Support for IE 4.x

[RichStevenson]

A client of mine is stating that his site I designed is completely misaligned on his home pc. On his office pc it looks fine. I ran the site through browsershots.org and it looks fine on 50+ different setups of browsers and OS's. But.... the IE 4.01 screenshot is horribly misaligned. So I'm suspecting that's what he's running. I'll find out tomorrow what version when I stop out. His site has also passed CSS and XHTML validation.

So my question is this, are the other developers in here bending over backwards to support IE4? If not, how should I approach this with him?
I'm assumming IE4 doesn't like the div's and or css???
This is not going to be a fun conversation with him.

Thanks,

Rich

[Bob Barr]

This is known as "customer education".

Point him to this Wikipedia page:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_4

Here's the most striking point on the page:

IE4 market share dropped under 1% by 2004.
Since that information is five years old, one can only imagine how far under 1% it is today.

You also might want to point out the strong probability that he has security vulnerabilities from using such an old browser.

[Early Out]

Most webpage designers don't even worry about IE5 anymore. On my own site, I think I had two IE5 visitors out of 50,000. I've never had an IE4 visitor.

Check out these stats: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Note that the last time they even reported IE4 visitors was 2002, and even then, they amounted to less than 1%.

I don't even worry too much about IE6 visitors, since I'm not doing anything for any sort of business application (and that seems to be where most IE6 users still are - in corporations that have developed lots of stuff that requires IE6). If someone says the stuff doesn't work right, I tell them to install IE7 or FF.

[RichStevenson]

Thanks guys. He was on XP after all. A simple Shift+F5 took care of the problem. Whew!

[Bob Barr]

Thanks guys. He was on XP after all. A simple Shift+F5 took care of the problem. Whew!
Sorry, I'm a bit confused. How did doing that help? Was there an error of some sort the first time he opened the page?

Shift+F5 forces a page reload, doesn't it? Or am I thinking of something else?

[felgall]

Shift+F5 forces a page reload, doesn't it? Or am I thinking of something else?

That's exactly what it does.

IE 4 is such a dinosaur that it doesn't support CSS (since it actually predates the CSS standard). As to why refreshing the page fixed the problem - that's anyone's guess. Since this is the only person in the world still using IE4 it isn't going to matter if that is the fix since provided that person knows that's the fix then IE4 is taken care of. It would be a slightly bigger problem if it were IE5 playing up because then you'd have half a dozen or so [people to educate on the workaround instead of only the one.

[wysiwyg]

I won't even go out of my way to support anything that isn't standards-compliant, and frankly, any developers that do are making a lot more work for everyone else.

Think about it this way: if web designers stopped supporting older browsers, people would be much more motivated to switch. As it stands, a depressingly large number of people continue using browsers that have no right to still be around, purely because they don't want to take 5 minutes to install a new one.

These browsers are both a security risk for the user, and a nightmare for web designers, whose idea was it to try and support them in the first place?

We're stuck in an endless loop of developers supporting older browsers because people are still using them, and people continuing to use older browsers because developers keep supporting them.

[Bob Barr]

That's exactly what it does.
Thanks, I wasn't quite sure I had that right.


As to why refreshing the page fixed the problem - that's anyone's guess.
Thanks for that also. Somehow, I just couldn't relate the page getting reloaded to the display getting fixed.

[redsox9]

While I agree with wysiwyg, the key, from a pure business sense, is to know your audience. That's one of the reasons to use a statistical program like Google Analytics to determine who is using what to visit your site. For example, in the past 30 days, about 63 percent of my visitors use an IE browser; of that, 67 percent use IE7 and 30 percent use IE6 (only three percent are using IE8). I also know that about 26 percent are using FireFox; of that number, 87 percent are using a version of 3.0.

(In the same breath, I have had exactly one visitor who used IE 5.01.)

The point is that I should make sure that my site will appear and function as I intended in the popular browsers used today. Six months from now, that may change, and I should be ready to adjust my site accordingly. As much as I would like to force the issue, I don't want to abandon a sizeable customer base.

[RichStevenson]

Sorry, I'm a bit confused. How did doing that help? Was there an error of some sort the first time he opened the page?

Shift+F5 forces a page reload, doesn't it? Or am I thinking of something else?

The problem only existed in his Firefox browser not IE7 (He is on XP so no IE4 like I thought he MIGHT have been running. The alignments of the div's were all off, no errors. Shift+F5 forced a reload and corrected it.

[wysiwyg]

A cache refresh is triggered by ctrl+f5. Yes, it is important.