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Comment by melling | Hacker News Reader

A little aside... Developers really should read your post twice and understand exactly how admins think. These types of departments are usually slow moving, and really hinder progress. When you read about the people who are stuck on old browsers and need legacy IE support, it's probably because of all the "planning and work" that would be required to upgrade.

Anyway, I've always advocated dumping legacy browser support because once the right people have problems viewing the web, fires get lit and the job gets escalated.

The only people who can't upgrade their own browsers are the ones with an IT team standing in their way.

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I think that's a little unfair. Admins' responsibility to keep everything running, all the time, is their top priority. As an organization scales, it pays off greatly to enforce some homogeneity - especially as the ratio of non-technical users increases. Not everybody can manage their own browser/office suite/mail client, but they always need it to do their work.

If you want bleeding edge software across the organization, admins need to have enough extra free time to coordinate the rollout and get the training to support it. Recall the administrators "prime directive" - fix what's broken. If the admin team is swamped with tickets all the time, you'll be stuck with legacy stuff, because they don't have enough time to adapt.

We have a joke at work that new stuff gets done during our "infinite amount of free time".

It's normally not an admin's choice to stay slow and out of date. This is especially the case in a non-IT-centric business, which nonetheless uses technology to function.

Typically, the issue is like this:

1) Management demands that a specific solution is installed, and ignores IT's complaints

2) The solution requires an environment IE 7 (or Windows XP, or... take your pick)

The admins now have two problems: they need to convince management to move away from the old solution to a new one (another capital expense), in addition to maintaining a hateful, old environment so that the business doesn't break. Senior management doesn't realize they dug their own grave, and refuses to pay for the capex "just" to have the latest version of the solution, when the business is seemingly working just fine on the current environment.

Eventually, after much praying and finger crossing, only one of the two things saves the admins:

1) The solution is upgraded to support modern software

2) The environment becomes unsupported, and management is forced to reconsider the upgrade.

Have some sympathy, mate! :(

So my advice to not support older browsers holds. If the web essentially stops working, the powers that be will insist on upgrading. Developers will be doing you a favor. If you've got software that still only runs on IE7, for example, you'll have to install Chrome or Firefox.

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