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Letting Go of Legacy Code

Browsers184 words1 minutes to read

Taking my own advice, I’ve updated my “crappy browser” messages to include Internet Explorer 5.5. IE 5.5 is now 5 years old (1999), and it’s time to encourage more and more people to move up.

Since IE6 supports the correct CSS box model (in “almost standards” mode), I’m not going to bother with the CSS box model hack in the new design. This is 2004 people… get with the program. If users insist on hanging on to outdated technology, then they need to understand that at some point they’re going to be left behind.

Microsoft has left behind Windows 95/98/Me, Apple has let go of anything prior to Mac OS X 10.1.5 (pretty much), and I’ve let go of IE prior to 6.0. At some point, you just need to bite the bullet and let the legacy code go. That’s where I’m at.

If you’re a die-hard Internet Explorer 5.0 user, sorry. If your company still hasn’t upgraded their systems with IE6, either find a new one that’s on-the-ball, or create a fuss to get IE6 installed (if not a better browser like Firefox).

Ryan Parman

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.