BUGtrack Blog

BUGtrack v4 will discontinue IE6 support

Today we are announcing the sunset of IE6 support. BUGtrack v3.72 and subsequent minor releases will still support IE6, yet with the release of BUGtrack v4 we are planning sometime in the summer of 2013 we’ll remove support for IE6 completely. Windows XP users can either upgrade to IE7+ or choose browsers from other vendors.

At the moment IE6 users are presented with a banner prompting them to upgrade.

 

What led us to this decision is in fact the lack of IE6 support from Microsoft side. For a long time they provided “time-bombed” virtual machine images of XP+IE6 we’ve used in our testing environment. Old images have expired in February 2013 and no new images for IE6 were made available since then.

No surprise, mainstream support for Windows XP IE6 was bundled to has ended on April, 14, 2009. XP users have available upgrade path to IE8 - latter is even marked as High Priority (Critical) upgrade.

In addition, some third-party libraries we are using, like jQuery UI dropped support for IE6 in their recent releases.

The web is evolving. IE6 was released in 2001 and by that time was perhaps the best browser in class. Many things were changed since that. As a result we are developing for standards and then patching, adding extras we would not normally need, and spending time to fight with bugs in the browser that is more than a decade old.

Since the last year BUGtrack IE6 users’ share have dropped from a significant 8% to a mere 1%. At this situation we think we should no longer to put our efforts and resources to support outdated, buggy, non-standard-compliant browser. Help the web, upgrade today.

BUGtrack 3.72 list improvements

There been long time since the last BUGtrack update. The release went through a rough patch but thanks to your reports we were able to identify and fix most of the problem within a day. We would like to thank you for your patience and your support.

So, what’s in?

Customizable Lists

You can now select columns to display and list format (Brief/Complete) right from the list page. These settings are remembered for Favorite/My Stuff and each saved filter. Moreover these settings are device specific – you may want to display issues as a list with all columns on 24” wide screen monitor and choose less columns or complete format on your smartphone.

As a bonus – one click Export button was added to a list page as well.

Scrolling Headers

The screenshot speaks for itself - we now always keep table header on screen; long tables become much easier to read.

Brand-new text editor

We’ve swapped our home-brew HTML editor with industrial-strength TinyMCE editor. At the moment new editor’s features set up to be in par with old one but TinyMCE is indeed capable for more. We would suggest checking their demo – if you find some features useful feel free to add the request to Idea Exchange.

No more popup windows

Historically the color picker and calendars were rendered as popup windows. This approach servers us well since the Netscape times, but now it’s an age of tablets and new windows are often opened full screen. Calendars do not require a lot of space and popup windows were replaced with compact dropdowns.

HTML5 ready

HTML5 standard provides many new features, one of these is form validation. When running in HTML5 capable browser such as Firefox, Chrome or IE10 BUGtrack now utilizes standard form validation – if we can check for some common errors right in the browser there is no need to send invalid data to the server.

Less clicks

Quite simple change – when search field is focused, the dropdown with search options automatically opens.

Behind the scenes

While filter settings used in Filters/Reports/Web-Queries look the same, in fact these are three separate code paths. We are working on to unify filtering UI to prepare for further improvements.