Haven’t posted in here in a while but I was just curious about something someone said to me a few days ago.
I was working on a site for a client recently I added a new feature (accordion style Read More/Less links) and this client said that the new features were not working in IE. So I went to browserstack and ran some tests all version of IE8+ were fine so I asked this client what OS they were using and what version of IE.
They came back and told me Windows 7 and IE7 - I thought that was very strange, maybe someone can shed some light on this, but I didn’t think anyone would be running IE7 on a Windows 7 machine?
I can’t answer your question about IE7 under Windows 7, although it does seem odd. Is it conceivable the client is mistaken?
As for your question: “would anyone code for IE7 now?” … clearly nobody is coding specifically for IE7, but that doesn’t mean that it’s OK for your site to fail under IE7. For better or worse, IE7 and below still have about 0.75 percent of the desktop browser market (source), and while that might sound negligible, it still represents hundreds of thousands of users.
The solution, of course, is graceful degradation. By all means, implement features that the old browsers don’t support, but make sure the site still works (at least in a limited way) in those older versions.
That said, I can’t see why the accordion shouldn’t work in IE7. Presumably you are simply using Javascript to toggle the visibility of certain sections of the page. As far as I know, that should be perfectly possible in IE7 and even IE6. I suggest you question the client more closely. Either he is mistaken in thinking the feature doesn’t work, or there is some other explanation - such as his having disabled Javascript.
Thanks for the replies guys, really helped me a lot.
I’ll get back to the client and see if they are mistaken, I did think it was quite odd to be running an old version of IE on a Windows 7 machine. And I’ll aslo see if they can tell me exactly what is not working.
I’ve only started using BrowserStack but does it have support for IE6+7?
Sounds like compatibility mode. Even IE10 will register as IE7 in compatibility mode and for some reason this is where IE defaults to when viewing a site on an intranet.
If you’re hosting through IIS then you can set ie=edge on the server. Otherwise, add the is=edge meta tag. You’ll have yo google these things because I’m on my phone, but it should be easy to find.
If they are actually running IE7 you’ll probably have to rip out a lot of functionality and rework a lot of things. Charge them well for this.
But it’s not the version of IE that the client is running that counts. What’s important is the version that their customers or site visitors are using.
Yes, but if they are hosting it themselves and viewing it over an intranet connection, IE will default to “Compatibility Mode” and render it using IE7. Given that all versions past IE will render this way and IE7 counting for an EXTREMELY low percentage in the west and taking extra effort to install on Win7 considering it originally shipped with IE8, this is most likely the cause.
You can’t support everything. I don’t believe in supporting <IE8 unless I need to. If Google dropped support for IE8 in 2012 and IE9 in 2013, it’s fine for me to not support for IE8 in 2014 unless required to. It’s simply missing far too much to support it unless there is a specific need to. People/Companies need to upgrade and I’m all for giving them every reason possible to do so. If they need specific support for IE5/6/7/8 on certain applications, then they should be using emulators to access them.
