IE the standard
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- seed
The company I am working on a large UI for insists that IE is the standard for all of their internal site and applications. This is a huge multi million dollar project that may be pushed in the direction of ignoring webstandards and only focus on what works in IE. The idea that a project of this size would not be forward compatible seems ridiculous.
There is a large North American commitee that decides these tech issues. I am going to put together a doc to outline a reason to shift to standards compliant browsers.
Anyone have any opinions or links with more info on reasons like security issues in IE, etc?
- mrdobolina0
lots of corporate training sites, internal insurance sites, benefits sites etc only work in IE.
What would be your reasoning on why to change this? Does everyone in the organization have IE installed on their machines?
Just seems if it is internal that the reasons for making it accessible would be very limited.
- Juliet0
It's like saying White People are the "standard" in the USA, so we won't let any blacks, mexicans, or asians into our stores.
- mrdobolina0
I disagree, if they are internal sites and your company supplied machine has IE on it, wtf is the difference?
- Juliet0
oh but internal? then who gives a fuck really, you won't lose any business.
- Fariska0
1) The fact that IE covers now almost 65-70% of internet population (and the trend is still decreasing)
2) The fact that IE7 is moving towards complete web standard support.
- Juliet0
you are right mrdobolina.
- mrdobolina0
word, juliet. Internal sites don't have to follow standards. They set their own with the equipment/software they provide their employees.
- seed0
I would think a multi million dollar app should have high quality code that would be forward compatible. Coding something to work in IE6 seems as if you would have to continue using that version as I can't imagine it would be forward compatible. I guess I just can't imagine purposely writing poor code or hacks.
I had to get special permission to be one of the only people here to be able to use Firefox to even surf. They are paranoid of security issues that I would assume IE has a lot more of.
- Jaline0
Internal sites don't have to follow standards. They set their own with the equipment/software they provide their employees.
mrdobolina
(May 30 06, 08:24)True. I work on internal government sites, and they are all compatible for IE. Whenever I open them up in FF they look pretty crappy, but you have to install FF yourself on the machine, and I'm sure most employees don't do that.
- Visia0
I agree with your company. In my opinion IE is THE standard, no matter what the W3C says. Internal or external.
You can't just ignore the vast majority of users and declare standards.
Unless a standard is adopted by the majority then it's nothing more than a suggestion.
Good suggestion, but not a standard by any means.
I agree MS should adopt the W3C standards but until then screw it. 86% of the world uses IE to access the internet (src: http://www.thecounter.com) so that's what I'll build for.
Don't be fooled by the W3C stats, they're heavily biased because the only peo0ple that visit their site are developers, who are more likely to choose FF or Safari.
- cereals0
people still use thecounter - god thats old! I bet they still have the crappy graphics they had in 1998
- k0na_an0k0
web standards?!?
i wipe my ass with that handbook.
no really, i'm poor.
- mrdobolina0
back to the salt mine, kona!
- olli1010
Wow - interesting case of deja vu. I'm going through the same thing right now but after researching it internally, we discovered that our audience (covering North America - US & Canada) is a whopping 98% IE 6. Our engineers were testing everything in Firefox and Opera but sad to say, IE wins.
Here's some other interesting stats:
- Visia0
yeah, The Counter has shitty graphics but in my opinion it's the best cross-section of sites. It's used by all types of sites so it's not centric to one type of user.
- ldww0
what is the big deal. make it work for ie, and also for ff and safari.
you are a web designer, and most people on the internet, and everyone in this case uses ie - so make it work for that. you do not have a choice.
- Visia0
interesting anecdote olli.
But, the W3C Schools stats are crap. It's all web developers.
If I were to phone all of my extended family members right now and ask them if the used FireFox they wouldn't know what I'm talking about.
In fact, I could call everyone I know that's not a web develolper and they woldn't know what it is. They'd all be using IE.
- olli1010
Visia - I totally agree. The weird thing is that with our research, we found that the majority (I run a music site) of users were not the Mac/Safari/FF geeks but using AOL / IE, etc...
We had an issue of a fixed deadline and limited time/money for QA and web compliance. The business case came up for IE dev first and the rest later.
Has anyone else had to fight this battle? I'm curious to see how it was solved.
Stupid IE! :-)