Mark Needham

Thoughts on Software Development

The Internet Explorer 6 dilemma

with 10 comments

A couple of weeks ago Dermot and I showcased a piece of functionality that we’d been working on – notably hiding some options in a drop down list.

We showcased this piece of functionality to the rest of the team in Firefox and it all worked correctly.

Our business analyst, who was also acting as QA, then had a look at the story in Internet Explorer 6 and we promptly realised that the way we’d solved the problem didn’t actually work in IE6.

In retrospect we should have showcased the story in IE6 in order to shorten the feedback cycle but if we take that logic even further than it’s clear that we should be running our application in IE6 frequently as we’re developing functionality.

It’s a dilemma that we’ve faced on nearly every project I’ve worked on recently.

We know in the back of our minds that we need to make it work on Internet Explorer 6 but because of Firebug the speed of development is siginifcantly quicker if we use Firefox.

It’s almost as if we’re trading off the longer term safety we would have if we use IE6 all the time for the quick feedback cycles we get from the Firebug console/CSS editor when we’re fiddling around with Javascript and CSS.

The way that we’re working at the moment is to continue using Firefox for local development but trying to make sure that we test and showcase in IE6.

It’s not a foolproof approach, as can be seen by the example I gave at the beginning of this post, so I’d be interested if anyone has any clever ideas for dealing with the situation where we have a requirement to make our application IE6 compatible.

Written by Mark Needham

July 11th, 2010 at 7:31 pm

Posted in Software Development

Tagged with ,

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  • http://www.derekhammer.com Derek Hammer

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  • pablo

    well, if Microsoft does not want to support it anymore why should we?

    I hear some companies actually charge extra to support IE6, and I don’t think it’s a bad idea.

  • Josh Robb

    I use IE (as my default browser + Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=e59c3964-672d-4511-bb3e-2d5e1db91038&displaylang=en) and run FF/Chrome side by side for when I need/want the heavyweight tools.

    Not perfect – but it leads to less surprises for me.

  • jules
  • http://programmergrrl.com Amy Thorne

    I don’t have any great solutions, but can say that we use a combination of testing things in IE6 as we develop them, when we’re aware that we’re doing something that might not work for it.

    Plus, before a developer considers a story involving the UI finished, he’s supposed to test it in all the browsers we support.

    But I can’t say this solution works all that great. It’s tedious, and sometimes we forget.

  • http://www.markhneedham.com Mark Needham

    I guess the IE Dev toolbar only works if you are directly using IE6?

    We’ve been tending to use IE6 via IETester instead so firebuglite would probably be the best for us.

  • http://www.cre8ivethought.com Mark Nijhof

    Whether it is IE6, 7, 8, 9, FireFox, Chrome or whatever it all behaves a little bit different (true IE stands out in this), and thus should all be run through to ensure the functionality is behaving correctly in all browsers. That is why I like writing unit tests for my JavaScript code, but this only goes so far, visual effects are very hard to test this way. But if you have your CI run all tests in all browsers then you will catch some problems for sure.

    I have noticed that my JavaScript code changes a lot when I write it TDD, especially since it becomes more self contained. Trying to proof as much possible in Unit tests ensures that I can proof it in the different browsers.

    Now only if there was a really nice and good way to run these JavaScript unit tests and Cucumber tests in all browsers without it being painful.

    For example the test framework not working 100% in all the different browsers :)

    -Mark

  • http://worldofsolitaire.com Robert

    Simple answer: Don’t support IE6

    Complex answer: If you KNOW that you have a large number of existing customers that use IE6 and you KNOW that you’ll lose those customers if you drop IE6 support, then *maybe* it’s a good idea to continue supporting IE6.

    If you don’t know, then you really need to find out how many of your existing customers are using IE6 and if they can update or use a different browser.

    The company I work for dropped IE6 support a few months ago. We had a few customers that told us they HAD to use IE6. When we actually dropped support, half of them said that this along with other factors prompted their IT departments to update to the latest version (along with Windows 7). The other half installed the Google Chrome Plugin for IE.

  • http://www.helephant.com Helen

    The IE tester people have a version of developer toolbar you can use within IE tester:
    http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/Doc/DebugbarInstall