Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by loupeabody 4657 days ago
I second this. We recently had an incident at the office where all our Windows 7 machines implemented an update which upgraded everyone's IE8 to IE10. Some software which is used daily in the office to generate reports (using a browser) was using the <font> element to display barcodes (with a barcode typeface).

Since the <font> element has been long deprecated, the barcodes as well as a few other elements rendered differently. This alarmed a few of my bosses who were eager to understand what could be done to bring the barcodes back. After showing them IE10's dev tools and the browser mode, the problem has been temporarily fixed.

But many people I spoke with in the office were of the opinion that IE8 was all around better than IE10, and for their use case, they're not wrong. The legacy software everyone here uses to generate reports is outdated, but it still serves its purpose fine. Web standards and innovative technologies are not relevant to them on a personal level to justify the inconvenience of the update. So yes, my coworkers prefer IE8 to other browsers, but only because they depend on it.

The software we use to generate reports, by the way, could easily be changed to meet modern web standards. So, their opinion is further arbitrated if the software would just be tweaked to work with newer browsers.