Microsoft’s MIX10 Developers and Designers conference is currently running in Las Vegas. Sadly I’m not attending as it sounds like lots of fun…
There has been lots of buzz and some really interesting bits coming out so far including Silverlight 4 RC, Internet Explorer 9 preview (with HTML5 and CSS3 etc.), Windows phone information, etc.
Scott Hanselman has posted a great roundup of the announcements and keynotes.
We’ve all seen the retail and consumer space push to ditch IE6 gathering pace over the last 6 months, including a petition to the UK government and Google’s announcement that their online productivity suite stopped supporting IE6 yesterday. But the corporates (and specifically banking) have been a lot more reluctant to follow suit. But is this about to change?
Rumour on the street has it that, finally, the investment banks are going to start abandoning IE6. Barclays are allegedly going to do an enterprise-wide rollout of IE8 in Q2 of this year (put back from Q3 last year). Even more surprising (and impressive) is a rumour that Standard Bank of South Africa are going to ditch Microsoft browsers completely and move to Chrome for their corporate standard!
One of the big benefits of Caplin’s browser-based SDP platform, Caplin Trader, is that it can run in virtually any browser without the need for plugins or special configuration.
This is no mean feat for a complex, high performance, low latency trading portal framework written in JavaScript and running to >250KLOC. Although IE8, Firefox, Safari and Chrome are similar enough to make it relatively straightforward to support each of them, IE7 and, particularly, IE6 are a different story. They are riddled with quirks and bugs in their layout, rendering and memory management engines. In addition, developer tool support is starting to lag. Worst of all, their performance is diabolical compared with the recent crop of competitors.
However, IE6 is often one of our customers’ main target browsers by default. Sadly the big financial institutions, and to a lesser degree their clients, run with locked-down and often out-of-date desktop components. This limits their capacity to upgrade or install new browsers, though it’s true that some of the smaller firms are able to do so more easily.
So, should we continue to support IE6? How should we encourage our customers and users to move to newer browsers? What are the benefits of doing so?
