Startup Skips IE Support, Claims $100,000 Savings

darthcamaro writes "Guess what — you don't have to support Microsoft's IE web browser any more to build a successful website. In fact, you might just be able to save yourself a pile of cash if you avoid IE altogether." (Here's the story, from a few days back, in Canada's National Post, about the frugal financing of social startup Huddlers.) Evidently, no one complained about the lack of IE support either. I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though; not being dependent on IE sounds great, but loses some sparkle if it means requiring Chrome or Firefox.

Comments

Re:Useless

[ilguido]

It's the admin part that's Firefox/Chrome only. So it may be something else than boring pixel perfect rendering. The portfolios(which need the "boring pixel perfect rendering to make the artists happy") can be browsed with any browser.

It's shennanigans

[crazyjj]

First of all, the summary has it wrong. The company is 4ormat, not Huddles. And read this article for an explanation of how this claim is just a publicity stunt. It works just fine in IE (ironically, the only browser it doesn't work in is Opera).

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Pieroxy]

The truth is that is you get IE out of the game, anything working in a browser either works in others of degrades gracefully.

It you get IE in the game, you have to test and develop whole chunks of your website twice.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Alex Zepeda]

You're kidding, right? IE8 lacks: Rounded corners, SVG anything, more robust font support, most HTML5 goodies (enhanced form support for things like validations and placeholders), text on canvas, CSS media queries, javascript optimizations like nested arrays and getElementsByClassName. IE8 is definitely a primitive browser.

IE9 is much closer, but it's still pretty bad. AFAIK it still doesn't support rounded borders + gradients and it has a number of problems with its SVG support. Others have linked to caniuse.com, but I'll point you in the direction of D3's issue tracker>.

If you're doing a dead simple site, sure IE8 not too bad. If you're trying to take advantage of "new" features, you're pretty much SOL (even with IE9).