On 19/05/10 18:28, Vince O'Sullivan wrote:
On May 19, 7:40 am, Robert Casto<[email protected]> wrote:
Laying this at the feet of other developers is a bit too harsh.
I would put the blame squarely on management as they are the decision makers.
If we, as developers, simply brush off responsibility for our work and
blame everyone else for the state of the code that we're putting out
then we're in no position to complain (or even comment) about the
current state of affairs.
Two well known pertinent quotes come to mind:
"We must be the change we wish to see in the world." (attrib. Ghandi
2001 (unproven))
“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one
persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all
progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (Shaw 1903)
I believe many web developers have fought the fight. I certainly have,
but in the end it is our role to provide a client with a service. If
that service is writing a web application that supports IE6, then that
is what we should do. And I still see IE6 support as an explicit
requirement in intranet projects.
My theory about the dominance of IE6 that it is mostly not about
deciding for that browser (or against others), it is about not deciding
at all. IE6 comes with Windows XP, so if you deploy XP and then do
nothing, IE6 is what you get. I believe this is a common scenario in
many large organizations, with people just not being able to make a
business case for the upgrade. Add to that that there are a lot of
enterprisy intranet applications that are still IE6 only (and here I
blame developers), then you get a whole world of being stuck with that
old browser no one really wants.
A corollary of this is that we will have a wave of IE8 upgrades soon
(when people finally move to Windows 7), which will be our problem in
the not too far future. A lot of large organizations will just declare
that to be good enough and since it is bundled with the SOE they can't
be bothered to change it. And to some extent that makes sense, since
removing IE is too hard and installing a second browser means supporting
two browsers where one should be enough.
MS played the game of cornering the browser market well, and while they
are losing on some fronts, IE will stay with us for much, much longer.
Peter
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