We use React + Material Design, one of our largest clients has basically told us they are going to drop us because the people who use our app are stuck on IE6, which we don't support at all.<p>This never came up anytime before, or during the pilot. This only came out as we started to roll out to one of their offices.<p>Their primary workstations are stuck on a version of Windows 2000, because their primary workflow applications do not run on anything more modern. We are on premise for them, so i can make a special build if needed. Any suggestions or ideas? I looked and dug around and can't find anything.<p>Electron doesn't work on Windows 2000, and no amount of tinkering with babel seems to make it work at all.
I think you're out of luck. Hindsight is 20/20, but shouldn't their hardware and software requirements have come up long before you started development? How did you get to the point at which you were actively developing without knowing your target environment, especially if you're on premise?<p>At first I wrote a response suggesting a few ways you might be able to get it working on older versions of Windows, but they're just not feasible for anything prior to XP. Possible? Probably, but more work than rewriting everything, most likely.<p>You might be able to convince them to upgrade and virtualize their Windows 2000 programs--heck, you might even be able to get away with using DOSBox. That seems a lot more realistic than virtualizing Linux or a newer version of Windows on Windows 2000. But I wouldn't get your hopes up--anyone still on Windows 2000 is going to object heavily to upgrading; that's why they're still on Windows 2000. You can eliminate all the barriers for them and they still won't want to do it.<p>Edit: This might sound crazy, but have you looked into whether it's possible to make some changes to Electron to get it to run on Windows 2000? It's designed to be portable, so, in theory, you should be able to get it to run on a potato--assuming said potato has enough RAM.
You are definitely not out of luck, IE6 is not that bad, older React versions even supported it. You just need more shims and more babel plugins, so get someone who knows babel/ES3 well. Add the console shim and start working error by error.<p>Also, you should ask this in a JS community, because in HN you will get way too generic answers.
Don't attempt to build a SPA if you are support browsers that old (even IE8 imo). Give them a traditional server-rendered app and they'll be happy.<p>Since you've already built with React, the good news is that it's easy to build a React app that you deploy as a server-rendered app. Just make sure you are doing things in normal HTML, like forms, and not relying on xhr/fetch.
The only real option you have is to rewrite in a server side stack, PHP for example. IE6 isn't going to handle rehydration for SSR, and as you've mentioned any form of virtualization is going to be far more painful than it's worth.<p>It's entirely doable, the big question is - do you really want to? If this is genuinely the clients fault for not providing the IE6 requirement and asking you to work with a QA team using Ubuntu, then the costs should be covered by them. Potentially though, if the client is important enough to you, you may need to make a reduced rate offer or even take the hit yourselves. Whatever you choose, seeking legal advise may be a wise move.
Can you build a Win2k-compatible wrapper for a modern Blink or WebKit rendering engine?<p>And man, why aren’t they at least on WinXP?<p>You may have room to make an argument that this compatibility should be implemented in a separate contract/extension (that is, at extra cost) since compatibility with 20-year-old software that even MS no longer supports is not something that a vendor should reasonably expect as a requirement without it being explicitly brought up from the beginning. You may want to consult a lawyer.
Is a Docker or a VM solution possible? I admit to not being very knowledgeable here. If you can get a virtualized solution running a different version of Windows (or Linux) on these machines just for your app.<p>Either that or it's rebuild the app using jQuery and an earlier version of Bootstrap. For an alterative for Electron you can look into LibUI plus LibUI-Node.
I suspect this is going to be quite a painful thing to support. I’ve worked with IE6 in the past and even if you do get the app compatible, and get your CSS to render correctly, the JavaScript performance is dreadful. I used to find that our Dojo application when working at IBM would gradually get slower and slower without a page refresh.<p>I’d consider doing some static rendering from React components then fallback to a simpler client interaction. Alternatively let the client go and waste the engineering efforts of your competitor (I appreciate that may not be an option).
I am sorry to hear about this. Seems like modern browsers are very hard to come by on such old platforms...<p>Idea 1: AWS Appstream <a href="https://aws.amazon.com/appstream2/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=4" rel="nofollow">https://aws.amazon.com/appstream2/pricing/?nc=sn&loc=4</a><p>Idea 2: VNC to something else on premise<p>Idea 3: Run the app inside Linux inside QEMU (or another emulator)<p>Idea 4: Write your web app like its 1999<p>I think Idea 3 may be best for this case.
Try using qt instead of electron... Qts 4.X webkit implementation is quite powerful we use it in different embedded environments (including Windows CE) you can write your own client, compile it with VS studio prior to 2008 and profit :)
Actually, it’s pretty easy to convert into a server render with react. Just try to write a new middleware, new App.js for IE6-9. Apart from css issues, you’ll have zero js to execute on client.
Is the app used in third-world countries? IE6 is insecure and only used on very old computers that can't install anything else.<p>I'd check that the requirement is valid before doing a bunch of work.