Deprecation policy for IE6

[Idan Gazit]

I'm looking at admin tickets, and I realize that some defined policy for when we can safely start to break IE6 would be very helpful.

I'd like to simply declare that going forward, the admin need not work perfectly in IE6. That leaves our support footprint for the Admin at "modern browsers" + IE>7.

* contrib.admin is contrib, and thus not covered by Django's deprecation policy

* This isn't a change which affects any other frontend product built with Django. The only audience this affects is users of the admin. I think it's reasonable to require administrative users to have IE7 if all they have is IE.

The admin is already using the HTML5 doctype (see https://groups.google.com/d/topic/django-developers/wJ9dnUDHUVI/ for background), but not any of the new HTML5 elements.

This change would mainly open up the ability to use PNGs and remove hacks and workarounds from admin CSS/HTML

Any objections?

I

[Gert Van Gool]

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Although I don't personally.
I remember from the HTML5 doctype that some people (with app in enterprises) need the support

-- Gert

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Twitter: @gvangool

[Carl Meyer]

Hearty +1 from me, for purely pragmatic reasons. In 2011, IE6 support is
simply an unreasonable burden to place on volunteer front-end
development work, IMHO. It's hard enough getting front-end work done
without tripling (quadrupling? more?) the pain factor like that. In my
mind, asking front-end developers to support IE6 is roughly similar to
asking Python devs to support Python 1.5, perhaps not in terms of usage,
but in terms of the additional development pain.

I think it needs to be stated clearly that the effective choice is
between maintaining IE6 support and making major improvements to the
admin. If someone wants to argue that admin IE6 support should be
maintained for another release, they should acknowledge that the
implication is that there probably won't be significant upgrades to the
admin UI for at least that long.

If there are Django deployments whose administrators really can't use
any browser other than IE6, Django 1.3 will be around as long as they
need it. It's not a reasonable tradeoff for that (frankly somewhat
ridiculous - IE6 is how many years old now?) edge case to continue to
hold the rest of the community hostage.

Carl

[Richard Bronosky]

I've seen a few admin themes in the wild. Would it be fair to say that after a certain (very near) date, if you need EOL browser support, it will have to be provided by a 3rd party theme?

> Twitter: @gvangool <http://twitter.com/gvangool>

[Idan Gazit]

OK, by the power vested in me, I declare the admin unshackled from the need to support IE6.

Reception and dancing shall follow.

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[Henrik Genssen]

the question is not - how old a browser is, but how many user it (still) has
in germany there are still 4% using IE6 - thats
half the user of Google's Chrome with 8%.

Henrik

>reply to message:
>date: 09.06.2011 14:22:54
>from: "Carl Meyer" <ca...@oddbird.net>
>to: django-d...@googlegroups.com
>subject: [<django-developers.googlegroups.com>] Re: Deprecation policy for IE6

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[Xavier Ordoquy]

Le 9 juin 2011 à 15:06, Henrik Genssen a écrit :

> the question is not - how old a browser is, but how many user it (still) has
> in germany there are still 4% using IE6 - thats
> half the user of Google's Chrome with 8%.
>
>
> Henrik

It looks like fewer german users are still running ie6.
http://www.theie6countdown.com/default.aspx#list
reports around 2%

The other thing to take into account as idan said is:
are those ie6 users likely to be the same that will access the admin interface ?

Regards.

[mofle]

IE7 is almost just IE6 with tabs. In my opinion, going forward, IE
support should be IE8+.

Like said earlier, if someone really need support for IE7 and lower,
they can still use Django 1.3.

On Jun 9, 3:27 pm, Xavier Ordoquy <xordo...@linovia.com> wrote:
> Le 9 juin 2011 à 15:06, Henrik Genssen a écrit :
>
> > the question is not - how old a browser is, but how many user it (still) has
> > in germany there are still 4% using IE6 - thats
> > half the user of Google's Chrome with 8%.
>
> > Henrik
>

> It looks like fewer german users are still running ie6.http://www.theie6countdown.com/default.aspx#list

[Aymeric Augustin]

2011/6/9 Idan Gazit <id...@gazit.me>

I'm looking at admin tickets, and I realize that some defined policy for when we can safely start to break IE6 would be very helpful.

My vote is: "last year". Even Microsoft begs people to move away from IE6.

I can't think of a context where people:

  a) can't upgrade to IE7

  b) can't run Firefox, even from an USB stick

  c) need to access a Django application — let alone a Django >= 1.4 app.

c) is extremely unlikely happen in places where the corporate culture enforces a) and b).

--
Aymeric.

[Javier Guerra Giraldez]

On Thu, Jun 9, 2011 at 9:44 AM, Aymeric Augustin
<aymeric....@polytechnique.org> wrote:
> c) need to access a Django application — let alone a Django >= 1.4 app.

even less likely: a Django application's admin page

--
Javier

[Richard Bronosky]

It's even more complicated than that. You care about the statistics
for the people who use your product. Also, the stats for the admin
userbase will be very different than the userbase of a public facing
frontend. That is very hard to deduce.

--
.!# RichardBronosky #!.

[Florian Apolloner]

Hi,

On Jun 9, 1:11 pm, Gert Van Gool <gertvang...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I remember from the HTML5 doctype that some people (with app in enterprises)
> need the support

Right, but even Google is dropping support for IE < 8 [1]! And if
Google is trying to get companies to use newer browsers we should
support that too ;)

Cheers,
Florian

1: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/06/our-plans-to-support-modern-browsers.html

[Tom Evans]

I don't think we can say 'even google' in this scenario. Google
deprecated those browsers for enterprise customers with no client
communication at all (we certainly didn't get any). Google often takes
a very aggressive approach to things like this, which is fine if you
are google - django is not google!

Having said that, sticking at 1.3 for any projects that require IE 6
admin support is an acceptable compromise.

Cheers

Tom

[Alexander Schepanovski]

IE 7 should be probably dropped with IE6, I can't see point in keeping
it

[Mateusz Harasymczuk]

Totally agree,

If someone moved out of the IE 6, then he/she move out of the IE 7, too.

[Javier Guerra Giraldez]

On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 1:14 AM, Mateusz Harasymczuk
<ma...@harasymczuk.pl> wrote:
> If someone moved out of the IE 6, then he/she move out of the IE 7, too.

while i agree, i found microsoft's tortuous path to standards full of
dark corners.

case in point: some time ago, i was using some simple <canvas> pages.
of course, to get them to work on IE6 & 7 i used excanvas.js, which
made a not-so-bad job. some things were missing, but it was doable.

also, on IE7 i preferred to use 'standards mode', since it made some
CSS and box layouts not as bad as IE6

when IE8 came out, i tried it. the new 'standards mode' was slightly
more standard CSS and box layouts; but excanvas.js just didn't work.
after some reading, i found that IE8 standards killed VML (the MS
alternative to SVG), which excanvas used to fake the canvas element.

finally, i had to force "IE7-standards mode" everywhere. effectively
disabling any IE8 advantage (nothing to weep about, fortunately).

tl;dr; in my case, IE8 is less useful than IE7

--
Javier