37signals: Developing for old browsers is (almost) a thing of the past →
David Hansson:
It used to be one of the biggest pains of web development. Juggling different browser versions and wasting endless hours coming up with workarounds and hacks. Thankfully, those troubles are now largely optional for many developers of the web.
Hannson takes the now-obligatory shot at IE (“the favorite punching bag of web developers everywhere for a very good reason”). This makes me recall one of the weirder reversals in net history: while everyone remembers IE as beating Netscape Navigator just because IE was bundled with Windows, back in the days of IE 4 versus Navigator 4, Explorer was the standards-compliant one that web developers were pushing users toward.
I don’t agree with 37signals’ decision to make IE 9 the earliest version they support—IE 8 isn’t that old, and businesses tend to keep software in service a long time. But any company that tells you that you have to support IE 6 is a company you don’t want to work at.
