hahaha. Did you ust say "compatibility with older versions of IE".

I'll probably get downvoted for this but.

If you want to maintain "compatibility with older versions of IE" try an older version of HTML, an older version of CSS, an older version of javascript and an older x86 processor, and an older version of windows (95 sounds nice).

Sorry.

If future features should try to remain compatible with older versions of IE we will get very little innovation.

Well, the thing is both Chrome and Firefox get updated automatically but IE doesn't.

So the problem will not IE versions that are already old (IE6, IE7) but current versions of IE - even future versions before they implement these new standards.

As these features roll out to Firefox and Chrome, users of these browsers will have to them because of the auto-update pretty quickly.

Eventually IE will implement them, maybe in version 12, and you'll have users still using IE10. Heck, maybe they won't be able to upgrade their IE because it won't run on their aging Windows 7.

Unless IE switches to the auto-update used by Firefox and Chrome, and stops dropping Windows versions in their new IE, I don't see the problem going away.

IIRC IE10 autoupdates

downvoted? No, you're totally right. We need to move on. see my rant below. upvoted.

I know. Browsers are free. What's the hold up?

Of course, its those creaky old IT departments.

Stop catering to these old browsers and people who want your app will download a capable browser or pressure their IT or just use their phone.

Ah yes, the "creaky old IT department"... Gosh darn it, if it weren't for those old fogies and their weird inclination to worry about making sure things actually work, and their bizarre insistence of mapping technological choices to the strategic concerns of the business (as opposed to just providing the coolest new toys for all the geeks to play with) - then, we might actually be able to get something done!

Exactly. Use their need to make sure things actually work to get them to upgrade.

Maybe what we need is a general strike. Have every app go dark for these old browsers on January 1st 2014 for one hour a day. Then double it every day until its 24/7.

If they can deal with Y2K, they can deal with something this trivial.

If you must support outdated versions of IE then your future is grim. The working tools you have today are all you will ever get. An expectation for ongoing framework support for these legacy environments is wholly unrealistic.

> If you must support outdated versions of IE then your future is grim.

Hello from military industrial complex business world. A hundreds of billions of dollars market where exactly almost nobody uses latest firefox, chrome and quite a few use IE8.

What looks grim for you is a boon over here. Supporting IE8 puts money in the pocket, money in the pocket makes the future not so "grim" ;-) Saying you need latest Chrome or Firefox guarantees just getting laughed at and shown the door.

I hate IE compatibility too, but there's still a lot of people using them; ~5% use IE8, ~2 use IE7. What business is willing to give up 7% of their revenue?

This varies widely by industry. We sell software to insurance companies. 40% of our pageviews are IE8. Sure, we can choose to ignore those customers, but in our world that's a lot of money to leave on the table.

I'm not saying I think everyone should be building for IE8. I wish we could stop. But it's also not always just as easy as saying give up 5% of your potential users. The HN crowd is so often consumer focused and incredibly out of touch with the enterprise markets (this is not an argument against the parent comment, but an overall trend I notice on HN).

as a supporting piece of anec-data I worked for an education startup in the uk - and we had to support IE 6 (six) as upwards of 50% of our userbase of high schools had locked in contracts with suppliers like RIM (not blackberry) and could not upgrade without incurring costs - which meant it did not happen.

Depends on a few more things:

1) If it's actually 7% of your revenue as opposed to just global traffic stats.

2) If entrenched IE customers would actually stop using your product rather than just install another browser.

3) If the cost of maintaining shims, backwards compatibility and ultimately just falling behind the competition in both experience and features is less than that potential 7% market.

And to expand on your points, is there anyone that is an entrenched IE 7 or 8 user because they just love that browser. My guess would be not, and that instead they are just using that because it's the latest version of IE that they can get on their OS. Anecdotally, I've seen a number of large organizations that I work with allow installation of new third party browsers even though they stay at an old version of IE for compatibility reasons.

So my point is that of that 7% that are using older versions of IE, it's probably a much smaller number that would not be willing or able to use an alternate browser to run your web application if they find value in it.

I'll happily give up 7% of revenue if I spend more supporting that small subset's outdated tech than I make in profit off them...

Give up 7% of revenue to speed up development by 30%.

To clarify, I'm fully aware that there's business to be had related to legacy browsers. I'm not arguing against the business case. If you've got a significant customer base with this need, then you'll have to choose tools that let you deliver.

To rephrase, makers of new tools, as a rule, tend to be forward-looking. This is what I'd expect. As corollary to this, at some point it no longer makes sense to support legacy technology. This produces a tradeoff within the aforementioned business case: is it worth the product constraints, effectively an externally imposed technical debt, to support that part of your market? How will you fare versus your competitors going forward if you do, or do not, support the legacy tail?

As soon as it is impossible to browse the web with old ie, users will be forced to switch. If you support old ie, you are contributing to it continuing to hang around.

Consider that support for those browsers is quickly becoming a niche market, especially where new ventures are concerned.

You can get around the IE problem by using classes to call your directives rather than element tags. <div class="ng-view"></div> isn't as pretty, but it works in IE8.

http://docs.angularjs.org/guide/ie

Agree that the documentation is still lacking.

Attributes also work for directives, though I like using ng-cloak as a class. I think in the future (next year, when my company will probably drop ie8 support) I'll start using custom tags.

There is a limit to how long developers will support these old browsers, even if they sell to corporations and institutions with backwards IT policies.

Some companies and even healthcare institutions are seeing the light and upgrading their systems. As more and more do, it makes less and less business sense to support old browsers (fewer companies still using them, and it only gets harder to make a modern web-app work on them).

There is a huge cost to supporting old browsers. There IS a tipping point where it's just not worth it anymore.

So the companies/institutions that don't upgrade will soon enough be left behind. That's just the way it is.