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Can Jive Help Make the Internet Better?

Posted by Matt Tucker on Sep 2, 2009 9:56:36 PM

In a bid to make the internet a better place for web developers, there's been a big effort lately to kill IE 6. My favorite part of the story is Microsoft themselves, with a promise to donate food on behalf of people that upgrade from IE6 to IE8:

 

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Our UI team regularly curses the large set of workarounds and compromises that IE6 support forces on them. Such is the reality of being an enterprise software vendor -- we still have many customers using the browser as a corporate standard (and believe it or not, there are some real reasons to delay the upgrade due to the expense of re-writing internal webapps that were specifically targeted at IE6).

 

On the other hand, I talk to plenty of customers and prospects that are clamoring for us to keep pushing the boundary of what's possible with social software in a web browser, especially after they've seen and tested Google Wave. Dropping IE6 will let us develop richer features faster and with less bugs. We're already committed to supporting it in our next release, but here's my question: should Jive drop official IE6 support in our release after next? No promises on timing of that release of course, but we're likely talking about late next Spring. We'll be conducting a more official survey, but your non-scientific opinion counts too! Leave a blog comment or tweet me @matttucker. And, cheers to a better internet for everyone.

1,865 Views Tags: google_wave, kill_ie6


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Sep 3, 2009 6:03 AM Guest Jay  says:
When I worked for a large banking company based out of the west coast a few years back, they had a TON of internal "apps" that were IE6 *only* apps.  They had problems when people would upgrade IE to the latest version, so there was definitely a culture of "don't change that! You might break things!" To get them to upgrade takes more than web developers making a lot of noise, they need some good incentives, and a good amount of time.  Since its been a few years since, I hope they have updated some of those internal apps, but when I was there a good number of them had been around for a very long time before, and they have that very conservative view of "don't fix things that aren't broken".  It may be a while before companies like that get around to updating everything.
Sep 3, 2009 1:58 PM Guest wroot  says:

Drop it! We dont use SBS, so my opinion probably doesnt matter. At our company we are moving to IE8 this week (not because the donations ). And we were already using IE7 more than for a year. No big issues, and we have a few massive web applications.

 

Spring you say, huh? So, we will have to use 3.0.5 at igniterealtime.org with its url pasting bug for 6 more months???

 

RTE is buggy here too, i had to retype this message.. i will soon start tagging my messages with kill_rtes

Sep 3, 2009 2:30 PM Matt Tucker Matt Tucker    says in response to Jay:
Jay -- thanks, great points and internal apps that target specific browsers is definitely makes things more complicated.
Sep 3, 2009 2:32 PM Matt Tucker Matt Tucker    says in response to wroot:
wroot -- note that I mentioned the next, next release. I think you'll be pleasantly surprised by the timing of the next release plus the RTE improvements!
Oct 10, 2009 5:47 AM mr2020 mr2020    says:

Keep it simple!  That's what my Grandpa used to say.   And don't ever try to please EVERYONE.

 

I just installed IE8 on all my systems, and can't imagine folks out there still insisting on using IE6 etc.

 

So in other words, drop the support of IE6.

 

Thanks!