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

They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[gabebear]

They support all browsers when not editing content(the way most people use this site)... this article is also rather old

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[ilguido]

this article is also rather old

Come on: Julia Johnson May 25, 2012 – 2:53 PM ET | Last Updated: May 28, 2012 7:45 AM ET

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Xest]

It sounds fucking stupid anyway.

"No one complained about lack of IE support"

Yes, that's probably just because they fucked off to your competitor who made even more cash than you because they did support the 33% or whatever of the global population that is still using IE.

Besides, modern IE isn't exactly that difficult to support. Most browsers are much more forgiving and less picky than they were just a couple of years ago so if it displays right in Chrome/Firefox, chances are it does actually work just as well in say, IE7+ anyway.

I don't like IE, but not supporting it is still just plain fucking stupid as you a) throw away a sizeable portion of potential customers, and b) It's not hard to support recent versions (which is the bulk of usage) now anyway. The $100,000 savings thing is either a big fat troll, or they have some either really really incompetent developers, or really really overpaid developers. If it costs you that to support most IE users when you already support say Firefox, Chrome, Safari etc. then your site and/or team is horribly broken.

We support all these browsers as well as Blackberry, Android, iOS, WP7, Symbian to boot, and I can't see how if you've been sensible about your use of templating/stylesheets/javascript libraries like jQuery etc. you could possibly spend this much on IE support unless you're trying to support as far back as like IE3 or something. It implies they're willing to pay the equivalent of say, a standard front end developer $50k a year to spend 2 years on IE support which is frankly fucking insane.

I suspect this story is just a rather long winded way of saying "We don't like Microsoft, down with IE" rather than something that has any basis in fact, which is also a shame really, because if they'd just come out and said that - i.e. exactly what they meant - then I'd have been able to just reply and say "Yep", instead.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[TheNinjaroach]

Besides, modern IE isn't exactly that difficult to support. Most browsers are much more forgiving and less picky than they were just a couple of years ago so if it displays right in Chrome/Firefox, chances are it does actually work just as well in say, IE7+ anyway.

I wish this lie would simply go away.

There is something fundamentally broken when your web browser requires non-standard markup in order to display standards-based markup.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Tohuw]

Supporting IE 9 is fairly easy, unless you're doing some wacky JQuery madness (stop doing that, nothing needs to be that fancy) or creating renders that expect really consistent text shadows (stop creating visuals that require text shadows to be readable). There are exceptions a colleague ran into whilst creating a rather extensive admin interface for a webapp that had many forms and parts on a single page, but he seemed to clear the hurdle without too much bleeding. IE 8 is notably less easy, especially if you're using CSS rounded corners (though you should be able to make a design that doesn't require them to at least look acceptable). There's also other bits of weirdness STFW for countless rants can reveal to you. IE 7 is a pain in the ass, and incompatibilities abound. It's nowhere near as bad as the hell that was supporting IE 6, but it's still costly and time-consuming. So, in summary, I agree with the core of your statements, but also can sympathize (but not agree with) the desire to drop IE for editing and control interfaces.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Gr8Apes]

Besides, modern IE isn't exactly that difficult to support. Most browsers are much more forgiving and less picky than they were just a couple of years ago so if it displays right in Chrome/Firefox, chances are it does actually work just as well in say, IE7+ anyway.

I wish this lie would simply go away. There is something fundamentally broken when your web browser requires non-standard markup in order to display standards-based markup.

IE 9+ maybe.... pre 9 I no longer bother for flashiness unless someone wants to pay. But, even then, since we're doing truly standards based development or utilizing supported toolsets on 99% of our websites anyways, we have very good odds of a large percentage of the website working all the way back to IE7, and the important workflows, i.e., ordering and purchasing, are tested thoroughly. That image flyover on hover, not so much.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[GodInHell]

Having not coded a web page in ... oh ... ten years, which is the lie: that different browsers require different mark-ups or that IE7 and Firefox/Chrome basically all work the same now?

I think its the former, but I wouldn't be surprised by the later.

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

[Vanderhoth]

As a web developer I can tell you you're correct. I have CSS and jQuery that work perfectly with FireFox, Chrome, Opera and Safari. Then I have special case CSS files for IE 6, 7, 8 and general case IE. Other browsers rarely need special case rules and never at all require special case rules for every version of the browser.

I deal with a lot of scientific data and dynamically generate graphs and plots based on variables selected in forms written in PHP. Almost guaranteed when I develop something in IE, it won't displayed correctly in FireFox, Chrome, Opera and/or Safari. If I develop something in FireFox I can't say I've ever had a problem with Chrome, Opera, or Safari, but it almost never works in IE and special case rules need to be written.

Just as an example, I have a page where a user determines the type of species they're looking at by answering questions. My organizations web standards group provided me the jQuery and CSS for the feature. The questions are contracted links in a tree like structure and are formatted as "Does the species have XXX?" or "Does the species have YYY?". When the user clicks on a link the section expands and asks another question until the user gets to the linked name of the species they're looking for, which takes them to a page with more information on the species.

The page works fine in FireFox, Chrome, Opera, and Safari, but doesn't work the same way in any IE browser. The progress enhancement solution for IE is to have all elements in the tree automatically expanded. The fact that this doesn't work in IE is a real pain in my ass. I demoed the page in FireFox and the content owner liked how it worked, but he uses IE and wasn't happy when I told him it didn't work the same way in that browser. So now he expects me to go through all the jQuery code and CSS to make it work the same way in not just IE, but every version of IE, which I'm not doing because 1) I've been told I'm not to modify features provided by the web standards group in order to ensure our web content complies with Web Content accessibility Guidelines 2.0 and 2) when the web standards group provides me with updates for jQuery features like this I'd have to go and re-update all the code again.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[KingMotley]

If you drop support for IE 6, then you can actually start to develop 1 page, with standards markup and be fairly successful. If you drop support for IE 7, then the incompatibility issues are fairly infrequent. Dropping support for IE 8 doesn't typically get you a whole lot, except for rounded corners, and you can drop the odd opacity/gradient code (Which isn't hard to generate). Between IE 9 and firefox/chrome the oddities are just about even. Chrome has a few bugs, Firefox has a few bugs, and IE 9 so far doesn't have any bugs I'm aware of, but it has a few features missing that the others support (Text Shadows mainly).

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Xest]

It tails off towards newer versions of IE, with 6 of course requiring the most additional support, 7 requiring much less, 8 requiring a bit less, and 9 requiring basically none.

Your chance of encountering such an issue also decreases with the version increases too, so on 7 you're much less likely to need to do anything specific than you were with 6, 8 much less so again, and 9 pretty unlikely at all.

Nowadays I find that Firefox tends to be more divergent in terms of requiring special attention than Chrome/Safari/IE. The WebKit based browsers and IE seem to be far more closely aligned in terms of HTML/CSS/JS support now, than the WebKit based browsers and Firefox.

But specifically what sort of issues do you constantly run into that are so time consuming that you find IE that much more difficult to support? and in which versions? I can sympathise somewhat with supporting IE6, and IE7 can be awkward in the odd case now and again, but not particularly frequently and most definitely not anywhere near frequently enough to justify someone to spend 2 years at $50k a year fixing even the largest of sites for it.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[aztracker1]

I'd say 80% of the time what I develop works cross-browser just fine... the rest is about half on various IE versions and the other half on firefox or safari quirks... with tablets in the mix (roughly 18% of my employers viewers now) it gets worse. Old tablet browsers are worse in some regards than IE8, as they don't always fully implement those features from 2-3 years ago, such as broken css3 transitions, etc..

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[s.petry]

I don't like IE, but not supporting it is still just plain fucking stupid as you a) throw away a sizeable portion of potential customers

Look, I'm sorry but you have it all wrong IMO. The whole point of HTML (and later JavaScript and CSS) was that it should not matter what browser you have, the stuff just works. The whole "works in my browsers" argument should have never happened, and was avoided so easily that it's scary. To argue that you must at this point in time is a rather retarded way of thinking.

Why do most sites work in Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, Konquerer, etc... etc... with identical code? OMFG, they support "STANDARDS". Microsoft has a history of bastardizing standards to suite their needs and create lock in to their products. If you waste money supporting their piss poor practices that should be something you choose to pee away money on. The "requirement" was artificially introduced and never should have been there to begin with. With the mass migration from PC to Mobile the argument has little merit any longer.

The arguments now should be what screen size to render, or how to scale based on the odd Mobile display sizes and not what browser is looking at the code.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Anonymous Coward]

Our site (commercial) actually runs one of those banners with the, "You're running IE6. This is dangerous and bad for everyone, blah blah blah. Harass the idiots at your help desk about installing a browser that was released some time in the last decade."

I suspect those users are used to that by now, and according to our site stats (and others) we collected before and now... the percentage of those is so small as to be irrelevant.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[flappinbooger]

I don't like IE, but not supporting it is still just plain fucking stupid as you a) throw away a sizeable portion of potential customers,

Maybe they just don't want to cater to the likes of people WHO USE IE.....

"Psst, hey Fred, he looks like an IE user..." "Hey, fella, we don't like yer kind 'round these parts!"

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[D'Sphitz]

IE7? No way, definitely not. There is no doubt that dealing with IE8 is less frustrating, but it still has issues. Once you've trained yourself to avoid common IE pitfalls you can generally hack out javascript and css that works sufficently well in IE8, but there are also many CSS3 properties that aren't supported such as border-radius, box-shadow, even for opacity you have to resort to the IE only "filter" attribute. Full support involves resorting the old hacks of yesteryear, usually involving lots of images for borders, shadows and gradients and much cursing.

IE9 can be supported with minimal effort (or none at all once you learn to avoid the few quirks), and IE10 will finally be on par with other browsers.

So IE has improved drastically from IE6, the problem is a significant number of people still use IE6, IE7, & IE8, usually unknowingly or because they don't have a choice (company policy, running XP, etc). You can generally assume that people aren't using Firefox 2 anymore unless they explicitly chose to do so, with IE many people are using browsers that are several years up to a decade out of date.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[htnmmo]

I agree IE isn't that hard to support anymore. I build websites for companies in various sectors including corporate clients. IE is still the dominant browser in some segments but not as much as it used to be.

For sites where the users tend to be more tech savy, and browse mainly from home IE isn't that popular. Maybe around 30-40% of these users are using IE.

For the business sites where visitors are generally browsing the site from work for business related reasons IE is still very strong. Around 60% and the most popular version is one version of the latest because of how software on corporate desktops is managed. It used to be a lot worse. 2-3 years ago IE was at around 90% for these client sites.

IE is still an important browser to support but if you limit support for certain areas, such as the admin area the site in TFA does it for, then you can be more restrictive on browser support because you have a limited set of users accessing those pages.

If you build websites for people that will be accessing the sites primarily from work, ignoring IE is shooting yourself in the foot.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Mabhatter]

My own experience is that you can set your tools to "XHTML strict" and build a nice looking page that will work on Opera, Safari, Chrome, and Firefox (and depreciate nicely on mobile versions, etc) it won't be "perfect" across all of them, but it won't have glaring render errors either. You can do this with NO BROWSER SPECIFIC HACKS.

Then you add IE and stuff breaks all over the place. Some versions of IE will work more than others, but the point is why invest in adding code JUST to make something work on IE that will work "good enough" everywhere else?

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Johann Lau]

Dunno about IE7, not even IE8 can do anything remotely fun or pretty. Oh, you meant a website that looks like ass, or uses graphics for every single thing? Yeah, that's possible with IE, sure. But otherwise, you couldn't be more wrong, there are worlds of difference between IE7 and (modern versions of) Firefox and Chrome. Don't believe me? http://caniuse.com/

^ no inline blocks, no :before and :after, no opacity (yeah, there's a speshul IE version of it, great) -- nope, unless you use a lots of graphics, there isn't shit you can do with that thing. Just accept that.

And don't even get me started on Javascript... there is just no way.

Also, this is about the admin interface! For my own first attempt at a CMS I did it the same way: IE visitors get something that looks okay-ish, visitors with a real browsers get to see the real website. Users with IE can use POST and be happy, users with real browsers get Javascript bling. But profile owners and admins have to use a modern browser, or fuck off. That approach saved me thousands of seconds of work, and many hundred bytes, so why shouldn't that scale for bigger projects? ^^

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Johann Lau]

Sure, but unless you're into Geocities nostalgia or masochism, you'll end up with a website that sucks.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[matthewv789]

True, modern IE is not that hard to support. But the only "modern" IE is IE9. Supporting IE8 and 7 is still a nightmare, though they are in no respect "modern".

- To support IE8, one assumes that you will avoid all use of CSS3, or at the least avoid CSS3 selectors and assume that it doesn't need to be pixel perfect (no gradients, shadows or rounded corners).
- To support IE7, you furthermore need to avoid all use of CSS2.1 selectors.
- The farther you go back, the more you also need to worry about vagaries in margins and other positioning differences.

In other words, to gracefully support IE7+, you basically need to code for the web of 10 years ago, which is more time-consuming, inflexible, and difficult to maintain going forward, and also leads to heavier pages (lots of background images, instead of a few lines of css code).

I am skeptical of $100,000 though.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[jakimfett]

Here's a pie chart to go with this thread: http://www.codemonkeyreport.com/coding-its-like-that/70

tl;dr: better than 50% of web development time is spent fixing the brokenness of Microsoft.


(Disclaimer: I don't hate Microsoft, but they sure have made some poor choices about standards compliance, and I shall heckle them mercilessly. Much as I did Ubuntu for implementing the abysmal Unity interface, or similar choices with the Gnome 3 interface.)

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[PIBM]

IE7 being at less than 3% recently, just let them burn should they still wish to use it. IE8 is easy to have a good enough result.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Joe U]

tl;dr: better than 50% of web development time is spent fixing the brokenness of Microsoft.
 

tl;dr: Joke chart from about 7 years ago.

Herp derp, old jokes R teh fun when yous peat dem 4 six yrs.

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).

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[jakimfett]

Herp derp, old jokes R teh fun when yous peat dem 4 six yrs.

'specially when they're still true. But hey, it's not like I'm a web developer grinding through this stuff every day. It's not like the official version of Microsoft products is WinXP/IE7 in my workplace. It's not like my primary project for fall 2011 *required* support back to IE6. I must be completely clueless, yup yup...

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[steveb3210]

IE7 still uses the broken box model... IE8+ is pretty easy.. IE9+ pretty much just works...

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Blakey Rat]

IE8 has every W3C complete standard implemented. Every one.

The problem is either one of:
1) Web developers demand too many features that are incomplete standards to the point where those features are just "expected", even though no browser is compelled to implement them

2) The W3C moves slower than molasses in January, and at this point they are the ones slowing progress on the web much more than Microsoft ever did.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[aztracker1]

I'm not sure what "wacky JQuery madness" you are referring to? jQuery tends to abstract browser capabilities and does a great job in handling the differences in a consistent manner. Now any given plugin/extension may or may not do a good job of that, especially visuals based plugins.

As for "nothing needs to be that fancy" ... I would completely disagree, unless you don't ever use the likes of GMail, or any other web based administrative interface. Most web based applications *require* JavaScript to be functional and responsive. You can cut down on the amount of data transfer, as well as the impact of data refreshes. It isn't just about being fancy, it's about delivering a responsive experience to the end user.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Vanderhoth]

Actually the real joke here is that chart is still relevant 6 years later.

I do spend about one third of my time on CSS, I've had issues with the missing/extra space in javaScript causing FireFox to go wonky and it's about accurate for how much time I spend correcting issues to make pages work in Internet Explorer.

I think I spend less time making the pages W3C compliant because I use tool kits that take care of most of that for me, but I definitely spend more time swearing.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Vanderhoth]

I think we need a support group.
I'm in the same boat as you except all my web projects must be IE6 compliant.

The real fun for me is going to start in October when my organization rolls Win7, with max security enabled and no admin rights (even for local IT or help desk) out to all the organization PCs.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Tom]

Besides, modern IE isn't exactly that difficult to support. Most browsers are much more forgiving and less picky than they were just a couple of years ago so if it displays right in Chrome/Firefox, chances are it does actually work just as well in say, IE7+ anyway.

No, it doesn't. There are tons of examples out there, and I've got some first hand experience. Stuff that works just fine in every other browser will break on IE in random versions because IE requires some totally different way of doing it than everyone else. That goes up to at least including IE8, I'm not entirely certain about IE9 as at least everything I use seems to finally work there.

IE still sucks and I will applaud anyone who writes a fast-spreading virus to irrestorable removes it from every machine, world-wide. And fuck those who don't have any other browser installed and are now stuck without the Web, we're all better off without them idiots anyways.

I may seem extreme, but just try to make a rough estimate of the total damage that IE has done to the world economy in requiring all the wasted time and effort for having its quirks supported.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[LingNoi]

> who made even more cash than you because they did support the 33% or whatever of the global population that is still using IE.

That's right all those customers in china on pirated copies of windows! What a gold mine! and those old dinosaur companies that are too cheap to spend on IT? They sound like the perfect paying customers!

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[lipanitech]

I know major venders like websense and Sunguard prefer you to use Firefox over IE they claim you have less compatibility issues.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[jakimfett]

I think we need a support group. I'm in the same boat as you except all my web projects must be IE6 compliant.

I'm so sorry for you. My heart goes out to you as you walk through this dark and dire task.

The real fun for me is going to start in October when my organization rolls Win7, with max security enabled and no admin rights (even for local IT or help desk) out to all the organization PCs.

You get Win7?!?!?!

That aside...max security stinks...fortunately, my dept is realistic enough about what developers need vs what the standard is that they let me install xubuntu as a dev environment...

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Vanderhoth]

I'm pushing to get a Linux distro instead of Windows 7. We have different security groups for Linux, OSX and Windows. The widows security group has it so locked down that it's useless to anyone that wants to do more than just use word and IE. We're not allowed to install any software outside what comes with the base Win7 image, including other browsers, which isn't going to work for me being the webmaster and all.

The Linux security group is considerable more lax, although Linux users have to use a web version of MS Outlook for booking boardrooms and sending/receiving e-mail within the organization. I only know two people at my work site that have Linux because you have to have a good reason to request a Linux distro.. I wonder if "So I can do my job" is a good enough reason.

I'm sure they'll relax the Win7 security once they get everything up and running and they're dealing with 100 request an hour for application installations and increased security privileges. I can tell you now if all I can do is read/write e-mails there will be a never ending torrent of them from me.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[jakimfett]

Don't get Ubuntu. The Metro-clone...err...Unity interface will make you want to shoot yourself.

Xubuntu has my vote for a development environment. Getting MySQL workbench working is a bit fun, but with a bit of work you can even get Skyrim running.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Bert64]

Most companies idea of "securing" windows, is to try and disable or break most of the features, resulting in a system which is extremely painful to use, and frequently displays errors because the system simply isn't designed to work in such a hacked up fashion.

What this says to me, is that most of the features are fundamentally insecure and thus have to be disabled rather than configured in a sensible way.

In every scenario i've seen, there were ways to bypass these restrictions and pretty much do what you want anyway.

On the other hand, on the linux setups i've seen you could do normal things, for instance you could browse the filesystem normally without resorting to hacks (on a typical windows setup explorer wont let you browse the boot drive, but you can still access it anyway through the cli or such), and yet the system still manages to be considerably more secure...
Simple things also make a lot more sense, like having removable media just not configured to auto mount, or mounted noexec on linux, vs having crufty software running on windows to prevent access to removable media (and which allows everything when that crufty software crashes) while still allowing usb mice etc.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Bert64]

How is it a metro clone? Unity has been around a lot longer than metro.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Bert64]

The problem is, HTML is *supposed* to degrade gracefully when faced with browsers that don't support given features, and properly coded html will indeed degrade gracefully in browsers like lynx and older mozilla versions...
IE (and netscape 4 for that matter) on the other hand, doesn't simply lack support for stuff, it has broken implementations of various specs which means that instead of ignoring it and degrading gracefully, you end up with a really garbled page.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[jakimfett]

Metro clone in the sense that it gives the same "Hahaha, screw you!" message to power desktop (or simply, non-touch-based interface) users.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Eristone]

I may seem extreme, but just try to make a rough estimate of the total damage that IE has done to the world economy in requiring all the wasted time and effort for having its quirks supported.

Hmm -- you must not be billing by the hour. It isn't your fault that you are transferring more of the wealth of your clients into your own pockets... (yes, I'll let you finish the rest of this whole thought)

And fuck those who don't have any other browser installed and are now stuck without the Web, we're all better off without them idiots anyways.

Unfortunately, everyone doesn't have the ability to make a choice as to their browsers -- corporate policies are fairly pedantic (and idiotic - in all senses of the word)

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[BrynM]

Here's the same article (albeit with a different company name) from April: http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/01/bootstrapped-startup-saves-over-100k-by-dropping-ie/

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Alex Zepeda]

So what? CSS3 Media Queries are at the candidate recommendation stage. At that point the W3C thinks they're stable enough to recommend removing vendor prefixes.

Besdies IE8 doesn't have any SVG support. Not even SVG Tiny. If the Mozilla, Opera, and WebKit guys can all agree... surely it shouldn't be too hard for Microsoft to agree? Ah, well.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[PCM2]

And don't even get me started on Javascript... there is just no way.

There's a pretty easy way for most people: Use a framework like jQuery, where they've done most of the banging-your-head-against-a-rock for you.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Xest]

"Look, I'm sorry but you have it all wrong IMO. The whole point of HTML (and later JavaScript and CSS) was that it should not matter what browser you have, the stuff just works. The whole "works in my browsers" argument should have never happened, and was avoided so easily that it's scary. To argue that you must at this point in time is a rather retarded way of thinking."

Wait what? accepting the reality of the situation for what it is is a retarded way of thinking? Look, accepting reality for what it is does not mean it's how I'd like things to be, I agree the situation should never have happened, but it did. If you actually deal with these things though day to day you have to be realistic and accept it the way it is and hope for improvement moving forward.

"Why do most sites work in Opera, Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Netscape, Konquerer, etc... etc... with identical code? OMFG, they support "STANDARDS"."

They don't any more so than IE does really since the post-IE6 world - versions of Firefox as old as IE7 were just as flawed, but comparing like for like modern browsers like IE9 and they all do just as good a job now.

"Microsoft has a history of bastardizing standards to suite their needs and create lock in to their products."

Agreed, but please also realise that the whole WHATWG hijacking of web standards from the W3C was absolutely a case of Mozilla/Apple also deciding to hijack the web. What they've come up with with HTML5 is a pretty weak spec for desktop browsers, but in it's push away from XML it completely rapes other user agents such as screen readers, or text only readers hopes of having a more compatible, more parsable web that the XHTML route offered. It's also worth noting that just about all browsers failed for a long time to implement proper XML parsing option, or in other words like XML parsing path or not, just about every browser vendor failed to fully implement that standard also. You must realise that the W3C is slow because it is represenative of a wide range of companies - you only have to look at the companies involved to see how well it represented the technology world in trying to offer standards that would support everyone's needs. Compare that to WHATWG and you'll see that WHATWG was equally a coup - an attempt to wrestle away standards from the highly democratic, highly representative (even if slow) W3C and put them in the hands of just a few developers at only a couple of companies. Don't think for one minute that companies nowadays are no longer trying to control the web and push it their own way. HTML5's production was entirely totalitarian - if Ian Hickson didn't like what you had to say, even if the majority of the rest of the web agreed with you and you were objectively correct, the change didn't go in. Sure this method of standards development is quicker, but it's also not healthy. You only have to look at the failure to agree a video standard to see the problem - the handful of people involved just wanted to use the standard as an attempt to push their own preferred video format when realistically a generic market based approach as is how other content on the web (such as image formats for the image tag) was always the saner option anyway.

You're not wrong, I'm not disagreeing with you at all - Microsoft and Netscape both implemented some horrible proprietary extensions in their battle to control the web, Netscape lost and we were left with Microsoft's extensions and interpretations as a disease on the web for many many years until Firefox came along. Like you say, the situation should never have happened, but the reality is that it did happen, so if you work with the web, you simply do have to cater to it. Things are changing and improving but it has nothing whatsoever to do with changes to standards - it's simply about a now healthy browser market with increased competition. When IE6 was all that was left there was no incentive for Microsoft to improve standards support, now we have Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Opera, IE all as viable options everyone is being forced to follow standards better.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[tehcyder]

I think if you're working in a place where "security groups" actually prevent you doing your job, you either need to speak to your boss or leave.

That's a big if though.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[tehcyder]

To support IE8, one assumes that you will avoid all use of CSS3, or at the least avoid CSS3 selectors and assume that it doesn't need to be pixel perfect (no gradients, shadows or rounded corners)

Losing pointless graphic-design fluff like that seems more of an advantage to me than otherwise. Maybe I'll start using IE8, thanks for the tip.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Tom]

Hmm -- you must not be billing by the hour. It isn't your fault that you are transferring more of the wealth of your clients into your own pockets...

I was talking about the macro-economy. Your billing argument is a micro-economy view and totally besides the point. It's not wrong, it's worse than wrong.

Unfortunately, everyone doesn't have the ability to make a choice as to their browsers -- corporate policies are fairly pedantic (and idiotic - in all senses of the word)

Agreed. I maintain my point: Fuck them, let them feel the full impact of their stupid decision, it'll cause them to make better decisions next time.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Vanderhoth]

We realize that. This is all just politics.
My organization is huge there are dozens of branches with drastically diverse functions. The thing is the security group belongs to the Technology Services (TS) Branch. TS also stands for Tough Shit, which is what they say when anyone in the organization wants to do something innovative. Our group belongs to the Science Branch. TS also has a web development group and a software development group, but other groups in the science branch come to our group for data analysis and management and application development. Mainly because TS is a huge group with no people on site. With all their bureaucracy they act as more of a road block, making it difficult for researches and scientists in the science branch to do their jobs.

My understanding is this feud has been going on for a couple decades now, long before I worked here. At one point my group was part of TS, but they decided the group wasn't cost effective so they cut it loose. Science Branch needed a group to develop tools to help analyze and manage data so they absorbed our group. Without being tethered to the TS branch and not having to deal with the bureaucracy and blot that comes with it our group did really well and started turning profit. Our group expanded and has been taking over other areas such as Networks, Databases, even designing and programming sensors. We're still not even one tenth the size of TS, which is suppose to manage all technology in the organization, but they're losing even more money because other groups, some outside of Science Branch, are coming to our group to get things done that TS has told them they won't do. Of course now because our group is making money TS wants to reabsorb us, but there's no way in hell Science Branch is letting us go because they'll go back to the way things were when there was no competition and TS held all the cards. Instead TS is playing tricks to make things difficult for us, at which point they're hoping our "shared" clients become their clients.

Back when the organization first rolled out WinXP the TS Branch tried this same security lock down trick, but ended up with a lot of push back. Some groups went as far as buying their own machines, software and put their own network infrastructure in place. Apparently it was a huge mess and took years to clean up. There are still external drives sitting around in peoples offices with massive amounts of data sitting on them, which might as well be considered lost since the only people that know the data is there are the people that sit behind the office door.

Regardless of what TS does my group will do what it always has and find a way around the restrictions. All TS is doing is hurting themselves as more and more of their clients will become "shared" clients with us or other groups in other branches that are similar to us.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[thirdender]

80% will work fine if you:

• Support only IE9+, or
• Ignore CSS3 linear-gradients (the MS filters are too buggy and slow to be used in IE)
• Rely on jQuery or some other Javascript library for all your DOM manipulation needs
• Use a Javascript library or custom code for your JavaScript 1.6+ needs (did you realize Array.indexOf wasn't in JS until 1.6?)
• Don't try to use display: inline-block; without IE specific hacks
• Don't use :before or :after psuedo-elements, or :(first|last)-child selectors without ie7-js
• Don't use display: table-cell; (even though some developers still do, and for the life of me I haven't found a suitable analog or shim)

If you're skipping out on all that, then yeah, sure, 80% of what you do will work fine in IE, no problem. If you try to do more than that, you will be fighting an uphill battle to make your site work properly in IE.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[locopuyo]

Try coding an html email for MS Outlook if you want a real bastardization of standards.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[dave87656]

Yes! I've been using Linux for years. I do have a Windows 7 laptop but it's collecting dust, probably the safest way to use it.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[KingMotley]

You can't use RGBA colors in IE 8, as well as some of the more interesting selectors (:empty, :disabled, :first-of-type, :last-child, :not, etc etc), opacity, text-shadow, animations, transitions, columns, box-shadow, etc.

Most of those can be worked around easily, or use something as a fallback. Some are a pain to not have.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Johann Lau]

What's your point? I know what Jquery is...what's more, I also know that manipulating the DOM after the fact isn't exclusive to JQuery at all. That's just plain fucking Javascript, JQuery merely offers some shorthands. So yeah. JQuery. And the people who use it mindlessly, clueless as they are.... thanks for pointing that out, not that's news... but notice that the flag still doesn't do anything. Just saying "JQuery" doesn't change that.

Do you know what network traffic is? Or do you just know that with JQuery, stuff may not be what it seems -- unlike Javascript! JQuery can do that, Javascript can't -- so whatever you want to be reality, you get to make up?

JQuery. *groans*

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Johann Lau]

Nah. I like Javascript. With a decent browsers coding to specs, it's fun. I don't want or want to wrap and convolute that, and ultimately miss out on actually learning Javascript, just to display bling to people who use IE, or write $ instead of QuerySelectorAll (IF I wanted that, I'd write my own with the things I actually use, instead of having *everything* in there "just in case"). I know it's the rage, but that is why the world doesn't need me to do it, too. Too many fuckwits use it mindlessly for *everything*. Kinda like peope who use IE. It's a perfect fit -- and I'm happy somewhere completely unrelated to all of that.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[spiralx]

*sigh* The action for the flag is bound to the flag using jQuery, rather than hard-coded in the DOM element.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Johann Lau]

Only it isn't.

So that answers wether you know about network traffic. And it's also not something that couldn't be done with simple Javascript, so you harp on about jQuery why, exactly? Also, explain why "onlick=return false" is even necessary for any of it. it could just be a plain a tag without href, and javascript (or jquery, for the jQuery monkeys) would be able to hook it up to an action regardless. It's just that when they disabled the flag, they put the "onlick=return false" there.

"'jQuery', he mumbled". Well stop mumbling, either make with the argument (and the CODE), or shut the fuck up already. Show me the code that hooks the flag up to an action, because it surely doesn't in Opera (network traffic! do you speak it?!). You know, it's just not there. You operate on assumptions and jQuery of all fucking things. Bye.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[_0xd0ad]

Only it isn't. ...

"'jQuery', he mumbled". Well stop mumbling, either make with the argument (and the CODE), or shut the fuck up already. Show me the code that hooks the flag up to an action ... it's just not there.

Yes it is. Right here in the script.

jQuery(document).ready(
    function(){
        $('.commentSub .ui-icon.flag').live('click',
            function(fe){
                if($('#flag_comment').length>0){
                    $('#flag_comment').remove();
                }
                $(this).parent().append('<form id="flag_comment"><input type="hidden" name="comment" value="'+this.id+'"><input type="button" class="s" value="Report" disabled="disabled" onclick="reportCommentAbuse();"><input type="text" name="reason" class="t" placeholder="Specify reason" ></form>').parent().parent().addClass('flag-in');
                $('input[name=reason]').focus();
            }
        );
        $(".comment").hover(function(){},
            function(){
                if($(this).hasClass('flag-in')){
                    $('#flag_comment').remove();
                    $(this).removeClass('flag-in');
                }
            }
        );
        $("input[name=reason]").live('keypress',
            function(kp){
                var code=(kp.keyCode?kp.keyCode:kp.which);
                if(code==13){
                    $(this).prev().trigger('click');
                    kp.preventDefault();
                }
            }
        );
        $("#flag_comment .t").live('keyup',
            function(data){
                if($(this).val()!=""){
                    $("#flag_comment .s").removeAttr("disabled");
                }else{
                    $("#flag_comment .s").attr("disabled","disabled");
                }
            }
        );
    }
);
function reportCommentAbuse(){
    ajax_update(
        {
            op:'reportCommentAbuse',
            comment:$("#flag_comment input[name=comment]").val(),
            reason:$("#flag_comment input[name=reason]").val()
        },
        '',
        {
            onComplete:function(){
                Slash.busy('modal-fetch',false);
                $("#flag_comment").hide();
            }
        }
    );
    return false;
}

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[spiralx]

Thank you :)

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Johann Lau]

Ooops, turns out it's broken just in Opera ^^

It's not like I looked at the source and deducted the flag doesn't work because of "onclick return false;". I simply tried to report my own post; nada. I *think* it used to work, not sure -- I'm sure it hasn't worked with Opera for ages now.

So the answer "it's done via jQuery" is just as stupid as my assumption that because it's broken in Opera it must have been disabled.... it's not that I got confused because it's done via jQuery, and jQuery is so magical --- it's simply broken in Opera. I'm still a fool, but hey, hahaha jQuery.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[_0xd0ad]

I tested it in Opera before I posted my comment. Same effect as you: nothing happens.

Probably this bug.

Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages

[Tohuw]

Where did you get the idea that I meant jQuery shouldn't be used, or that quality, responsive interfaces aren't ideal? I was lightheartedly chastising the sites that go overboard with nonsense, poorly-constructed Javascript that causes cross-browser compliance issues. Instances of this abound, search around and you'll find them. There is using a tool, then there is whizzing on the rug like a poorly trained Weimaraner. Choose wisely, web developers.

Useless

[vlm]

I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though

Boring pixel perfect rendering to make the artists happy. Blah. At least I know they're putting most of their effort into how it looks; I will have no use for it, and can avoid it.

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.

Re:Useless

[billcopc]

In my experience, tacking IE7 support onto a modern web site adds up to 15% to the total cost. Call me jaded, but I don't expect this Huddlers thing to be all that complex, certainly not enough to justify a $100k premium for IE support. So maybe they pulled a number out of their ass to look important and draw attention, or they're projecting that $100k over several years of development. Either way, it's a load of bullshit.

More importantly, how much business are they losing over that $100k "savings" ? I don't put in extreme effort to support IE, but then again I usually don't need to. It's pretty easy, as long as you're not shooting for 100% pixel accuracy - which is a dumb goal anyway, regardless of browser preference. That 15% figure I mentioned earlier, that's a worst-case scenario, meaning everything's messed up and I need to spit out completely different HTML for IE. Most of the time, all that's needed is a conditional stylesheet and a Javascript shim.

Re:Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though

Boring pixel perfect rendering to make the artists happy. Blah.

This. So very this. I'm involved in a web project right now where both IE support AND pixel-perfect rendering are apparently vital (it took us about a month to convince the spec designers of the concept of "your fonts are not the user's fonts" and "Illustrator is NOT a web design tool"). We're actually expected to maintain pixel-perfectness in an automated testing environment. Seriously, half our development time has been wasted trying to figure out how to test this with an art department breathing down our necks with pixel-measuring tools for a web application.

So you can see why I posted anonymously.

Re:Useless

[AmiMoJo]

Remember when people used to make the entire page one giant image with clickable areas, just to get pixel perfect rendering in every browser?

Re:Useless

[n5vb]

And the original concept of the Web was specifically not intended to do pixel-perfect rendering of anything. HTML was specifically designed to mark up flexibly depending on the dimensions of the window space, and use local fonts on the client rather than supply fonts from server side, so getting pixel perfect rendering of a site is essentially fighting a whole pile of client-side unknowns that may vary widely even between instances of the same browser rendering engine that are doing exactly what they were designed to do based on the HTML spec (although because everyone wants their site to "pop" and grab viewers' attention and all that other marketing BS, the spec itself is now starting to drift toward pleasing high-end art departments .. ::eyeroll::)

And remember that JavaScript was originally part of MS' "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy, and the open standard it evolved into differs subtly from the version MS still implements in IE. (And that aspect of IE integration can be a massive rectal pain loaded with horrendously screwy little gotchas.) So if you do anything major on client-side, including pretty much anything even vaguely resembling Ajax, you're stuck with two parallel development/testing cycles, one for IE, one for pretty much everything else. I actually abandoned IE support on one site I was building because I just didn't have the time to mess with it.

Re:Useless

[hobarrera]

Or even worse; one big flash covering the entire page/website.

Re:Useless

[jellomizer]

I worked at a start up. We followed this policy.

We support Chrome/Firefox/IE using the latest versions.
The non-latest versions we just made sure the application worked. If graphics were a bit off, or the eye candy didn't work, no big deal.

This policy seemed to help much with development. Because we are not spinning our wheels in getting old IE to work perfectly. Saving development time. What usually hurts these companies is trying to fully support older browsers while putting in the new features.

Re:Useless

[MaWeiTao]

Just because you can't be bothered to get every pixel just right doesn't mean it's not important. Those differences you consider irrelevant often make the difference between having a site that looks professional and intuitive and one that doesn't.

Being on the other side of this, as a designer, it's immensely frustrating to deal with developers who can't get things right. I'm not just talking about being pixel perfect, I mean being in the general ballpark. I'm not one to harass developers about every last pixel, but it's outrageous how sloppy these guys sometimes are.

I mean, I do a bit of my own development occasionally, and trying to follow best practices and keeping my code clean I can reproduce what I had in Photoshop almost exactly. So someone who's expertise this is can't do the same. And the fact is that I have worked with developers who are meticulous and do get things right. But those guys are few and far between. The rest, like most people, do just enough to get by, but then bitch when being given a hard time.

I will also agree that many, if not most, designers have no sensitivity towards the web. They produce work that is impractical and have unrealistic expectations for development. So it does go both ways. But then that's what education is for, inform the designer what works and what doesn't. It's something I try to do, although I admit it encounter a lot of stubbornness.

The IE limitation is for the backend, not the site itself. The actual site looks like they took something off the shelf and put minimal effort into customizing. So this is not a case of a demanding designer, by any stretch of the imagination. Judging from the design I don't expect much from this startup. Looks like a me-too kind of site.

Re:Useless

[jellomizer]

Back for the original concept of the web, was for educational documents where you can click and go to the source. During that time, while windows was getting traction, the GUI UI was considered a quick fad, and the Web was more focused on text. But over time, you added Pictures, and more advanced font handling. Then server side processing of data came into play, so they put in forms. Then they realized that Client side processing may be handy so they put in Javascript, and CSS for more detailed control of the experience.

I don't like the idea of a Purest, lets go with the original design. That is the quick way to being obsolete very quickly.

Re:Useless

[mcgrew]

Attempting pixel-perfect rendering on a web page is ignorant, especially today when so many get their internet on a phone. There's no possible way to know the user's screen's orientation, aspect ratio, size, or resolution. It's not going to look the same on your kindle as it is on your computer.

Blah. At least I know they're putting most of their effort into how it looks; I will have no use for it, and can avoid it.

Indeed. Content is king, how pretty the page is is secondary.

Re:Useless

[IntlHarvester]

In my experience, tacking IE7 support onto a modern web site adds up to 15% to the total cost.

I usually estimate it at around 20%, but that assumes minimal javascript and an experienced webdev crew. (Anyone who's been in the business for a while hates IE to the extent they know how kick its ass sideways. If you're hiring kids out of college, on the other hand, it could easily double your costs.)

IIRC, they posted their metrics and half their users were on Macs. I wouldn't worry too hard about IE in their situation either.

Re:Useless

[mcgrew]

I was completely with you until "And remember that JavaScript was originally part of MS' 'embrace, extend, extinguish strategy" (unless you're referring to MS jscript).

JavaScript was originally developed in Netscape, by Brendan Eich. Battling with Microsoft over the Internet, Netscape considered their client-server solution as a distributed OS, running a portable version of Sun Microsystem's Java. Because Java was a competitor of C++ and aimed at professional programmers, Netscape also wanted a lightweight interpreted language that would complement Java by appealing to nonprofessional programmers, like Microsoft's VB.[9] (see JavaScript and Java)

Developed under the name Mocha, LiveScript was the official name for the language when it first shipped in beta releases of Netscape Navigator 2.0 in September 1995, but it was renamed JavaScript in a joint announcement with Sun Microsystems on December 4, 1995,[10] when it was deployed in the Netscape browser version 2.0B3.[11]

The change of name from LiveScript to JavaScript roughly coincided with Netscape adding support for Java technology in its Netscape Navigator web browser. The final choice of name caused confusion, giving the impression that the language was a spin-off of the Java programming language, and the choice has been characterized by many as a marketing ploy by Netscape to give JavaScript the cachet of what was then the hot new web programming language.[12][13] It has also been claimed that the language's name is the result of a co-marketing deal between Netscape and Sun, in exchange for Netscape bundling Sun's Java runtime with its then-dominant browser.

JavaScript very quickly gained widespread success as a client-side scripting language for web pages. Microsoft introduced JavaScript support in its own web browser, Internet Explorer, in version 3.0, released in August 1996.[18][not in citation given] Microsoft's webserver, Internet Information Server, introduced support for server-side scripting in JavaScript with release 3.0 (1996). Microsoft started to promote webpage scripting using the umbrella term Dynamic HTML.

Microsoft's JavaScript implementation was later renamed to JScript to avoid trademark issues. JScript added new date methods to fix the Y2K-problematic methods in JavaScript, which were based on Java's java.util.Date class.

Re:Useless

[gbjbaanb]

which is fine, but things change and now people (ie graphic designers and users) want a bit more than large banks of text. I think the system should start using a few design features from old desktop publishing systems, which might make working with HTML a lot easier, and make web pages easier to look like the designer wants.

Of course, if you can persuade the entire internet users to accept that the web is not the equivalent of paper magazine layouts, good luck to you.

Re:Useless

[Tom]

I agree that pixel-perfect is crazy, but most of us geeks do ourselves a disservice by not taking the importance of design as seriously as we should.

I definitely want my web stuff to look as similar as possible on all kinds of devices. I hate it when some browser doesn't support some feature I need and displays totally different. Because there's actual thought going into my designs, it's not just eye-candy. Losing parts of the design is pretty much the same as using parts of the functionality.

Re:Useless

[LucasBC]

And the original concept of the Web was specifically not intended to do pixel-perfect rendering of anything

Sadly, so many graphic designers, advertising agencies and customer executives view this as limitation of the web rather than a deliberate decision. They still approach it like a print medium. "When are they going to fix it?", they ask me. Trying to explain how this is supposed to work has been an up-hill battle for me for the entire 17 years I've been in this business. Heck, I still get designers/customers asking me to "fit it all on one screen so there's no scrolling".

Re:Useless

[billcopc]

Well yeah, that's the thing. Most of us have enough experience that even while pounding out the first skeleton templates, we have a pretty good sense of where IE will stumble. I'd even say that I compensate for IE from the very start of the project, in such a subconscious manner that only a handful of minor fixes are required during debugging. You get used to it and you adapt your practices in a way that minimizes the pain of cross-browser testing. Plus, these days we have a bunch of heavy but useful Javascripts to palliate those shortcomings.

Re:imho

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Yes on (a) no on (b).

IE, with the possible exception of the waning days of netscape, has been a pox on the internet. However, that said, any flavor of 'BEST IF VIEWED ON', be it IE6, or something technically superior, is the real pox upon the internet...

Skeptical

[Bill_the_Engineer]

I'm no fan of IE, but I'm skeptical of the $100,000 savings. Of course if I chose to hire one guy to do nothing but support a single browser then that would easily account for the money saved, but who in their right mind would do that?

Also the lack of complaints about incompatibility could be an indication of how all the major web browsers are finally converging on the HTML standard.

It's almost as if he went to the local library and read a book from the 90's about web development.

Re:Skeptical

[hackula]

I agree. Browser compatibility is rarely any sort of major issue. Sure, it is a PITA to deal with, but it is usually one or two tiny little formatting issues per page that take 10 minutes to test and fix. If you are not relying on the dark corners of any of the browser specs and write generally standards compliant code, this really should not be a 100,000 dollar problem for all but the largest of sites (some social networking site nobody has ever heard of does not qualify).

Re:Skeptical

[exomondo]

I'm no fan of IE, but I'm skeptical of the $100,000 savings.

I'm more skeptical because the website seems to work fine in IE9, not sure what that $100,000 is even for.

Does it filter the browser ID?

[Anonymous Coward]

That would be a mistake as IE becomes more and more compliant.

Re:Does it filter the browser ID?

[SJHillman]

This has been the main reason people complain about Opera - sites redirect Opera users to a page bitching to download IE or Firefox without giving the option to proceed with Opera. It's easy to circumvent, but still very annoying. I'm fine with sites that give you the warning that it hasn't been tested in your browser as long as there's an option to "Proceed Anyway".

Re:imho

[SJHillman]

I haven't had any issues with IE8 or IE9 that isn't present in any of the other major browsers. Even IE7 was decent when it first came out. It's not my browser of choice, but it competes with Chrome for the #2 spot. No browser is "superior in every single way" - each one has its strengths and weaknesses. I prefer Opera for the bulk of my day-to-day browsing, IE for certain types of interactive content and Chrome for speed on media-heavy sites (mostly Netflix and Pandora). I only have Firefox and Safari installed for testing my websites and they get no use otherwise.

I'd like to complain

[Eirenarch]

I'd like to complain that /. does not work well (hides part of comments) in IE. /. will probably claim that no one is complaining but here I am. So are you going to fix it now?

Re:I'd like to complain

[jones_supa]

I every now and then see a bug (or maybe it's my score settings?) where I can see a comment, but its child is missing, and then immediately after comes the grandchild comment (with proper two levels of indentation). So a comment disappears in between. This with all browsers.

Re:I'd like to complain

[Eirenarch]

No, it's some IE specific issue that cuts longer comments in the middle and hides the reply link. I sometimes log in with Opera to post comments but most often decide to skip commenting. While /. may not care for this in particular I have dropped several sites I intended to spend money on for not supporting my browser of choice. For example playhem.com . I make sure to tell them they suck though ( http://feedback.playhem.com/forums/130623-ideas-improvements/suggestions/2577693-internet-explorer-support )

The other day I decided to test the c9.io and to my surprise it did not work not only in IE but in Opera as well. I don't have any other browsers on my laptop so the test kind of failed.

Re:I'd like to complain

[Anonymous Coward]

While we're bitching: The sliders that control what comments are displayed do not work on any Android or WebOS browser.

Re:I'd like to complain

[paimin]

They're saving $100,000, didn't you RTFS?

Re:I'd like to complain

[jones_supa]

Actually, I was talking about a separate issue when I replied.

Webkit

[hackus]

I would target the latest version of webkit.

IE:

1) Developer tools
2) Server software
3) Desktop Software
4) Virus Checking your updates from Microsoft/MSDN
5) Specific time for setup, maintain IE development environment. (Server, Desktop, Tools)
6) Debug time for IE specific stuff and Development

And of course all the licensing BS costs.

I can see lots of reason to dump IE altogether and just target webkit.

-Hack

Re:Webkit

[Anonymous Coward]

I can see lots of reason to dump IE altogether and just target webkit.

Right, because a mono-culture is exactly what the world needs. Just stop being lazy. If you want to run a successful website you support the browsers that are in common usage.

Re:Webkit

[Gr8Apes]

Just write to the standards. WebKit happens to support them, as do several other browsers. The one left in the cold? IE.

Re:Webkit

[JDG1980]

The current "target WebKit" movement happening is not about just supporting standards, people are increasingly using webkit specific prefixes and other tricks

Then those prefixes and tricks will become de facto standards and other browsers will eventually implement them. If the W3C wants to sit around for years on end doing nothing, the web won't stand still waiting for them to finish.

Re:Webkit

[Jesus_666]

1. Web developers who were apparently born after 1998 decide that "optimized for WebKit" is the way to go.
2. Other engines pretend to be WebKit in order to work with the standards-incompatible websites designed by the "WebKit only" people.
3. Congratulations, we're back in 1998 where you have to do arcane browser-sniffing hacks because more reliable methods of distinguishing between engines (like vendor prefixes) were made useless.

If you have such an aversion to writing '-moz-', '-o-' and '-ms-' then just use SASS/Compass and let that handle your CSS. One nice advantage is that Compass doesn't come with mixins for extremely nonstandard stuff so you can be reasonably certain that your website will actually work outside your beloved WebKit.

Or, of course, you can just pretend that it's 1998 and WebKit is the new IE 6.

IE is far from as terrible it used to be.

[thomthom]

As of version 9, IE isn't that awful any more. I didn't have to do anything special for IE) when it came out - the sites looked like they did in Firefox, Opera Webkit etc - finally using the nice CSS3 features. The design is built on adaptive degrading so the newer the browser the prettier it looks. And it gets even better with IE10. For the most part, IE9+ just works. It's becoming less of a pain. The new pain is the various HTML5. CSS3 support that varies greatly among the whole browser-spectrum. (Though, not surprisingly considering the are note complete.)

Re:Here's the memo the interviewees missed

[SJHillman]

You obviously haven't spent much time on Slashdot or Facebook.

Not that I'm skeptical or anything....

[Toreo asesino]

....ah sod it, I'm calling BS on this. Back in the days of IE6 & 7, maintaining cross-browser compatability was a nightmare. Now not really - IE renders as well as any other browser, and there's not a single one that doesn't have it's own quirks in some form or other.

Re:Not that I'm skeptical or anything....

[Fosterocalypse]

I second that BS calling. Or I am developing web pages and apps for the wrong people

Re:Not that I'm skeptical or anything....

[Tom]

No, it doesn't.

Granted, every release of IE seems to finally bring it in line and make it play nicer with the other children, but IE is still the odd one out in many, many more cases than everyone else and probably more than everyone else combined. MS just has this "not invented here" fixation and insists on doing a ton of things differently than everyone else.

I've spent many, many hours working around IE quirks, and that was after declaring that IE6 will be completely unsupported and I don't really care all that much about IE7 as long as most of it barely works.

For something reasonably complex in both logic and presentation, I can easily imagine a cost of several ten-thousand bucks, if you count in overhead and all other expenses. 100k seems high, but not totally off.

Re:Not that I'm skeptical or anything....

[sexconker]

IE9 has given me infinitely less trouble than Chrome and FF.
And I CAN point to specific examples.

Chrome will have a conniption fit if you specify a file name with a comma in a header. We serve up PDFs and have to pass the file name through so when a user saves it they get it saved with the intended name. IE and FF will happily eat the commas while Chrome thinks the comma signifies an additional header and cries in the corner with some vague mumblings about a potential security issue.

On a Tuesday, Chrome will take a massive shit if you implement a PDF in an IFRAME on one side of the page and HTML content in an IFRAME on the other side of the page. We use this setup so users see a document and can see/edit its metadata at the same time. This occurs whether or not we use Chrome's built-in PDF shit or Adobe Reader. It worked on Monday but then Chrome updated random shit that caused it to break. It'll be fixed again on Thursday and broken again shortly after.

Even when it works it doesn't work. Both FF and Chrome will have the PDF IFRAME hijack all input. Can't scroll up/down or type into text fields in the metadata input because all your inputs get locked to the PDF IFRAME. This is likely an Adobe Reader issue, but it's fine in IE. Click once in IE and you have focus where you want it. In FF and Chrome it's a voodoo ritual to reclaim focus. Tab, arrow, click, click on the browser's address bar then back into the content, etc. like a spastic clown until shit starts to behave.

My code validates perfectly.

Re:imho

[Keeper Of Keys]

Did you know that really.__anything__() can be written as anything(really) ?

Right. Sure.

[Sycraft-fu]

Sounds more like they are either making shit up to try and get new bites for advertising (my bet) or they suck at design.

While you do encounter some differences with browsers, you don't encounter the level of differences that would require $100k of work to fix unless you either suck or are doing something supremely stupid with your design.

Certainly a mark against your product if I'm evaluating it. I don't use IE, but any time you are telling me that I have to use browser X or can't use browser Y all I can think is you suck at design work. The stuff I use works fine in everything. No, it doesn't always look 100% the same, but it works. My web host has a fairly involved backend for all their various management features and it'll work in all browsers.

Part of it is just not getting too stupid with HTML 5. Yes it is neat and all however it doesn't all work. All the browsers have issues with it in one form or another so maybe leave off all the crazy features for a bit. My favourite example is the HTML5 Angry Birds. It says works best in Chrome, which isn't a good sign that it should matter. It does run well in Chrome, but seems to blow Chrome up from time to time. IE is stable with it and all the features work but the rendering is a little slower. Can't seem to maintain a solid 60fps. Firefox has fast rendering and doesn't seem to have stability issues, but has no sound.

With a bit of smarts about the design, supporting all browsers is not a herculean feat. Our web guy (there's only one) manages it just fine.

Re:Right. Sure.

[rsborg]

Sounds more like they are either making shit up to try and get new bites for advertising (my bet) or they suck at design.

No, but they are realistic - I'd say as a customer, if you want IE support, that's a *feature*, and it will cost you - heavily. Trimming that "option" should reduce your costs and delivery time.

Re:Right. Sure.

[Sycraft-fu]

Except as someone else confirmed, their site works fine in IE if you tell it to lie about what browser it is to bypass their block page. Go read through the Slashdot comments. So they are full of shit. It is either pure zealotry, or marketing (I'm betting marketing).

And hey, if you want to tell me "IE support costs extra," I'll say "Ok no problem, I'll remove you from the bid list." When I'm drawing up a list of companies for work that we are going to look as potentials for a solution, failure to support what we want and/or stupid shit will get you knocked off the list, we'll just go on to others.

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:It's shennanigans

[DoofusOfDeath]

The company is 4ormat, not Huddles

I'm really surprised they chose that name. I mean, who wants to pronounce "four-ormat"?

Re:It's shennanigans

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

4ormat? How is that pronounced? Forormat?

It sounds high but ...

[Anonymous Coward]

The most expensive part of software is debugging and maintenance. [Actually ... its the most expensive time to make changes] But discovering IE version specific bugs is a giant PITA which occasionally involves heavier UI refactoring and therefore regression testing. In a nice sized team where you have dedicated developers, qa team, etc. Each simple bug is still and "expensive" proposition considering the time to track and properly QA it.
 

Bullshit all-round

[magic maverick]

$100,000 to support MSIE? Bullshit. Unless they are supporting MSIE 6 or 5.5 there is no way it would cost that much to support MSIE. Even if they are supporting backwards and ancient browsers like those, it still shouldn't cost that much unless they are aiming for the website to look exactly the same on every possible browser.

Also, the whole thing is an ad. There have been a number of start-ups that have gone on about how they don't support MSIE. Some of these block anything with an MSIE user-agent (and then the site works fine in MSIE 9 with a different user-agent), and some use MSIE conditional comments (which won't work on MSIE 10). Both ways are, a bit, well crap. Unless you explicitly test in those browsers and find that things seriously break, you shouldn't not block them. Hell, who blocks Lynx (and similar)? Even though Lynx (et al.) don't support fancy CSS, images, JS or similar.

The sensible, and correct, way of doing things is to say, "we don't support MSIE (or any other browser explicitly), but because we build to the standards, any standards compliant browser should work well". And also make your site degrade gracefully (that is, continue to present content even to inferior or older browsers, or to browsers without JS, and/or without images, and/or without CSS).

So, basically, this whole thing is a stunt by the start-up in question, and they deserve no press because of it.

Re:Bullshit all-round

[tgd]

Well, to be fair, it can cost a lot of money to support all the browsers if you have lousy developers. Its easy to write code the right way the first time, but if you write it the wrong way, it costs a lot of money to keep twiddling with things.

Replacing their developers with people who have better knowledge/skills would be cheaper than throwing $100k at a problem that shouldn't have existed to begin with.

Re:Bullshit all-round

[CastrTroy]

Depends on the size of the project. $100,000 is basically 1 person year. If you have a development team of 10 people, and it takes them 1 year to do the project, then 10% of their time is dealing with IE specific problems. That may seem like a lot of time to spend on IE, but depending on how UI dependant your site is, I could easily see that happening. If you're trying to build a really rich web UI with lots of Javascript and CSS3, then IE can be a real pain. But if you stick with HTML4 type stuff, with standard forms and a basic layout, then IE doesn't really get in your way at all.

Just curious

[bbbaldie]

I couldn't find a link to the site anywhere, did they abandon the alt tag for images and go with title? AFAIK, "alt" is strictly an IE thing.

Re:Just curious

[cdrudge]

The alt attribute is strictly an IE thing? No. It's part of the HTML5 standard as well as XHTML. The title attribute should be used for captioning an image, while the alt attribute should be descriptive of the image. The end goal is the alt tag should not provide additional, nor leave out information whether the images are displayed nor not. The meaning of the page should not change.

Re:Just curious

[Eirenarch]

And this demonstrates the problem with the HTML standard - 99% of the developers have NEVER read a single sentence out of it (having read several pages it is hard to blame them). They just assume what firefox/chrome/opera or whatever their browser of choice is IS the standard. After all we all know only IE does not follow the standard. When IE8 came out people were screaming left and right why their alt text is not shown as title. All other browsers support alt text on hover so obviously IE is not following the standard. Funny thing in this case IE8 fixed a bug in all previous IEs because alt text should NOT be displayed as title even if no title is available. But people don't read the standard :)

Re:Just curious

[bbbaldie]

Thanks. Like the reader below stated, I've never had time to pore through the standards, I just know that Firefox seems to ignore the alt tag. OK, not IGNORE it, but it doesn't present its content as a balloon.

Re:Just curious

[sudonymous]

The short answer is: Nobody should be abandoning "alt" - it's required for compatibility and accessibility.

"title", if it is provided, is just a snippet of extra text that relates to the image. It should not be redundant to the image itself. Browsers which can display the image should also have some way to display its title (usually when the mouse is hovered over it). In fact, "title" is not specific to the img tag. Many HTML elements can have a title attribute.

"alt" is the alternate text, to be shown by browsers which can't display the image (search engine robots, braille displays, screen reading software). It should be redundant to the image itself. Browser which can display images can simply display the image and ignore the alt text.

Note that IE7 and previous versions of IE incorrectly displayed the "alt" text as a tooltip. That is incorrect. The "title" should be a tooltip, "alt" should not.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_attribute

Yes, it's true, they saved $100k

[Hermanas]

Although not $100k in IE-specific development; They saved $100k in advertising for their PR stunt, because now they get tons of free PR from all over.

Re:imho

[billcopc]

Have you even used IE8 or 9 ? Safari/WebKit is quite nice, though I prefer Firefox, but I really cannot dump on IE like we used to. IE9 tends to work fine with the vast majority of my sites. When I have to add IE-specific fixes, they are for IE7. IE8 is missing some CSS3 stuff, but is usually pretty close.

As a web developer in 2012, I really don't mind any current browser. They have all come a long way, and if I'm not targeting older browsers, I hardly ever need to do any tweaking at all. I can develop with any of those browsers and the result will be near-identical across the board. To hate on any of them is a display of ignorance.

Article is wrong; no IE support on the ADMIN pages

[Aphrika]

The story here misses out one key piece of information; that just the administration pages don't work on IE. The sites they're creating with said admin system work fine on IE. The company explicitly points this out - go here and click the sign up button: http://4ormat.com/

Now, that's not such a big deal and nobody's going to complain because they can easily get the thing working by downloading another free browser. .

I'v done the same thing in the past, and also the exact opposite - making an admin interface that only works in IE. It's not a big deal, and in most cases it's the norm for intranet-style sites. That said, if someone reads this, runs out and decides to make their public-facing site IE-unfriendly, thinking they'll save $100,000, then they're nuts...

IE can just be a pain...

[rrossman2]

On my internship I had to convert a flash site over to just HTML keeping the same format etc (using flash can cause a screen reader to have issues which could have brought a ADA lawsuit).

Anyhow, to make the menu list they had on the left side I just used one type of div for the buttons, and another div to act as a spacer between the buttons. While every other browser like opera, firefox, chrome, safari, etc handled the spacer div size via CSS correctly, IE (versions 6, 7, and 8) would completely ignore the CSS height size of the spacer div, making the menu take over a page and a half of scrolling for something that should only have been half a page.

Re:IE can just be a pain...

[sudonymous]

You have to specify overflow="hidden" to force IE to make divs with heights smaller than 1 line of text. Luckily, that particular fix doesn't break compatibility with other browsers, either.

Re:IE can just be a pain...

[sudonymous]

Then again - maybe not. I think it has to have a certain position style, too. Not sure. I at least know that in IE an absolutely-positioned div with specified heights and widths will be a minimum height if you don't set the overflow property. Firefox and Opera don't need an overflow property if there is an explicit height specified.

Re:Article is wrong; no IE support on the ADMIN pa

[Lumpy]

You would have to code like a moron to make it IE unfriendly.

Code to HTML standards and you will be fine. Not everything has to be WEB 4.0Beta with fricking blinking beeping and sliding crap everywhere. In fact most sites that are crap embrace all that garbage. Look at how much slower Slashdot became when they added in all that garbage that really was not needed.

Why would supporting IE costs extra at all?

[assertation]

Why would supporting IE cost extra and especially $100,000?

Just follow w3.org standards and test in a standards compliant browser.

The latest IEs support the standards and since they are not a bank or a government org they don't have to worry about supporting earlier versions of IE.

Re:Why would supporting IE costs extra at all?

[hackula]

they don't have to worry about supporting earlier versions of IE.

I think this is pretty debatable. Most sites for general public use should probably work in some form for ie7 and ie8. For most, there is probably still enough market share there to justify the effort.

Re:Why would supporting IE costs extra at all?

[assertation]

I think this is pretty debatable. Most sites for general public use should probably work in some form for ie7 and ie8. For most, there is probably still enough market share there to justify the effort.

I think the only people left using the dreaded IE 6 are orgs who built webapps hardcoded to it and maybe a few people with very ancient computers. The first group is not really relevant to the kind of site the startup is making ( and they likely have modern machines where other modern browsers are likely installed ).

Re:Why would supporting IE costs extra at all?

[tepples]

I understand not taking hours to troubleshoot problems on IE 6 and 7, but Windows XP won't run any IE newer than 8.

Re:Why would supporting IE costs extra at all?

[LingNoi]

It's also deprecated by Microsoft. If Microsoft aren't supporting why are you? You're talking about traffic levels from places like south east asia that use pirated windows copies. For most people these aren't ever going to be visitors so why bother?

The trend shows IE 7 and 8 dropping by 1/2% each month. So the work you're putting into IE 7/8 now is becoming more worthless every month. If you're developing something that's going to take 6 months to a year don't even bother because IE 7/8 won't be used by the time you finished.

I'd like to note that the article misses the point

[dskzero]

The entire point about IE still plaguing the world is not that web developers need to support it, it's that old software can only run in that browser (and that means IE6). The new IE is actually pretty good, and this article is rubbish. Then again, it's /. MICROSOFT BASHING FRONT PAGE

Re:imho

[Kjella]

To be honest, I'd not have a big problem with Webkit becoming the reference implementation for HTML. For one it's trying pretty hard to stick to the standard and if all else fails you can look at the code to see what the hell it's doing. Comparing that to IEs black box layout where I've been doing pixel-by-pixel adjustments waiting for the one pixel to turn my entire layout into monkey barf isn't even on the same planet. As long as they don't fall into the "yeah this is wrong but we can't fix it because that'd break too many sites" crap. Fix it and the crappy web developers who've relied on buggy and incorrect behavior will have to fix their shit, I don't have a problem with that.

Re:imho

[dskzero]

I have no idea why would anyone use Safari over Chrome or Opera. That said, I agree with you and it's a major point: IE9 is a good browser. It's just inferior. It's definitely better than Firefox nowadays.

Not Huddlers, and not a business app

[optimism]

TFS talks about the "huddlers" website, which was absolutely nothing to do with this topic. TFA mentions (briefly) that the artist-portfolio site 4ormat skipped IE support. What the hell? Do the editors here not even bother to skim the articles they post?

Anyway, it ain't a business app. If you create web apps for the "enterprise market", you absolutely positively need to support IE. Often back to IE6, yes, even today. I don't like it, but that's just the way it works in big business. Platform shift is veeery slow when a business has tens of millions of customers, partners, and employees who rely on a particular application.

Anyway I don't understand the $100K savings. Come on, what startup is dumb enough to write directly to the browser in HTML & CSS? There are tons of AJAX/DHTML libraries that hide all of the differences across browsers and browser versions. smartclient.com and extjs come to bind as a couple of systems with extreme breadth & depth.

Competition

[jones_supa]

Ok, maybe those guys saved some money, hooray and cheers, but shouldn't we generally support all browsers to keep a healthy competition active? Until we at some point reach a state when we can just write to the spec...

Not really - they skipped IE support everywhere

[Hemi Rodner]

Here's an example of what they are telling their customers:

IE is becoming a really outdated browser - we can't offer full support for IE, though we do try our best to offer that. IE uses different syntax for CSS than many other browsers, and generally causes problems. It will be nice when everyone stops using it!

Thanks for using 4ormat, Stefan

So it implies that IE manages to display most of their content, but thet don't really bother fixing IE-related problems.

Re:Not really - they skipped IE support everywhere

[Johann Lau]

More, nay, all the power to them!

Re:Not really - they skipped IE support everywhere

[Hemi Rodner]

Yea, it's fine w/ me.
What's not fine is that it took /. two days to notify me by email for your reply.

Coaching

[jimmerz28]

I'm glad at least the company is claiming to "coach" their customers to use modern web browsers.

It's extremely irritating when companies fail to educate their clients and just take whatever money grab they can even when it's to support a project for IE6/7/8.

correct code

[erica_ann]

If you write the code correctly in the first place and w3c compliant.. you dont have to worry about supporting ie.. it just works right.

Re:imho

[Eirenarch]

I have yet to see front end dev look at rendering engine code. I will be really impressed if I ever do see such a sight.

All versions?

[Millennium]

I'll give them IE6 and IE7. I'd give an awful lot to not have to support IE8, even. But there really isn't any reason to not support IE9, unless you need WebGL for something. A lot can be said about Microsoft's past shenanigans in the browser space, and none of it is good, but they pretty much cleaned up their act with IE9, and that should be acknowledged and encouraged.

Though I'm still suspicious of their WebGL stance. That sounds, much like the NPAPI plugin thing in the past, more like a simple attempt at lock-in than an actual security concern.

Re:correct code - Mod parent up

[Anonymous Coward]

Creating a standards compliant site is the answer. It gives a couple of important advantages. It improves your Google page ranking. It is accessible for the handicapped.

I see it increasing business, not decreasing it. It costs less to write. win/win

Re:Article is wrong; no IE support on the ADMIN pa

[n5vb]

Depends on how much client-side functionality you're using for your web app UI. If all you send to the browser is flat HTML (whether it's from a file or dynamically generated, and I usually generate mine pretty dynamically), your page may not render pixel-perfect on every browser but it'll render consistently and look acceptable at least. If your client side scripting reloads with the page frequently, probably still ok. If you have persistent scripting that relies on Ajax-type RPC backend fetches, there are significant differences that will make the scripts behave noticeably differently (at least) if you try to use the same code for everything and you pretty much have to detect which browser you're in and select between different versions of functions. I often just dynamically generate flat HTML for this exact reason.

umm

[buddyglass]

Isn't IE support fairly easy if you use an off-the-shelf UI library (e.g. jQuery, etc.)?

Re:imho

[IAmGarethAdams]

We've got a front end dev in our web shop with rendering patches accepted into Gecko. It's a rare sight, and it takes the right kind of developer, but it's not unheard of

A little off topic

[DaMattster]

I know this is a little off topic but I liked the bit on rentership and bootstrapping. While the article really had nothing directly to do with IE development costs, it did highlight some of the benefits of cloud computing. Prior to cloud computing, it took lots of money to build out infrastructure to support an application or system in development. Cloud computing makes enterprise-sized infrastructure available to the bootstrapper. It has leveled the playing field!

Re:Group Policy

[Anonymous Coward]

I work at a large government organization where IE7 is the current browser, and you cannot install a newer version or any other browser under threat of termination. They will upgrade to IE8 when they are good and ready and not a decade earlier.

MS goes one way, We go another

[SoothingMist]

Personally, I think we should just let MS go its own proprietary way while the rest of the world goes with open software and languages. Any company that takes a standard and reworks it for its own proprietary purposes does not deserve a loyal customer base.

Re:MS goes one way, We go another

[Tarlus]

I was saying this in 2002. Ten years later, it has become clear that while we can boycott a software company as individuals, there are way too many people out there who don't really care what MS does differently because (a) they are non-technical and they don't even know what web standards are, (b) it came with their computer, it suits their needs just fine and they would rather concern themselves with other things, and (c) they will trust a large corporation like MS before they listen to a bunch of geeks like us.

I have encouraged countless people to stick with alternative browsers over the years and it has served them well, however these days even IE seems to do a pretty good job of adhering to standards. MS still tries to be naughty from time to time, and I still don't use IE9 for more than testing, but they seem to have made some vast improvements in recent years.

Re: Pixel Perfect

[TaoPhoenix]

Except somewhere along the way, near-Pixel-Perfect became a standard to be judged against, maybe with the help of Apple.

Now if you have any flaws, people who would otherwise use your site just fine go "bleh, looks like $hit, they must suk, I won't bother using their service."

Something like not visiting Groklaw because a column was mis-formatted. Sorry, Groklaw is a solid starting point for a few important cases, so dissing them forever if one week they happen to have a bad page update is silly.

Bad idea

[OhHellWithIt]

Deliberately locking out non-favored browsers is a bad idea. I can remember the days when web site providers would refuse to consider a complaint because I was running Firefox on Linux, and, in some cases, the issue had nothing to do with the browser I was using. Web sites should be written to support standards, and browsers should aim to work with standards as well. Today, we're picking on MSIE, and tomorrow, Firefox or Safari could be the outcast.

I'm not defending MSIE's quirks and bugs. I've had my share of "bugs" that turned out to be something that was broken in MSIE. But interoperability isn't interoperability if someone gets locked out.

Re:Bad idea

[Johann Lau]

You're right, coding to standards is a good idea. IE basically locked itself out.

Yes, all versions that are non-compliant.

[bussdriver]

Microsoft will screw over the web 1st chance they get as they did in the past.

If IE9 gets the majority share and continues to help cement their OS monopoly (their sole motivation besides Office) then they will keep the web from advancing as they did for the previous decade. IE copied everybody else poorly added a few tweaks (often causing compatibility problems) then spent years fixing the bugs that didn't help them harm the web.

The culture of MS has not changed. If IE10 is great and gains majority we should ban it the second it slacks off and falls behind the others. Never allow them to harm the world like that again.

Re:Yes, all versions that are non-compliant.

[bussdriver]

MS is a convicted monopolist for preventing competition; they were anti free market. THEY ARE TO BLAME, as the court ruled.

People don't choose the best. Most do not choose; they end up with the default. Without a default, then a legitimate choice CAN be made (likely still based on irrational choices, like what is popular.) IE is the default. It takes a lot to get people to install a browser; probably people like myself volunteering to initially convert everybody I come in contact with are why Firefox took over. Now I have people I turned installing Chrome on their own. (except mac converts who use Safari, because it is default.)

Nowadays

[Tarlus]

When you employ good practices with HTML and CSS, making a page look and display properly in IE8+ is trivial. Even common jquery effects are fairly browser independent now.

If you have to fight a lot to get a common result between browsers, then you may be trying too hard to reinvent the wheel. And if your visitors are still using IE6, then it is easy to have the webpage notify them that their 10+ year old browser is incompatible and needs to be upgraded.

Re:Nowadays

[sudonymous]

When you employ good practices with HTML and CSS, making a page look and display properly in IE8+ is trivial.

The following is perfectly good HTML and CSS. Why don't you test it and tell me which browsers it looks and displays properly in.

<html>
<body>
<div style="color:red;font-weight:bold;height:0px;overflow:hidden;">Broken!</div>
<div style="width:80px;border-right:solid 80px white;overflow:hidden;">Works</div>
</body>
</html>

Re:Nowadays

[Tarlus]

Let's try this again.

When you employ good practices with HTML and CSS, making a page look and display properly in IE8+ is trivial.

Give that code a doctype and then try again. It will give you the same result, even using IE8 (with or without compatibility mode).

Re:Nowadays

[sudonymous]

So IE8, by default, unless it's explicitly told to do it correctly, will render HTML according to its old, quirky, WRONG way of doing it. Is that what you're telling me?

Re:Nowadays

[Tarlus]

So IE8, by default, unless it's explicitly told to do it correctly, will render HTML according to its old, quirky, WRONG way of doing it. Is that what you're telling me?

That is not what I am telling you, though that is true. Please understand that I am not trying to defend IE. In fact, I avoid using it whenever possible and encourage other people to do the same. Its default behaviors, while not as bad as they once were, are still substandard. It doesn't account for mistyped code as well as other browsers, which is why it has failed the ACID tests for so long.

What I AM saying is that it is not difficult to employ good practice and have consistent results regardless of which modern browser you use. People should be doing things like specifying their doctypes anyway. It doesn't cost $100,000 to hire a web developer who can adhere to good practice like that.

Re: Pixel Perfect

[Johann Lau]

Except somewhere along the way, near-Pixel-Perfect became a standard to be judged against

That's funny .. I totally despise fixed-width websites. They're just lame, have no reason to exist (in 99% of the cases).. every monkey can make them, and every monkey does.

We did the same thing.

[monk]

We have a small (tiny) startup with a local community membership, and I'm the sole developer. Members are able to edit their own content. After a couple of rounds of broken IE (even 9) and the hassle of even keeping a Windows test platform usable we dropped IE support for members in favor of Chrome, Firefox, Opera or Safari. So far, no members have complained and we've been able to turn back on features that just didn't work in IE and will soon have removed every special case in the CSS and javascript. Frankly if we are loosing some hypothetical customers who insist on IE, we're better off without them.

Visitors to the site can still use IE, but we'll be working to discourage even that in our small part of the world.

We also support some of our members who are less computer savvy and for the last couple of years when we get a request for help with their local machines, we suggest switching to Linux. So far we've had close to 100% success, with users being really impressed with the live Ubuntu CD demo and having very few questions or issues after switching over. Months later we still hear about how much better their experience has been. I've heard several variations on "I thought I was stupid and didn't understand computers, but this is just easy."

And then Unity came along.... I'll save the rant for another post, but I'm really worried that this is not just annoying for experienced users, but after trying to show people how to use it, it's a real step backward for new users too.

IE is still a bitch

[Tom]

I'm developing a web app so there's some personal frontline experience here. Supporting IE is still a bitch, it sucks badly and it's a punishment. If my target audience were private individuals, I'd say "fuck IE", plug a big "IE not supported" button on the homepage and be done with it. Unfortunately, my target audience is in the corporate environment.

The main problem is that IE does everything differently from everyone else and from version to version. In CSS, for example, sure, other vendors have their prefixes, but writing out half a dozen essentially identical statements for advanced CSS stuff is tedious, but not troublesome. Finding the five different ways the IE wants it done, that are totally incompatible with anything else is just horrible. Google up how IE does CSS gradients vs. how everyone else does it for an example.

For JS, fortunately we have stuff like jQuery or Prototype, and yet plugins to these still list compatability with various browser - and large everyone else is either supported or unsupported and then there's IE. It is very, very, very rare to find a plugin that works on Firefox, but not Chrome, or on Safari, but not Opera. It's a lot more common to find something that works everywhere except IE.

Basically, you can write a web app that runs fine and looks nearly the same on all recent versions of all major browsers, and breaks completely on IE. You would have to consciously try to do the same with any other major browser.

Re:IE is still a bitch

[MtViewGuy]

I'd almost agree, but with IE 10.0 due in a few months, if you can write HTML 5.0 apps, it should run under IE 10.0 with its pretty good HTML 5.0 compatibility.

Re:IE is still a bitch

[Tom]

I'd be surprised, especially given the historically abysmal adoption rates of new IE versions. If you're serious, you still have to support IE 7 - no other browser has any market share worth mentioning going back even nearly as far.

Re:imho

[LingNoi]

I use chrome on OSX daily and Safari is a turd in comparison. It's slower, the searching is poorer and the UX just isn't as good as it is in Chrome. Oh and Chrome just updates without needing to restart the whole os to update the browser that's a total plus.

Re:Group Policy

[LingNoi]

> and you cannot install a newer version or any other browser under threat of termination.

That's so stupid that it's funny. "You're using a newer piece of software?! You're fired!". Your company must be a fun place to work.

WTF

[Onymous Coward]

Last time we targeted a single platform it was a disaster.

Last Time We Targeted A Single Platform It Was A Disaster.

LAST TIME WE TARGETED A SINGLE PLATFORM IT WAS A DISASTER.

How is this thinking still going on? ... ?

You've got a low enough UID to have been there and seen it happen, do you just not realize what put us in IE's stranglehold? Developers who did not care about interoperability as much as making their lives easy put us there. They saw the easy way out, they fell for the sweet promises of the One True Provider, and now here we are, still trying to get out from underneath IE.

You want to extract our collective neck from Microsoft's stranglehold and put it in Apple's instead?

Is it going to be better this time around because Apple's prettier or something?

We are basically taking our first joyous steps in the springtime of smooth interoperability, with the ease of coding to unified standards, while the difficulty of handling incompatibilities is hastening the demise of incompatible browsers, rushing us onwards to a beautiful, sunny season of web development, and you would have us turn the clock around? Send us back to the bitter winter of a single corporate master?

SERIOUSLY, JUST DON'T DO IT.
NOT AGAIN.

Flash to the rescue!

[rsborg]

I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though

Boring pixel perfect rendering to make the artists happy. Blah.

This. So very this. I'm involved in a web project right now where both IE support AND pixel-perfect rendering are apparently vital (it took us about a month to convince the spec designers of the concept of "your fonts are not the user's fonts" and "Illustrator is NOT a web design tool"). We're actually expected to maintain pixel-perfectness in an automated testing environment. Seriously, half our development time has been wasted trying to figure out how to test this with an art department breathing down our necks with pixel-measuring tools for a web application.

So you can see why I posted anonymously.

Isn't this what Flash/ActionScript was supposed to be perfect for? Well, except for the lack of mobile support.

Similar experience with TodoListMe

[high_rolla]

I have developed an on-line todo list manager http://todolistme.net/ and have experienced similar issues. I was able to get it working nicely in all browsers except IE. It may be that my web development fu is not up to scratch but I did put a fair bit of time into trying to get it to work in IE and had no luck. All my tweaking just resulted in weird error messages that I could not decipher (Even with the help of Google). So I just gave up.

It's not a huge success of Facebook proportions yet but it is growing nicely in popularity so the lack of IE doesn't really bother me at this point.

It seems to me that for content only pages IE is perfectly fine but as we move more and more into web apps it's struggling to keep up. But I don't have extensive experience in this area so I'm happy to be proven wrong.

Standards compliance or bust

[bgibby9]

It's pretty simple, just build against the standards and let those who don't implement the standards correctly deal with it!

Re:I'd like to note that the article misses the po

[MtViewGuy]

IE 9.0 under Windows 7 is actually quite good. The only thing lacking is spellchecking, which will be fixed in IE 10.0 for Windows 7 and 8.

Re:You will never loose users

[monk]

http://theoatmeal.com/comics/misspelling

Oops. I knew better.

On the other hand it would be cool to be able to loose users like trained attack monkeys.

Re:imho

[Gr8Apes]

I use chrome on OSX daily and Safari is a turd in comparison. It's slower, the searching is poorer and the UX just isn't as good as it is in Chrome. Oh and Chrome just updates without needing to restart the whole os to update the browser that's a total plus.

Google paying you much? I'll agree to the update needing to restart the OS is ridiculous in my opinion too. There's no call for that. But other than that, the UX is not much different, performance is on par with Chrome or better, depending on the tests, and search... really? How on earth is search any different between the two since they both use Google? Unless you're talking search on your mac, in which case Spotlight is about as fast as you can go.

Re: Pixel Perfect

[Johann Lau]

Because they're not mindless, lazy, untalented go-alongs?

Are you really saying "non-geeks" would be put off by content that adapts to screen size, and text that reformats, because they resize their browser window all the time and get confused? That people don't make static sites because it's easier and quicker, and satisfies pointy-haired bosses, but because of usability testing ... ??? AHAHAHAHAHAHA.

You're a coward, but at least you make up for it by being hilariously stupid ^^

Re:imho

[Gr8Apes]

I prefer my address bar to, well, work with addresses, and search to do search. Surprise. I especially hate chrome doing a search on localhost when I want to go to http://localhost./

But that's just me, and I guess according to your opinion mine's worth less than yours. Consider this though - Until Chrome, I don't believe anyone had combined the two. Ever wonder why an ad company that serves ads on searches created a browser with this default?