Microsoft fixed some garbage collection problems in IE6 almost a year
ago. I'm trying to figure out if many users of IE6 are unpatched and
still have the old buggier JScript in them.
I have a rather large ECMAScript app that is speedy enough in just
about every browser but IE6. Some people tell me just to forget IE6,
but it still seems to have significant share at www.w3schools.com. And
anecdotally, the place my brother works (incredibly) still mandates
IE6 on company computers.
I have the feeling that I can't count on people having upgraded their
IE6s to the better GC JScript. If they were the upgrading type, seems
like they'd be using IE7 or another browser rather than IE6.
I'm sure it's uncool to tell IE6 users to use one of the browsers that
I wish they would use (but see the next paragraph for my thoughts on
this), so I'm looking for specifics on what I should and should not be
doing for IE6's sake, especially to ease or head-off garbage
collection problems. Do I explicit tear down objects and arrays at the
end of functions? Do I avoid closures? Anything else?
Uncool though it may be, I am tempted to throw IE6 users some kind of
warning that they're in for a long wait if they try something
especially ambitious. I could then offer them a way to speed things
up, like offering an Adobe AIR version and giving benchmarks of
different PC browsers performing the task. Thoughts on that tactic?
