Vintage Browsers and PRTG: Why We Do Not Support IE6/IE7 Any More

The technology that makes rich web applications possible is called Asynchronous JavaScript and XML, or simply “AJAX”. Using Ajax an interactive user experience is created inside a web browser, enabling instant reaction within the interface without loading complete web pages for every little action. In many cases, the user does not need to wait for a HTTP response from the web server before he can continue working with the app. Google, for example, uses Ajax for its Google Maps feature or the Gmail web interface. Unfortunately, older browsers cannot cope well with Ajax—so Google dropped support for Internet Explorer 6 already in 2007, for example. Since version 7, PRTG also uses an Ajax framework (we rely on the fantastic jQuery library) to provide a flexible and easy-to-use interface that you can use with your web browser from anywhere in the world. With the development of the new version 8 of PRTG, we had to make a decision, as Internet Explorer always needs special treatment regarding Ajax scripts: Should we support IE7 or should we rather create twice as many features for all modern browsers instead? Developing Ajax functions that support IE6/IE7 takes about twice the time it takes to create the same functions for modern browsers. We decided to drop IE6/IE7 support in favor of creating more functionality for modern browsers like Firefox 3.5/3.6, Chrome 4/5 and Safari 4. The result is that PRTG 8 supports IE6/IE7 only with the HTML-based, read-only, limited-functionality “HTML interface”. By the way, we do not support Firefox 1/2 anymore either. Read more about this in our Knowledge Base article Why are Internet Explorer IE6 and IE7 not supported by PRTG's Ajax Interface?