Comment by ShabbyDoo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ShabbyDoo | Hacker News Reader

Right now, I'm consulting for a large company that still provisions IE6 because it has a bunch of in-house web apps that don't work right on any other browsers. Since switching thousands of users over to another browser could not happen in a single day, these legacy apps would all have to be modified to work in both IE6 and a modern browser. This can be done, but it requires coordination and resources. Furthermore, the groups responsible for the apps and those responsible for the desktop standards probably meet on the org chart at the CIO level.

Sadly, it would be really useful if Chrome (or Firefox or whatever) could accurately emulate IE6's behaviors for sites of an administrator/user's choosing. We could fairly easily make Apache insert a special "PleaseRenderLikeIE6" headers so those applications could continue to function as-is.

Yes, this is painful to write about, but it's the reality of most large corporate IT shops.

And doesn't this plugin kind of achieve this? Rather than marking sites which should be rendered in IE6, you mark them to be rendered in Chrome. So all legacy sites work without modification (using the IE6 engine), whilst modern sites can add the chrome meta tag and get rendered by Chrome.

If we could tag certain sites as legacy, we could uninstall IE6 and default users to Chrome/Firefox/whatever. Or, we could even install IE8 and use the Chrome plug-in for true IE6 compatibility -- the opposite of what Google proposes.

You could simply use the IEView plugin in Firefox to achieve the effect you are looking for. I have a few IE-only sites and it seamlessly uses IE to render those sites while in Firefox. You configure which sites automatically use that rendering engine.

You could also solve the problem in the other direction: install two browsers on every employee's computer. When that's done, you can safely migrate to a standards-compliant version of the internal web-apps.

I think there would be fear of a support nightmare. An automated email contains a link to the internal foo system. Which browser should be used? Should IE6 be the default?

You could solve that by using Google's extension, actually. If the page requires standards compliance, put in the annotation for standards compliance. Otherwise, let ie6 render as default. The employee using the webapp, ideally, wouldn't even notice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com