Building Resilient Systems on AWS: Learn how to design and implement a resilient, highly available, fault-tolerant infrastructure on AWS.

Mailbag Q & A II Answers

By David Walsh on February 5, 2009

A few weeks back I asked that users submit questions for another mailbag post. I got some good questions so here we go.

When will you drop IE6 support?

This is a topic that's been buzzing around the internet quite a bit. I wont drop IE6 support until its market share is below 5% which will take at least another year. I think that the idea that all web developers should drop support at once so people upgrade is ludicrous. People aren't consciously choosing to stick with IE6 -- they simply don't know better. Some people don't care about the internet as much as us and we, as developers, have no right make things more difficult on them to make our jobs easier.

What are you thoughts on jQuery 1.3 and the future of MooTools and other JavaScript frameworks in the coming year?

2009 will be a huge year for JS frameworks, Moo and jQuery specifically. I think they'll both see huge growth because more developers will strive to learn both frameworks. I also know that the MooTools project will improve in a number of ways beside just the robust framework code but I can't talk about it...yet. I've got a secret: MooTools is NOT dead.

How much time does it take to write a MooTools plugin?

A lot less time than you think. Testing generally takes more time than writing the code. Obviously the complexity of a plugin dictates how long it takes to write but if you made me put a time on the average plugin, I'd say 30 minutes to an hour. Some have taken 5 minutes and some have taken 3-4 hours of tweaking.

I know you pay a lot of attention to the MooTools project. How much attention do you pay to jQuery.

I bet more than you think. I follow @jquery and Lead Evangelist Rey Bango. It's important to know what's going on in jQuery because their moves may effect MooTools' moves and visa versa. I also get great inspiration from plugins hyped on @jquery. Remember, you shouldn't be choosing one framework over another -- you should learn one and then pick up the other.

Recent Features

By David WalshJuly 14, 2014
How I Stopped WordPress Comment Spam
I love almost every part of being a tech blogger: learning, preaching, bantering, researching. The one part about blogging that I absolutely loathe: dealing with SPAM comments. For the past two years, my blog has registered 8,000+ SPAM comments per day. PER DAY. Bloating my database...
By David WalshNovember 7, 2012
Camera and Video Control with HTML5
Client-side APIs on mobile and desktop devices are quickly providing the same APIs. Of course our mobile devices got access to some of these APIs first, but those APIs are slowly making their way to the desktop. One of those APIs is the getUserMedia API...

Incredible Demos

By David WalshDecember 11, 2012
pointer Media Query
As more devices emerge and differences in device interaction are implemented, the more important good CSS code will become. In order to write good CSS, we need some indicator about device capabilities. We've used CSS media queries thus far, with checks for max-width and pixel ratios.
By David WalshAugust 19, 2010
Image Reflections with CSS
Image reflection is a great way to subtly spice up an image. The first method of creating these reflections was baking them right into the images themselves. Within the past few years, we've introduced JavaScript strategies and CANVAS alternatives to achieve image reflections without...

Discussion

Mark Sanborn
I got a tweet from Eric Meyer just a bit ago that said, there were still a million people using IE5.01. Depending on your site and how important these types of users are to you, I don’t think many of us can get rid of IE6 any time soon.

Like you have pointed out, not everyone is a tech person. Many people don’t keep her machine up to date. Let alone care what browser they are using.

Fortunately IE gives us a way to provide IE specific content and there are JS scripts that help old versions of IE to become more compatible.
cssProdigy
Great mailbag. I completely agree with what you said about IE6 but if we as designers and developers don’t drop support or provide a way for users to upgrade, people will still be using IE6.
Dmitry-Sh
I’ve dropped the support for IE 6.0 already, as it was done by Apple.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13786/should-we-support-ie6-anymore
Is it time to do away with IE6 programming?
Yes.
rpflo
Drop IE6? Depends on the site.

Typically if the content of the page for visitors is straightforward and “brochure”-like, I’ll support it.

For a more complex site that is more of an application than a brochure I charge a lot of extra to support IE6 (if possible)–or at least give the IE6 visitor something to do at the site, albeit very different from the real one.

But for the admin side of a website I don’t support it anymore–ever (and usually just ignore IE 7 as well).