Some facts:
1. Firstly, there are a couple of COM APIs that were broken with IE8 which mean that some horrible "intranet applications" that use ActiveX won't work with IE8 properly. They worked fine with IE6 and IE7. These are now no longer supported by the vendors with no upgrade path so people are stuck with IE7 whilst applications are rewritten or disposed of. This can take years. In fact I know a company that has taken 4 years to rewrite an ERP system away from this model. The compatibility flag deals with some rendering issues but it doesn't change the script engine or the ActiveX hosting situation.
2. No they can't install another browser side by side and just keep that for legacy. Chrome has a poor privacy and configuration support. The GPO side of it really is crappy. Firefox ESR is impossible to configure using GPO. Not only that users don't want to browser-juggle. Most of them don't actually give a shit about any of this as long as it works.
3. Also, IE7 was released in 2006. I personally maintain software that was written in 1988. People are very quick to hang software, particularly the non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture. IE7 isn't going away until April 11, 2017.
To be fair, I'm recommending people away from the web and the cloud for business critical applications these days. The churn, culture and attitude (as your post outlines so readily) is very negative and a realistic 10 year cycle isn't possible any more. People need stuff to work undisturbed for years for their investment to be recouped.
Your company bought into a single-vendor solution that was then (as is TYPICAL of said vendor) dropped like a rock. Tough.
Not our company fortunately, but I have stuff to integrate with their systems. They had supply and maintenance contracts and soure escrow. The supplier went under rather than dropped the product - this is not typical. The replacement is being built by ex-members of the supplier working for the company.
They won in a bad market so it's hardly a "tough" situation.
The company should light a fire under the ass of their vendor or development department if they're being forced to live with some very serious security risks.
>I personally maintain software that was written in 1988.
Why are you supporting software that is a quarter of a century old? If it has undergone significant rewrites to work on those new-fangled color monitors, then you understand why things need to be upgraded.
>People are very quick to hang software, particularly the non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture. IE7 isn't going away until April 11, 2017.
What is "non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture" supposed to mean? While HN has a charlatan element, you can't legitimately think that the startup culture here isn't dominated by engineers.
>I'm recommending people away from the web and the cloud for business critical applications these days.
Do you also scream "la la la" while the tips of your fingers are lodged in your ears whenever in architecture meetings? A web browser is an ideal consumer (ubiquitous, cross-platform, cheap) of a large number of business applications and high availability demands writing software that's internet-aware (that feels so strange to even have to type).
>The churn, culture and attitude (as your post outlines so readily) is very negative and a realistic 10 year cycle isn't possible any more.
It sounds like your perception of the industry is antiquated. A 10 year cycle without maintenance to keep the codebase secure/running on modern hardware/platforms?
The company should light a fire under the ass of their vendor or development department if they're being forced to live with some very serious security risks.
The vendor doesn't exist any more. This is a realistic problem. They had source escrow which results in them hiring a development team to port it. This has taken 4 years, including retraining all 5000 users and porting data. This isn't some shitty TODO list app or an Intranet - it's a full ERP with over 2 million lines of code and 500Gb of raw non-binary data. And yes this is still cheaper to run than SAP/Oracle.
Why are you supporting software that is a quarter of a century old? If it has undergone significant rewrites to work on those new-fangled color monitors, then you understand why things need to be upgraded.
Because the 30 year paid for and guaranteed support lifecycle isn't over yet. Not only that, it's tied to the specific hardware platform which is an embedded 80286. It doesn't have a monitor attached - it has a 40x8 text LCD screen and an RS232 port. New requirements and bugs do appear.
What is "non-engineering background trendy startup pushing culture" supposed to mean? While HN has a charlatan element, you can't legitimately think that the startup culture here isn't dominated by engineers.
I use the phrase engineer loosely with respect to software as it has in the last decade or so come to mean a different thing. It's gone from individual who carefully plans and creates something with meticulous attention to detail and extensive knowledge of requirements to individual who makes something with little thought. Note: this isn't every case but it changes the meaning of the word, much as you can say "I love you" too much...
Do you also scream "la la la" while the tips of your fingers are lodged in your ears whenever in architecture meetings? A web browser is an ideal consumer (ubiquitous, cross-platform, cheap) of a large number of business applications and high availability demands writing software that's internet-aware (that feels so strange to even have to type).
Yes, it's actually my job to ensure that due diligence is done and put good engineering standards and technology in place. La la la doesn't cut it but I have to think ahead 20 years in some cases and make a call. If something doesn't make sense in that timescale, then it gets discarded. Your personal opinion isn't necessarily that of a risk assessment.
It sounds like your perception of the industry is antiquated. A 10 year cycle without maintenance to keep the codebase secure/running on modern hardware/platforms?
Industry? There are two industries at the moment. The one in the technology press and everywhere else. I firmly circulate in the latter. There is not a noisy presence but a large and realistic one that makes critical cogs turn behind the scenes. Whether or not this is "antiquated" or not is purely conjecture.
I've worked with lots of different companies over the last 20 years with lots of legacy intranet systems that are too large, complex, and customized to make upgrading them anything less than a multi-million dollar multi-year endeavor, and yet there's always someone who says, "Just rewrite the thing in [favorite framework]!"
I've seen some programmers actually try to do the rewrites themselves. They code for a week or two, discover just how much business logic has been written into the thing over the last 20 years, and abandon it to start looking for employment elsewhere.
The 'reality of the situation' is that you're no longer retaining any young talent in your company, because you're stuck writing COBOL. The Frankenstein-of-an intranet program you've stitched together is now too big and too complex to work with; only the guys who built it in the first place have the guts to stick their fingers in the code.
Sometime around 5 to 10 years ago, you stopped building software and started slapping a bunch of dirty hacks together to get things to 'just work'. The technical debt is insurmountable, and it's only getting worse. The software is 20 years old. What will happen in the next 10 years? Maybe then the company will be able to afford a rewrite...
Except now the technical debt has crept in to the workflow of your users. People are doing things that computers should be doing. Every process involves some hacky workaround to get your ancient system to play nice. You're printing on dot-matrix printers and scanning it back in. Other companies don't know how to hand you data. CSV files over FTP transfer? Maybe we can just email you the files every week so your mail server can gobble it up and hand it to your ancient application? Other companies are scaling. Your bottom line is hurting.
Now we're 30 years in, and the guys who built it in the first place are looking to retire. There's nobody you can 'pass the torch' because none of the new employees over the last decade have lasted more than two years; they all went on to play with silly 'kid' languages like 'Ruby' and that funny 'Cloud' fad. You'll have to find someone with talent, years of experience in your antique system, and yet isn't thinking about retirement within the next decade. Time to post a job opening for a COBOL ninja-rockstar!
Where reality means a serious failure in tech leadership.
>I've seen some programmers actually try to do the rewrites themselves. They code for a week or two, discover just how much business logic has been written into the thing over the last 20 years, and abandon it to start looking for employment elsewhere.
Having been one of these people that "try to do the rewrites" himself, I left because paying off technical debt wasn't prioritized. It's not just about having a modern stack, it's about being able to hire maintenance programmers and not being forced into trying to keep a sinking ship afloat.
I love it when people use this phrase. The "reality of the situation". Yes, this is how things are, and they will continue to be that way until we change them.
There is a world of difference between "refuse to support IE7" and "let's rewrite everything in [favorite framework]." Our startup is squarely in the enterprise space, and we don't support IE7. Our app will literally display a "you shall not pass" modal if you try to log in with IE7. Our client list includes a lot of local governments (cities large and small, counties, GPOs, etc), and we still manage to get by just fine without supporting IE7.
I think you'd be amazed at how small of a market you're giving up by telling everyone you simply cannot support IE7. When you just accept "reality", you never bother to push the issue, and you never make progress.
Yes, it's a realistic problem of "if your vendor goes extinct, you should start moving." If you're in charge and you let your business get stuck in this spot, the liquid lunches need to stop.
>This has taken 4 years, including retraining all 5000 users and porting data. This isn't some shitty TODO list app or an Intranet - it's a full ERP with over 2 million lines of code and 500Gb of raw non-binary data.
5000 users and 500Gb isn't that large. Lines of code is a god-awful measure of work, especially in a verbose language like Java or C#.
I feel as if you have a flippant stance towards web-applications, which I promise you is incredibly misguided. Not everyone here is making TODO apps with Ruby.
>Because the 30 year paid for and guaranteed support lifecycle isn't over yet. Not only that, it's tied to the specific hardware platform which is an embedded 80286.
Where to begin on this? To keep it somewhat related to the parent thread, I'd suggest that code for embedded systems is a different world than sharecropping on a Microsoft technology (or a code-bloat ERP almost certainly containing layers of awful sedimentary hacks placed by numerous outsourcing companies). In 2007, you had your head in the sand (while drinking the koolaid) if you thought ActiveX was a long-game.
>I use the phrase engineer loosely with respect to software as it has in the last decade or so come to mean a different thing. It's gone from individual who carefully plans and creates something with meticulous attention to detail and extensive knowledge of requirements to individual who makes something with little thought.
Oh come on, this is just ageist. Was the guy that wrote something that only works on IE6/7/8 thinking ahead? What about an engineer that created a scenario in which hardware can't be updated? Unless your code is going on a satellite, congrats on over-engineering a solution that only works in a given architecture.
With most consumers thinking of computers as tools that access the web, thinking that you don't have to be incredibly reactive to change is myopic. Do you think that writing maintainable stacks for a changing consumer preferences and patterns is something done without planning?
(before you scoff at anyone that writes code for the web, keep in mind that you previously stated 'IE7 isn't going away until April 11, 2017' as a defense for not 'hanging software')
>Yes, it's actually my job to ensure that due diligence is done and put good engineering standards and technology in place.
This is a different world if you're writing something for an embedded chip that will be made for 20 years. If your customer thinks that she can predict needs for the business 10 years in advance, she's about to have her lunch eaten by another company. The world doesn't work in a "we sell bikes like _this_" way anymore. Give me 6 months and I can write you a SCM and a CLM that will work for the next 10 years _as long as you run it on this architecture with this software installed_, but that's not as useful as "give me 3 months and you're be good for 5 years, we'll evaluate what need in 4 years" approach.
>Industry? There are two industries at the moment. The one in the technology press and everywhere else.
The "technology press" is media and investors.
>I firmly circulate in the latter. There is not a noisy presence but a large and realistic one that makes critical cogs turn behind the scenes. Whether or not this is "antiquated" or not is purely conjecture.
You circulate in the "everywhere else?"
The 'critical cogs' are maintained by kernel, hardware, and protocol devs that are typically paid by a company that doesn't obsess over running ancient code on dinosaur hardware because that doesn't scale with changing demand.
With respect, I feel like you're drawing a line in the sand and being smug because you imagine your problem domain to be on somehow more "pure" side of engineering.
It's not particularly large but add complexity to that and the work is insane. The application was implemented in C++ and COM for reference which is terse and complex.
I feel as if you have a flippant stance towards web-applications, which I promise you is incredibly misguided. Not everyone here is making TODO apps with Ruby.
Not particuarly. I've spent 18 years writing web applications (big ones) and do today. I'm a pragmatist and web applications are not for all use cases. In fact bar information presentation they are a complicated frustrating area. The emphasis is on smaller applications within this community by comparison which is where my point lies. The reality of real businesses with complicated procedures, processes and regulatory compliance is not something people have to deal with. Fanfaring about the death of IE7 shoots a big chunk of the industry in the face. These people do a disservice to us all.
Where to begin on this? To keep it somewhat related to the parent thread, I'd suggest that code for embedded systems is a different world than sharecropping on a Microsoft technology (or a code-bloat ERP almost certainly containing layers of awful sedimentary hacks placed by numerous outsourcing companies). In 2007, you had your head in the sand (while drinking the koolaid) if you thought ActiveX was a long-game.
The reliability and lifespan expectations are surprisingly similar. The delivered product is different but the processes and procedures are similar. yes in 2007 ActiveX had the writing on the wall but in 2007 the product was already 18 years old and was a 1998 port to COM/C++ from an AS400 platform.
Oh come on, this is just ageist. Was the guy that wrote something that only works on IE6/7/8 thinking ahead? What about an engineer that created a scenario in which hardware can't be updated? Unless your code is going on a satellite, congrats on over-engineering a solution that only works in a given architecture
Not ageist. When this was written, they had Internet Explorer 4 and Netscape 4. Try engineering a solution that fulfills the requirements with any other technology than ActiveX at the time. Even Java wasn't mature enough then. As for hardware it was designed to work for 30 years and they bought enough spare parts to make sure it does.
With most consumers thinking of computers as tools that access the web, thinking that you don't have to be incredibly reactive to change is myopic. Do you think that writing maintainable stacks for a changing consumer preferences and patterns is something done without planning?
This is a temporal argument. When the application stack was designed 16 years ago, the world was a different place. And thanks to the lifecycle guarantees of Microsoft, that guarantee was made up to 2017. In 16 years the same will be true. Time needs to be frozen for certain things and guarantees need to be made otherwise it limits the ability to write off risk against big projects.
If your customer thinks that she can predict needs for the business 10 years in advance, she's about to have her lunch eaten by another company.
Simply no. For some markets, yes but for a lot of traditional supply chains this isn't the case. The company has been around for over 100 years so they've obviously done ok with high lead times and a static model for the last 60 years. Whilst there are some disruptive changes, particularly in the consumer-facing and retail sectors, the sheer amount of work, knowledge and momentum required to enter some industries is prohibitive so they are unlikely to be disrupted by new technology startups.
The "technology press" is media and investors.
Yes. Noise. They focus on the technology company, not the company that uses technology purely as a function of its business.
The 'critical cogs' are maintained by kernel, hardware, and protocol devs that are typically paid by a company that doesn't obsess over running ancient code on dinosaur hardware because that doesn't scale with changing demand.
Actually no. The critical cogs are the ones that generate revenue. The kernel, hardware and protocol work is bought in. The unique algorithm, advantage or working model for your company is the revenue stream, not the stack. The stack is incidental to it. The port from COM to Java SE/EE here is seen as an incidental cost of doing business.
With respect, I feel like you're drawing a line in the sand and being smug because you imagine your problem domain to be on somehow more "pure" side of engineering.
No it's not pure; it's just a considerably larger problem domain than most people anticipate and an unrepresented area of the industry amongst these circles.
Everyone has a story to tell; this is purely mine. I'm not suggest it's right or wrong but there are two sides to every coin and people should consider both before they start a browser witch-hunt.
And frankly it does really depend on the company on which point is more valid.
At the end of the day, csmithuk viewpoint is a solution/enterprise architect's view point which caters more to the overall business needs of a company.
And based on my experience, the challenge of getting any new technology in a company that is mature and successful is really hard. The challenge of changing the status quo once that tech has become embedded in their business processes is twice has hard. There is always a benefit/cost ratio. The cost is not just development - it's training, its documentation, its lost time, etc.
Not really. I've worked as an Enterprise Architect and worked in good as well as bad architectures. If you engineer a system that backs the company into a corner of "we can never upgrade," then you're a crappy architect. Even more so if you can't hire someone to step in and maintain a project or have a drought of hardware suppliers.
>The challenge of changing the status quo once that tech has become embedded in their business processes is twice has hard.
Business process is not synonymous with "tech stack." If it becomes synonymous, you done fucked up.
>And based on my experience, the challenge of getting any new technology in a company that is mature and successful is really hard.
That's because some people do tech-for-tech's-sake. If you open the conversation with "hey, if we switch out IIS for nginx/apache, it will take 8 months, but we'll save money on maintenance and licenses, as well as spending less money on hardware," then you're in better shape than just pitching the new hotness. Of course, it's been my experience that these decisions are usually done on a whim in mature companies (hooray business!).
>There is always a benefit/cost ratio. The cost is not just development - it's training, its documentation, its lost time, etc.
Yes, of course. It's also cost of life management, staffing costs for niche/antiquated skills/getting developers willing to do long-term damage to their skills (imagine becoming an expert in coding for IE9 and lower, how do you think your resume will look in a few years?) for short-term profit.
Unfortunately most products built in the early 1990s-mid 2000s suffer from poor architecture. The growth of companies and the technology shift were impossible to anticipate. This is the unfortunate reality of all of those <IE7 dependencies you see. Also there was no foundational research done into how to build these things -- people were pissing in the dark with immature tech and knowledge. This is no longer true fortunately.
Unfortunately for the average corporate, the cost/benefit ratio only becomes an issue when the vendor pulls the rug out from underneath you. In this case when IE7 is EOL in 2017.
We're destined to follow the trailing edge because that is exactly where the best cost/benefit ratio lives. Do nothing is cheapest.
Sometimes the we can never upgrade is part of the job description. A lot of control software for industrial systems is like that. You do not expect to be thinking about having to upgrade the core code for at least a few decades, as downtime for development and testing is obscenely expensive.
I'm sorry, it's hard to go to a company that has already invested in the Microsoft stack, have developers that work in that stack, have many internal and third party applications, have SharePoint all over the place, that run on ASP.NET (and hence IIS), already have sunk costs with SQL Server and Windows servers and make a strong case for changing over. The case might be easy for SQL Server (use PostgresSQL instead) but generally its a no go. I know you used this as an example, but like I said, a lot of it depends on the company.
Anyway, interesting discussion for sure.
HAHA! Yes! that shit is ungodly expensive.
If you download Firefox 26 today along with your favourite OS and store it on a USB stick, you can restore it in 10 years an run the exact same web applications. That's not really technologically different from storing .NET Framework 4.0 or Java8 on USB stick, to ensure that you can run your that-other-compiled-LOB-program in 10 years. You may need an isolated virtual machine running, but you may need that for the other software as well. Anyone tried running a 16-bit VB6 app lately?
Yes I can snapshot everything if I want but the problem with the web is that it is a general purpose tool. It should be a single portal into everything both local and remote sites and applications.
Unfortunately, the rate of change is incredibly large for Internet-facing applications. Intranet-facing applications are left behind. As browsers evolve, which they do rapidly, unpredictably and without compromise[1] a disparity grows until you need two browsers. This is not a situation an enterprise wants to or can afford to maintain, simply because it's below the watermark of concern for 99% of users. This is my point.
The difference between the CLR/JVM and a web browser is that they have a predictable shelf-life and can be maintained separately as they are separate portals into each world. To be fair (I exclude the CLR from this as it's too integrated into the OS), I can ship a JVM with a Java app and it'll run quite happily for another 15-20 years.
And yes I have tried running a 16-bit VB4 (!!) app lately - one of our clients uses one. On 32-bit Windows 8.1, it still works absolutely perfectly (Windows Vista 64-bit+ has no 16-bit subsystem).
[1] Apart from IE.
I do enjoy the new functionality continuous upgrades bring, but in general they usually result in breaking changes or disagreeable UX changes that users must endure in order to remain compatible with the ever-moving target of modern distributed/web applications.
Some days I feel that I really am alone in the desire to see technology slow down, stabilise, become more predictable and be long-term (10+ year) dependable.
The HN echo chamber of fast-moving cloud/social apps and flavour of the month programming languages feels like it can, in some ways, be harmful to our industry and its reputation. I don't mean this in a derogatory way, but it's easy to forget that 95% of the software out there needs the stability and long-term predictability that "modern", SaaS services just can't offer.
I want my software to remain usable for more than three {browser version increments, Android versions, day job successors;}.
This could be an argument for buying in cloud services (which you expect to be updated and maintained as technology evolves) rather than building solutions internally. Not always an option but where it is this seems like a good argument to buy rather than build, and if possible buy from a company which seems keen to move with the times and allow you to upgrade your browser in future without fear of breaking something
This isn't really an option for a lot of people.
The box model was broken for years, don't even get me started on tables, JavaScript is the most loosely defined language to have ever existed, there have been several different document parser models (HTML, XHTML, HTML5) it's unreal. At best, most browsers these days estimate what they are doing, diving into some wierd mode full of edge cases purely by accident if you step on the wrong stone.
As for proprietary extensions, they are the most stable in IE. The IE8 change was the first since IE4 and it was primarily a security model change. Now we have NaCl on the horizon (ActiveX v2) and every vendor fighting their own extensions into the "standard" by buddying up for a new "standards" group.
It's a minefield which throwing critical applications into is a bad move both from a logical and risk perspective.
I'm not saying it lacks utility, but it's a risky proposition for a product that needs a defined lifecycle.
Sites following standards should still work. While we have different parsers, they should all be supported today.
NaCl is not a standard, and only works in Chrome, which I can't see changing. ActiveX is a proprietary IE extension, and will never work outside IE. Same with VB script, same with Dart etc.
I had to port an application to IE7 last week, and it works fine in all browsers that has come out since. And this is a EmberJS app using ajax heavily. The web is a great place, as long as you stick to the standards and nothing but the standards. Luckily, the standards are evolving, meaning you can do more and more within the standards, without tying yourself to browser-specific extensions which was the problem in the early IE days.
Browsers are really the most stable backwards compatible platform you'll find provided you:
1. stay away from proprietary extensions, applets, plugins, and what have you.
2. stay away from the new features that aren't standardised yet.
The different parser models are there, and are STILL there. they will be there forever. Why? because DON'T BREAK THE WEB.
"At best, most browsers these days estimate what they are doing, diving into some wierd mode full of edge cases purely by accident if you step on the wrong stone."
Evidence or it didn't happen.
"As for proprietary extensions, they are the most stable in IE. The IE8 change was the first since IE4 and it was primarily a security model change. "
IE's proprietary extensions are the most stable, except they aren't, at all? Are you reading what you're writing before you send it?
By popular demand IE has been forced to expunge the worst of it, and support standards. The ones that don't change every browser release.
"Now we have NaCl on the horizon (ActiveX v2) and every vendor fighting their own extensions into the "standard" by buddying up for a new "standards" group."
Well then don't use those.
"It's a minefield which throwing critical applications into is a bad move both from a logical and risk perspective."
It's only a minefield if you go into it with extremely misguided and confused thinking like you apparently have. There is a huge, rich, extremely stable platform here that you missed out on because you ironically are only interested in the whiz bang new shiny feeding frenzy going on. Just don't use those parts that are changing rapidly. they are easy to spot. Use the old parts that haven't changed since 2004. If they've been around for 10 years they'll be here for 10 more years.
IE7 and COM are fucking ancient. And they're both shitty technologies. COM, especially, is a sad, disgusting 1990's remnant of "guru"-level C++ shit-baggery that is the only technology I'm aware of where the boiler-plate code is 2x to 3x more than the actual code. I'm glad those are put on the back-burner by MS.
Unix is from 70's and it's fucking solid. You wrote C code in 1975, you could probably port it to Ubuntu Linux without too much effort. You "standardized" on "enterprise" (a hilarious word, btw) technologies like IE7 + ActiveX? You deserve all the pain that is being dished out to you.
The crying and stomping of feet that happened at my company after IT deprecated WinXP + IE6 was music to my ears.
The world doesn't need IE6. It doesn't need IE7. It doesn't need COM. What it needs is fewer "enterprise architect" types who read too much MSDN Magazine and develop brittle "solutions" based on ActiveX and sell them to unsuspecting victims.
Admittedly, there aren't many of these companies given most gave Vista a miss in favour of 7 or something else entirely, but they do exist, and it is a plausible reason that IE7 is still around for some.
Both will emit "MSIE 7.0" in the user-agent, but IE8 will have Trident/4 while IE7 lacks any such token. MSIE 11 does away with "MSIE" in the user-agent altogether.
There's a X-UA-Compatible header (and meta variable) you can emit to ask for no compat checks.
User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/7.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729; Media Center PC 6.0; .NET4.0C; .NET4.0E)
Super conservative IT department. Lots of users only need a handful of websites to do their job, as long as those work why bother changing anything?
Some 3rd party application which might work on IE8 but only "supports" IE7
People who turned off automatic updates years ago because they slowed their computer down.
No computer exists that is able to run IE7 but not IE8. And because IE7 came out way past the "optimized for IE" age, I doubt there is software around that requires 7 and doesn't work with 8.
This is in contrast to 6 which is what IE was stuck in for years, so software began depending on that.
If you could upgrade from 6 to 7, then you can upgrade from 7 to 8. Even more so considering that IE8 has an IE7 compatibility mode built in that can be enabled without having to touch the site itself (by setting the HTTP header in the server).
The same is true for local software embedding the IE control, but there you need to set some registry flag to do it.
There is no excuse for sticking with 7 and 8 is so much better to develop for. It's 2014. I would stop caring about 7. People still using 7 are used to sites not quite looking right anyways (as the majority of sites stopped caring) and in all likelyhood, they might not even notice the odd rendering glitch.