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Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

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Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#91
post #72

If I, as a developer, decide my site supports a browser, I know I'm going to have to spend some time doing QA on that browser. Standards are cool, but I've run into enough FF and Chrome bugs that I always test. That being said, the cost of testing in IE is waaay higher than the cost of testing in FF and Chrome. Why? Because FF and Chrome are cross-platform, I and my fellow developers can test on our OS of choice. Wit…

With IE, a testing environment costs my company about $300 per developer.

I.e., miniscule relative to the cost of actually having a developer.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#92
post #72

If I, as a developer, decide my site supports a browser, I know I'm going to have to spend some time doing QA on that browser. Standards are cool, but I've run into enough FF and Chrome bugs that I always test. That being said, the cost of testing in IE is waaay higher than the cost of testing in FF and Chrome. Why? Because FF and Chrome are cross-platform, I and my fellow developers can test on our OS of choice. Wit…

With IE, a testing environment costs my company about $300 per developer. I.e., miniscule relative to the cost of actually having a developer.

fair.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#93
post #3

The problem is, IE 9 and 10 are not everywhere. I know for certain that my school (and, I'd be willing to wager, many businesses) only deploys IE 7 and 8. IE 6 still isn't dead, despite Microsoft publicly encouraging migration. Until Microsoft gets IE 9 and 10 adoption up, supporting Internet Explorer is tricky.

> Until Microsoft gets IE 9 and 10 adoption up I'm not sure that's something Microsoft can do. See for example the amount of XP deployments out there. Tell people that it's unsupported, no security updates, whatever. Enterprise customers and home customers who are terrified of change will not do it . Part of me wishes MS forced updates like these. Sure it would probably break a few ancient mission critical ActiveX ap…

> Part of me wishes MS forced updates like these. > Sure it would probably break a few ancient > mission critical ActiveX apps, and > my god the outcry would be immense and furious, > but it would be better for everyone in the long run

YOU tell the famous doctors in hospitals you're going to break the medical-imaging app they use that depends on IE6. I'M not telling them that. Seriously. It's not as simple as ripping off a band-aid.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#94
post #83
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Non standard features like... XMLHttpRequest? The entire AJAX industry, they invented. What were you saying again?

Seems to me there has, for a long time, been a double standard when MS is involved. The response I often see is: Something non-standard but cool in IE? "Screw MS, they're trying to embrace and extend the web!" Something non-standard but cool in another browser? "I don't understand why people are complaining! Good ideas like these eventually become standards, and this is how innovation happens!"

There is no double standard. If any single browser had the marketshare that IE had in its heyday, it would be irresponsible and anticompetitive for them to implement nonstandard features. But marketshare is spread much more evenly among the players today, so it's pretty much understood that a production site cannot rely on a browser-specific feature. Hell, most people don't even rely on modern standard features because they still want their stuff to work in IE6. Comparing experimental features today with the IE-flavored-web of 2002 is comparing apples to geese.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#95

it's just a publicity stunt to get traffic to their site. since web devs mostly hate IE it an easy way to get their attention...

Well may have gotten traffic but did it get sales? Goodwill?

Attracting traffic because you are being a dick is not the same as attracting traffic because you are making a world-changing awesome product.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Opera as my main browser and I cringe when clicking on a link in HN which supposedly shows off usage of cool new features in HTML/CSS/JS/WebGL whatever. Then I hunt around the site which breaks on me with no message. Then have to trawl through the HN comments to realize that it only works in Chrome and no one bothers to put that in the headline or on the site. Note that this happens to lots of Google cool featu…

Honest question, and I promise I'm not trying to be antagonistic: why do that to yourself? Why not Chrome or Safari or even Firefox? Why keep using Opera at all?

In my case, because Opera seems to work better than the others under Linux (Safari isn't even available).

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#97
It's easy to say IE9+ works but in the real world people aren't upgrading their version of IE like users of other browsers tend to do. While IE9 and above are much better than their predecessors by a long shot they still require you to jump through more hoops compared to any other browser. IE9 supports gradients but you have to feed it so,e conditional CSS for it to work as expected.

Overall it's misleading to say "IE9 and above work just fine you elitist hipsters" when we all know damn well there are still so many users on versions of IE older than 9 because XP won't let you or simply because Mocrosoft has traditionally not really encouraged or made it as easy to upgrade. To their credit I'm glad they're running commercials for IE10 and for this case, considering PayDirt's audience, it could be fair to criticize them for leaving all IE users out because we can reasonably assume they're using the latest greatest even if it is IE. But if you want to talk about IE being no problem to support in general then it's disingenuous to only mention the two latest versions because we know there are far too many users of the older ones to ignore. Users of other browsers are upgrading regularly so it's trivial to support old FF or Chrome (plus even FF's and Chromes's older versions support a hell of a lot more than comparable older IE's).

You know why we love to hate IE even when it improves? Because it feels like too little too late. Even the improvements are one step behind everyone else.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#98
post #46

So, if Microsoft renamed IE10 to something entirely different, and packaged it as a standalone browser, would a site like Paydirt support it then? It seems to work fine, so why not? This, and comments like "The site happening to work" seem to have an underlying prejudice about IE. "It was IE, so it must be fucked some way or another." The old versions are, but try running the site on Chrome 1, or Firefox 3.6 (I belie…

>The old versions are, but try running the site on Chrome 1, or Firefox 3.6 (I believe a lot of old Ubuntu LTS releases have that). They'll be exactly the same. You're forgetting quite how bad IE was. Having worked for a place that had to support many ancient browsers, getting IE8 working was three times as much work as FF3.2. I hear the IE team have turned over a new leaf and are supporting all the standards, but I…

Yea IE8 do not even support XHTML and DOM2, which are 10 years old now!

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#99
post #72

If I, as a developer, decide my site supports a browser, I know I'm going to have to spend some time doing QA on that browser. Standards are cool, but I've run into enough FF and Chrome bugs that I always test. That being said, the cost of testing in IE is waaay higher than the cost of testing in FF and Chrome. Why? Because FF and Chrome are cross-platform, I and my fellow developers can test on our OS of choice. Wit…

Aren't you creating an artificial dichotomy? The options you imply are: 1. block all IE9+ 2. spend lots of time and money making the site perfect in IE9+ What about this? 3. Have a quick glance and if things look 95% ok, let people know it is not optimized for IE9+ via a subtle notification. (That actually requires no more developer resources than blocking IE9 explicitly) Or: 4. Set up a VM (it isn't that hard, and y…

That's also fair - there's definitely middle ground. I particularly like the "not optimized for IE" notification, which would allow us to legitimately suggest trying another browser as the solution to a problem.
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