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Startup Skips IE Support, Claims $100,000 Savings

Posted by timothy on from the what-about-being-platform-agnostic? dept.

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.

23 of 273 comments (clear)

  1. They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by gabebear · · Score: 5, Insightful

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

    1. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by ilguido · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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

    2. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by Xest · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    3. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by TheNinjaroach · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

      --
      I went to eat some animal crackers and the box said, "Do not eat if seal is broken." I opened the box and sure enough..
    4. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by Gr8Apes · · Score: 3, Informative

      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.

      --
      The cesspool just got a check and balance.
    5. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by Pieroxy · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

      --
      Write boring code, not shiny code!
    6. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by Vanderhoth · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    7. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by KingMotley · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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).

    8. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by Alex+Zepeda · · Score: 5, Informative

      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).

      --
      The revolution will be mocked
    9. Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages by Blakey+Rat · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

      --
      Comment of the year
  2. Useless by vlm · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

    --
    "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    1. Re:Useless by ilguido · · Score: 4, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Useless by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Useless by n5vb · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

    4. Re:Useless by MaWeiTao · · Score: 3, Insightful

      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.

  3. Re:imho by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

    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...

  4. Webkit by hackus · · Score: 3, Informative

    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

    --
    Got Geometrodynamics? Awe, too hard to figure out? Too bad.
  5. Re:Here's the memo the interviewees missed by SJHillman · · Score: 5, Funny

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

  6. Not that I'm skeptical or anything.... by Toreo+asesino · · Score: 3, Interesting

    ....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.

    --
    throw new NoSignatureException();
  7. Right. Sure. by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

  8. It's shennanigans by crazyjj · · Score: 5, Informative

    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).

    --
    What political party do you join when you don't like Bible-thumpers *or* hippies?
  9. Yes, it's true, they saved $100k by Hermanas · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  10. All versions? by Millennium · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.