Unfortunately the "enterprise" seem set on it. Yesterday I was working with a new content management platform and I had to downgrade my Internet Explorer to 9 because it only works with IE 7,8 and 9. Then that still didn't work because of some MSXML problem I couldn't fix and I ended up having to use a VM with XP installed and IE 8.
Un-be-lievable. I don't know who these Enterprisey IT managers are who are making these decisions but they seem to have a lot of power which they are using irresponsibly. And they seem to love IE.
A decade ago the large company I worked for switched to a web based timecard system. The only problem, ie only and the software team of 50+ all were using hpux or solaris workstations. No ie. Oh and they wanted timecards done daily.
The solution?
Set up 2 terminals in the lab with a unix backend and a windows NT virtual environment so we can use IE to do timecards.
How complicated can/should a timecard system be? Surely one of those 50+ software engineers could have rewritten a portable version in a few days and saved you a lot of bother.
Is that really a bad thing? You have a known working VM image to access one particular system. It will never stop working. At worst we'll just run an x86 emulator on our 10GHz 60-core ARM-based phones.
We go through a lot of the same crud. The latest is they cannot push out IE 10 / 11 to everyone because it would require server upgrades (which is true, but very lame). :/
If IE is giving you half the performance of the nearest, free, easily downloaded competitor in your favourite online game, you might be tempted to switch. And this is for the few users that are on IE10!
Two years ago when the tables were turned and Google announced Dart, which has the same compatibility strategy as asm.js (fastest with explicit support, falls back to regular JS), Brendan Eich had these harsh words for Google's move (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2982949):
So "Works best in Chrome" and even "Works only in Chrome"
are new norms promulgated intentionally by Google. We see
more of this fragmentation every day. As a user of Chrome
and Firefox (and Safari), I find it painful to experience,
never mind the political bad taste.
But now "runs best in Mozilla Firefox" is cool?
I actually like asm.js and think it's a totally reasonable approach. I mention this only to highlight that maybe all of the bad-faith assumptions Google gets are not entirely deserved. Objectively these two are similar moves and I think they are both in good faith.
Obviously I'm not Brendan or Chris Peterson, but I see there being two meanings of "works best in Firefox/Chrome": one of which is "Chrome/Firefox has a faster implementation of the standards" (which is what all browsers strive for—for the Web to "work best" in their browser), and the other of which is "Firefox/Chrome has a faster nonstandard implementation of X and there is a worse, standards-based fallback for browsers that don't support this vendor-specific extension", which is what I read Brendan's frustration as relevant to.
By "runs best in Firefox", I just meant that Firefox executed asm.js content faster than Chrome (though the same standards-based content is compatible with all browsers). Google's "works best in Chrome" demos usually depend on non-standard features or the phrase is just marketing text.
I can't speak for Brendan, but I think his comment linked above was concerned that Dart and NaCl promote proprietary content types.
The Dart language is an interesting but incremental improvement like CoffeeScript and TypeScript. The Dart VM is a dead end because Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla will never embed Google's Dart VM. If Google merged Dartium's VM into Chrome, web servers would serve proprietary Dart content to Chrome and "separate but equal" JS content (generated from Dart) to other browsers. That approach would require extra tooling and testing from web developers and open the door to Google services serving exclusively Dart content. Imagine if YouTube only supported Chrome.
I'm not really sure these two are different. How is dart2js "worse" than the Dart VM, except for speed? And even in speed, dart2js is faster than hand-written JS in many cases (see https://www.dartlang.org/performance/)
With source maps Dart is debuggable from JS AFAIK. And dart.js allows deploying Dart content in a way that works seamlessly whether or not the Dart VM is present. I'm really not seeing the difference here.
People are downvoting all my comments on this story, which are saying "I think Google and Mozilla are both acting in good faith to move the web forward."
Stay classy, Mozilla fans. I'm trying to be one of you but you're not making it easy.
Un-be-lievable. I don't know who these Enterprisey IT managers are who are making these decisions but they seem to have a lot of power which they are using irresponsibly. And they seem to love IE.