There is light at the end of the tunnel

Bonesnap

My boss has announced that we are officially dropping support for Internet Explorer 8 on April 8, 2014 (the day Windows XP is no longer being supported my Microsoft in any capacity). At first my boss said on January 1, but then I reminded him XP was still receiving security updates until early April.

It's a nice feeling knowing the lowest version of IE will be 9, and I have a feeling that 9 won't be around for very long as I believe 10 has already surpassed it in market share the last I looked (if I remember correctly). And with 11 on the horizon things are finally looking up in the IE department.

Anyone else dealing with IE compatibility issues?

laserlight

What does the end of official support for Windows XP have to do with ceasing support for IE8? I would think that would just give an unassailable reason to stop supporting IE6.

NogDog

IE8, the browser that won't die: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combined-ww-monthly-201209-201309

Bonesnap

laserlight;11033955 wrote:
What does the end of official support for Windows XP have to do with ceasing support for IE8? I would think that would just give an unassailable reason to stop supporting IE6.

IE8 is the highest version of IE one can update to on XP. The mission to kill IE6 has been underway for a long time now, and its market share shows. Plus Microsoft has begun its auto updating of IE for a while now - which would put most users at IE8 (who are still on XP). I'm not even sure you can update to SP3 without updating to IE8 first - and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone who is using XP (legitimately) with a service pack less than 3. By Microsoft ending support for XP, we can tell clients that it's simply not feasible or even reasonable to support it - Microsoft isn't even supporting it. It might be a different story if its market share was higher, but IE10 is poised to overtake IE8 in a couple of months, so by the time April 2014 rolls around, I don't doubt that IE8's market share will be considerably less than what it is now - and will probably take a sharp drop around that time when the media starts playing up the end of XP.

NogDog;11033957 wrote:
IE8, the browser that won't die: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combined-ww-monthly-201209-201309

Unfortunately, IE8 will be the new IE6, but I am confident that with Microsoft's killing of XP, IE8 will fade into obscurity much quicker than IE6.

cretaceous

ie8? pah - remember 5, 6 and 7 .. yes it's hallowe'en soon

johanafm

I just moved and needed to setup WiFi to access the internet. So I pulled out my router from back in the early years of this millenia and instantly ran into problems… After changing its settings, you are supposed to first "save" and then "apply", after which the router restarts and applies the new settings. The router did indeed restart, but it kept using the same settings.

Eventually I tried using IE8 to access the router admin pages… without success. Damn Microsoft - not-so-gracefully degrading my internet by upgrading their browsers!

Finally I explicitly put IE8 into IE6 parsing mode. I requested the admin page again and was now informed that IE was operating in IE5 quirks mode! All my internet needed to work was a little love and backwards compatibility.

Settings updated, I finally manged to connect to the office VPN. And with the early days of internet flashing before my eyes, I did indeed see IE10 at the end of the ip-tunnel. Praise the Bill!

I wonder, will Flash also die next year?

dalecosp

johanafm;11034007 wrote:
I wonder, will Flash also die next year?

Could you kill it? PLEASE? 😉

Bonesnap

cretaceous;11033979 wrote:
ie8? pah - remember 5, 6 and 7 .. yes it's hallowe'en soon

I'm trying to forget!

johanafm;11034007 wrote:
I wonder, will Flash also die next year?

One can only hope.

There are some really cool things you can do with CSS transitions and transforms, but they're not supported by anything under IE10, and even then, I don't think IE10 has the support that Firefox and Chrome has for those sort of things. jQuery allows for some pretty nifty things as well. Combined, I think you can eliminate the need for Flash in majority of scenarios. It will be a pretty awesome web landscape when Flash is dead.

NogDog

If Flash goes away, then I'll need something like the FlashBlock Firefox add-on I use now to stop a lot of distracting crap on the web I don't want bothering me unless I specifically choose to view it. 🙂

bradgrafelman

(Slightly OT) How about designs like this website? (Note: Start scrolling down/up to see the potentially "distracting crap." :p)

dalecosp

Your work? Interesting HTML5-ish stuff....

bradgrafelman

dalecosp;11034037 wrote:
Your work?

Nah... (un?)fortunately most of my "work" these days is in embedded software. I just happened to stumble upon that page after a product announcement and thought it seemed like a Web 2.0-ish way to be "flashy" without being Flashy (read: no .swf's just to accomplish interactive/moving designs).

dalecosp

Yeah, that's the banner-wave of HTML5 ...

I'd probably call it "Web 2.1" 😉

Weedpacket

It's not as responsive as https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/os/ and it's not as easy to print. Both work if the page is loaded without JavaScript; the Garmin one looks better without CSS; I'm wondering which one works better in screen readers (and hence search engines).

Bonesnap

Damn, those are some pretty cool websites.

dalecosp

NogDog;11033957 wrote:
IE8, the browser that won't die: http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combined-ww-monthly-201209-201309

Interesting: compare http://www.netmarketshare.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2&qpcustomd=0

Less than 30% IE at StatCounter, and almost 60% at NetMarketShare ... as someone once said:

Aaron Levenstein wrote:
Statistics are like bikinis. What they reveal is suggestive, but what they conceal is vital.

or maybe (and much more well known):

Mark Twain wrote:
There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.

StatCounter might be a tad closer ... our IE usage stats range from about 32% to the mid 40th percentiles for Oct. '12 to Oct. '13 ...