Federated Solutions Group

With Google's recent announcement that they will be ending support for IE6 in March, my hope is that the few remaining clients who still ask for IE6 compatibility will mercifully cease to do so. The result will be lower costs and (possibly more valuable) way lower frustration. It's always a morale hit for the designer tasked with "make this work in IE6".

IE8 is a dream, from a designer's perspective. 9 out of 10 designs done in Firefox look pixel-perfect in IE8. It's very rare that we have any IE8-specific CSS at all. Of course, IE7 isn't remotely as good, but it's a huge leap better than IE6. When the day comes that IE7 finally joins IE6 on the scrap heap - which is almost certainly 5 years away - will we rejoice as much? Probably. From the perspective of today, though, IE7 is a big leap up from IE6 and deserves at least some praise just for trying.

Much of modern JavaScript has continued the trend toward compartmentalization of code by utilizing late-binding to attach itself to objects, instead of the traditional "onX" handlers embedded in the HTML. This is normal for pretty much every other language. But in HTML, the debug tools for this (primarily, of course, Firebug) don't do a very good job of enabling straightforward access to them, making debugging modern dynamic apps a lot more difficult than it needs to be.

In our case, this has had the effect of moving more of our development toward Flex and away from heavy-JS apps. Throw in the development headaches of trying to make any even moderately intense JS-based app work well in IE6 & 7, and Flex makes a lot more sense than it used to.