly for enterprise companies) business approval. The vast majority of enterprises cannot just publish production code at their own discretion.
IE9 has a way to put it into IE8 compatibility mode. Do these kinds of sites not work in Compatibility Mode? Press F12 to switch the mode. It's a good option for using a better version of IE while still supporting older sites.
Not only don't they capture all the quirks, but they introduce new ones. I had an issue a year back, I can't remember the exact details unfortunately, where IE8 in compatibility mode for IE7 was causing some weird behaviour that didn't happen in either IE7 or 8.
To make things even more confusing there is both a "browser mode" and a "documents mode", both containing all the versions of IE7,8,9 plus documents mode containing IE9-compatibility-mode whatever that is. Setting any combination of the two options is valid.
There's a sad story waiting to be written about the developers that have had to spend so much time deliberately introducing bugs into IE10 to make this feature work.
Nah, they just plug in the old Trident renderers. "Browser mode" changes the user agent, and "Document mode" changes the renderer. The JS engine remains the same, which is why you always need to test in the real deal.
As long as sites keep working on those ancient browsers while devs waste precious time spoon-feeding them - they will linger. I myself stopped caring about anything below IE8 a long ago (lately below IE9) and I ask everyone to do the same.
JQuery 2.0 is a great weapon against the legacy (support only for IE9+). I hope for its swift and rapid adoption in place of 1.x version.
It's important to note that Google's apps do not support legacy browsers any more. Last time I checked on my VM, the main Google search engine works perfectly fine in IE6.
The answers to this question will be skewed as a lot of people on here work at startups, with no interest or need to support legacy browsers.
I work at a digital agency, a lot of our larger clients still desire legacy browser support (sometimes as far as IE6). Since a lot of these clients earn some serious money, we could charge a ton and it'd still make business sense for the client to support these users. Also, some of the sectors we've worked in have had some very high IE6/7 numbers, especially in the legal sector.
To answer your question, it depends on who you ask. On here and on places like Reddit you'll find a lot of people don't offer full legacy browser support, but many of us still do because we are bound by our clients. Once Windows 8 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.
"Once Windows 8 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process."
Once Windows Vista starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.
Once Windows 7 starts to take off, probably when the first service pack comes out, I fully expect the people still using XP to begin the upgrade process.
Heard it before. I expect some people to never ever leave XP, because they'll have one little activex control that their entire multibillion dollar operation runs on, and they will continue to insists a shrinking pool of vendors support it at all costs, because any expense is worth it compared to any downtime experienced by shifting their business process to anything resembling modern technology. They will be few, but they will still exist.
I appreciate that people will run XP/IE6 like an application environment rather than an OS for people to use, but by the time the new service pack hits it'll be coming up to 2014, when Microsoft officially ends support for XP, meaning those that run XP are on their own.
It's been far too long now, and even Microsoft want it dead and buried. When April 2014 hits I expect Microsoft to halt all support, and then I'd not be shocked to see XP targeted by virus makers in order to kill it off for good. Companies won't want to pay for their applications to be ported, but if the choice is to port or have their systems wiped out then I think they'll be left with no choice.
> I expect some people to never ever leave XP, because they'll have one little activex control that their entire multibillion dollar operation runs on,
What about the expense of the Chinese/Russian/Whatevercountry hackers totally owning them because they use IE6?
Unfortunately, where I am at our corporate standard says that we "fully support" IE 7. We've decided instead to make sure that the site functions in IE 7, but it doesn't have to render exactly the same. Our customer support group is still stuck on IE 7 for unknown reasons and since they use our product internally also, we can't break it completely. It's stupid that we have to stupport a 6+ year old browser.
Many companies are still using Internet Explorer 6 or 7. It's absolutely ridiculous, why not upgrade or just switch browsers? Can't be that difficult, surely?
My previous school uses Internet Explorer 8, I asked the tech why he doesn't upgrade the computers to IE9, he just said he doesn't have the time.
If they're running Windows XP, he probably doesn't - a lot of places have skimped for years and are now faced with replacing hardware and upgrading software to run Windows 7. The results will be good but it's a capital-P project.
Not strictly true. Our QA team are using Windows 8 and they typically decided to fire up a VM using built in Hyper-V containing one of the above each :(
No, Windows 8 has IE10 by default. They presumably have that VM to test IE9 and IE7 which are used on previous versions of Windows, but god knows why they put them on Windows 8.
//run some webkit sunspider code before solving a square
webkitPartialBaseBenchmark();
In solvenextsquare():
// run some webkit sunspider code a few times before continuing
...
//not done solving, run more webkit sunspider, we hear that's what users want
It looks like the "benchmark" is to run bits of sunspider while running a minesweeper game. I think this is kind of misleading, since it makes IE10 look good at graphics and game rendering, when really it's running unrelated code.
From the help popup: "Let's see how fast your browser is at running a computationally, mathematically, and graphically intense app! Thank you WebKit SunSpider :-)"
Are you sure this isn't just to introduce some artificial delay to make it seem like it is "processing"? Imagine a slot machine that gave you a result in 10ms as opposed to rolling around for effect.
Looks like they're just causing computation and JIT'ing in Chakra and V8 before moving to the next square. SunSpider is a terrible metric and they're just poking fun. Pretty funny when you think about it.
“Internet Explorer 10 takes the lead in browser privacy”
—Geek.com
"Greatly enhanced and is simply delightful"
—Gizmodo
“Flip ahead feature in Internet Explorer 10 is slick”
—Tweet
Sources for the first two might actually be findable. "Tweet" as a front-page endorsement? I'm not sure if they're trying to be funny or serious. That looks more like something theonion.com would use.
A random tweet possibly made by a person working at Microsoft? Or maybe the tweet doesn't actually exist.
I've seen companies (gaming companies, mostly) that display tweets as endorsements for a game and then, when I try to find the tweet in Twitter, that user mysteriously doesn't exist.
> Sources for the first two might actually be findable. "Tweet" as a front-page endorsement? I'm not sure if they're trying to be funny or serious. That looks more like something theonion.com would use.
Of course it's an ironic joke.
Yes, even people in big companies like Microsoft sometimes have a sense of humor.
I wish IE would move away from big waterfall-esque versions-numbers and just go to frequent bite sized automatic updates.
I understand the corporate need for browser version locking but that should be the exception (Active Directory overriding) not the norm.
As an aside the latest versions of IE seem just fine. I no longer have any skin in that game like I did in 2006-2010 where every computer I happened across would instantly have FF installed and IE hidden.
Actually, I'm starting to fall out with frequent automatic updates.
The most recent version of chrome on Mac OS X has broken me watching videos on itv.com. Manual downgrading is really painful, so I've just switched to Firefox for a while. But if this was a website important to my business, I would be livid.
I've had Chrome break a few things from automatic updates as well, but overall I still like auto-updates. Knowing me, I'd have updated anyway, and this just does it for me. I do a lot of web work though and I'm mostly just thrilled that I don't have to design websites for "Chrome 6" or any nonsense like that.
This is great news, as they really need to ramp up the pace with "frequent bite sized updates".
But I have no idea (and it will be interesting to find out) if IE11 will run on Windows 7 ever; or if as usual this is the end of the line and older OS versions will be the enabling factor of older versions of IE still being used. This is important since not everyone likes and wants Win8, so Win7 will be around for a while to come.
Perhaps part of the reason Microsoft hasn't switched to a faster release cycle is a fear that the quicker they iterate IE the quicker it will be replaced by other browsers. They need a certain baseline for their own internet solutions, but until those solutions are mature enough, and the market is ready to pay for them, they don't have a strong enough motivation to improve IE.
Wow, that's actually pretty great. One of the biggest reasons why people are still stuck on old versions of IE is because they don't want to run OS upgrades. Making the upgrades independent of everything else is quite sensible.
" We will begin auto updating Windows 7 customers to IE10 in the weeks ahead, starting today with customers running the IE10 Release Preview. "
Does this mean they'll try to update everyone on Windows 7 to IE10? I'm hoping so, but don't know enough about the policies around MS updates to grok what the impact will be in the coming weeks.
This has been the case for the previous few IE versions too. There is a tool to block automatic deployment, mostly meant for corporate environments where you probably first need to test all your intranet apps.
It won't reach those who don't update their Windows, though. And that's probably a large part of users who are still on older IE versions.
The benchmark actually has a pretty reasonable workload: rendering, playing sound effects, doing some basic flood-fill searching, etc. And it's much faster in IE10 than Firefox for me, so...
With graphics-intensive things, I tend to find that IE9 and IE10 always come out on top, followed by Chrome and Safari. Firefox is usually horribly slow.
Yes, they added a lot of bells and whistles to make it relevant for a benchmark. I am just surprised that they didn't use something that is more dynamic by design.
I can't tell for FF, but Chrome has no problem with that demo.
I just took that penguin test on my Chrome Browser and then on IE 10. I was blown away by the result http://i.imgur.com/JfTTw7w.png . I knew IE stepped up their game when it came to graphics, but can someone explain why is there such huge disparity in rendering? I always thought Chrome had the best graphics rendering of them all.
Every browser vendor has their own benchmarks (Google has Octane, Mozilla has Kraken, MS has plenty of smaller ones on their IE test drive site). Apparently those are the things each vendor optimises for which shows in the results (Chrome is fastest in Octane, Firefox is fastest in Kraken, etc.). It's not so much that Chrome is slow at graphics or IE is slow doing computational stuff, it's more that each test's performance depends a little on the intricacies and internal workings of the browser it was written for (and runs best). Or maybe vice-cersa, i.e. the test was written and the browser adapted to run it fast.
For the penguins I noticed a few graphics glitches on IE 10, though, namely that penguins sliding in from the bottom or right are not rendered completely immediately, so you get only half a penguin until it redraws completely. In other sites IE tends to skip frames to keep up with rendering sometimes (although that was on an old Intel graphics chip, so might not have been that comparable).
As an aside, does anyone know of a way to install this alongside IE9 on a testing machine? I should have started testing in IE10 months ago, but I'm loath to set up a separate VM for every IE version.
But I use VirtualBox and take advantage of "snapshots" -- this way I have a virtual hard drive with "XP" and separate snapshots with IE6, 7, and 8 installed. And I have a separate virtual hard drive with Windows 8 installed, with separate snapshots for IE8, 9, and now 10.
This way you can save a LOT of disk space. And as a side benefit, once you set your snapshot point, every time you switch between snapshots, you lose the VM history since the snapshot, so you can start testing sites with a "clean" version of IE everytime, uncluttered with cache, history, etc.
+1 for this. We just set up 20 of our people with this set up. With Hyper-V built into Windows 8, it's actually quite pleasant (compared to dealing with VMware).
Note, however, that this is not the same as the real browser engine - there are key areas which still perform like the native version. As an example, IE8 in IE7 compatibility mode will throw JavaScript exceptions if you try to set invalid styles on a DOM element but real IE7 silently ignores the error.
I like Browserstack. I used it before modern.ie endorsed it and I've been fairly happy with the results. In the beginning it locked up a bunch, but it has gotten better and better
The newest versions of Chrome and Firefox has been working on Windows 7 for quite some time already.
This is my major objection when people insist that "Internet Explorer has caught up". It's true that the latest IE isn't light-years behind it's rivals anymore, but it doesn't matter if people are forced to use older versions of the browser because they don't constantly change their OS.
My family's laptop runs Windows 7. What's the point of talking about all the advantages IE10 offers if they couldn't even use it?
It took Microsoft 6 months to port one version of IE to another version of Windows, while Chrome and Firefox are available not only on all versions of Windows (XP included, which is 40% of the market), but also on Linux and Mac OS. I thought Microsoft wanted to be taken seriously in the browser market?
And also, to make it more complete let's add in Safari. Released (as a beta) in 2003, with its first Windows version in 2007. The Windows version's last (read: no more releases after this) release was Safari 5.[1]
Are we to take Apple seriously since they only support iOS and OSX?
I think you'd have trouble buying a Mac that doesn't have multitouch support today, considering that Macbooks come with multitouch trackpads and iMacs come with Magic Mouses (with desktop trackpads advertised alongside them).
If the trackpad counts, then virtually every Windows device supports multitouch too. So why is this a reason for Apple to stop supporting Safari on Windows? I don't think it has anything to do with gestures.
They are quick to take advantage of new Win8 features, and it took a while before their backport of some of them (Platform Update) to Win7 can be finally released.
That may make some sense if they were already ahead of the others with IE10, but they are about 2 years behind in HTML5 support. Spending another 6 months just to port it to a pretty similar OS of their own doesn't make me very optimistic about IE's future.
I guess it's easier to ship an updated rendering engine if you are also the one shipping the single embedding application of said rendering engine, unfortunately.
How long before IE10 hits the update channel for Windows 7 users? This should be enough to send IE9 to low single digit and IE10 to double-digit market share.
IE9 auto-updates have been enabled for over a year, and IE8 has yet to fall to a single-digit percentage of page views... (Of course, IE8 share is kept high by the large number of users still on Windows XP, which won't be the case for IE9.)
With the biggest font on that website: "Looking for our latest browser?", just under that: "You'll need Windows 8 or Windows RT or Windows 7 SP1 to use Internet Explorer 10.".
I did a single Octane run on each for my own amusement. Totally unscientific methodology but the results are good enough for me. Chromium is v. 27.0.1424.0 rev 184630 (probably the latest build) from a zipfile (Google makes it practically impossible to download zips of anything else).
IE still has to do a lot to catch up and the Windows 7 desktop version's GUI is same old IE9 without any changes.
Just tried after your seeing your comment. It throws out a useless generic error "We are experiencing problems with our site...". I think it has something to do with Cookie/ViewState validation to prevent automated attacks.
Fix: Clicked on the "Compatibility View" icon at the top on the browser and the order went through fine.
Good call. For some reason I didn't get the compatibility view button for this site. I noticed I don't get it for any sites. After some digging, it appears something has turned it off on this box. I've turned it back on and it works in compat view.
Sir, i tried to bring your attention on the fact that pizza is not the best food to eat. All i did I just used the same words you used to describe MSFT.
MSFT has 94,000 employees and ~1 billion devices running windows around the globe. You can buy brand new computer which runs windows 7 or 8 for ~250$.
And i don't know why guy like you, who finds pizza ordering process so sophisticated that made post on ycombinator about it, thinks that he has rights to insult 94000 people, saying that they don't care about their customers. Some of this people i have an honor to call colleges and friends. I think you owe apologies, sir.
Sir here is a Microsoft gold partner who puts nearly £1m a year in business their way as well. I'm not a reddit whinger and Microsoft hate monger.
They treat us like criminals by throwing us through audits, never fix a defect we raise and stop us ordering pizza through trivial bugs which may or may not also affect our 2mloc financial platform.
So, no apologies due. And if you work for MSFT, you're adding to the problem. 94000 people doesn't mean it isn't a ship of fools.
And for reference, its not going to be pizza that kills me - I have a degenerative neurological condition (neurofibromatosis) that will get me first.
Hopefully the companies just now upgrading to Windows 7 from XP will also deploy I.E 10, but I'm not holding my breath. On the other hand maybe Windows 7 install media will come with I.E 10 incorporated into it. A man can dream.