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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

#151

Post by JangoSteve »

yummyfajitas wrote: post #91
jneen wrote: 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.

Or another way of looking at it, infinity times greater than the cost of Chrome or Firefox testing environments.

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

#152

Post by drhowarddrfine »

ricardobeat wrote: post #105
jneen wrote: 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…

We just keep a couple spare, old win laptops around for testing on IE. They have Win7 with IE9, plus VMs for Also, neither Chrome, Safari or Firefox behave exactly the same on win/mac/linux. Delicate layouts and javascript-heavy apps still have to be tested. IE9 has a large share of the web, and is still growing. It's a perfectly ok browser (except for lack of WebGL). Not supporting it or adding a "not optimized for.…

But IE usage, overall, is shrinking.

Lack of WebGL is only one glaring example you can read about while people forget it also lacks text-shadow and...oh forgetabout it. I'm not going into this list again.

IE is an incompetent browser. Those who know how the web works don't use IE. That should tell you everything anyone needs to know.

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

#153

Post by mistercow »

biot wrote: post #134
mistercow wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The feature is anticompetitive because it was part of a large-scale and well-documented effort within the company to coopt and/or destroy technologies not controlled by themselves. A handful of innovations (which would have happened anyway) that happened along the way do not justify that kind of behavior.

Either you're changing your argument or you failed to articulate your position initially. Nothing justifies Microsoft's abusive practices; that's a non sequitur. If we take your original statement and change "browser" to "search engine" and "IE" to "Google", we end up with this: "If any single search engine had the marketshare that Google had in its heyday, it would be irresponsible and anticompetitive for them to im…

>If we take your original statement and change "browser" to "search engine" and "IE" to "Google", we end up with this: "If any single search engine had the marketshare that Google had in its heyday, it would be irresponsible and anticompetitive for them to implement nonstandard features."

If Google made non-standard extensions to robots.txt, that would be an equivalently anticompetitive situation. To my knowledge Google hasn't done anything like that. We are not talking about just any features here, but features that make websites incompatible with other browsers. Search engines, by and large, are not concerned with interoperability in the first place, so your analogy is nonsensical.

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

#154

Post by yuhong »

rpeden wrote: post #124
mistercow wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 becau…

Weren't , , , and experimental, non-standard features added by Netscape? Due to Netscape's dominance, everyone ended up implementing them. I'm not saying non-standard features are always a good idea...but is everyone always waited around for standards bodies to come up with new things, we'd never see any new features.

Nope, was invented with Mosaic, and , and was in Mosaic too.

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

#155

Post by toast76 »

atambo wrote: post #115
ricardobeat wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither adds that automatically, you define the prefixes yourself (or use a framework that does).

I think he means something like http://compass-style.org .

I'm just a dev. I don't actually know what I mean :)

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

#156

Post by mcpherrinm »

ken wrote: post #120
yummyfajitas wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or compared to the cost of the developer's time for testing and writing code for it. It's annoying that supporting IE costs one Windows license. It's painful that it's so far from standards compliance.

Microsoft provides free Virtual Machine images for testing Internet Explorer.

http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...

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

#157

Post by haberman »

rpeden wrote: post #83
gaius wrote: 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!"

The difference is that Microsoft intentionally uses incompatibilities to marginalize the competition (a fact well-documented by the DOJ trial). "Embrace, extend, extinguish" is a phrase that Microsoft itself used internally to describe this strategy.

When you're trying to use your extensions against your competitors, you do things like file patents on the technology, keep the internals undocumented, and tightly couple it to the rest of your platform. When you're trying to innovate in a way that others could adopt, you do things like release open-source implementations, publish lots of technical detail, and grant patent licenses.

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

#158

Post by masklinn »

JangoSteve wrote: post #151
yummyfajitas wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Or another way of looking at it, infinity times greater than the cost of Chrome or Firefox testing environments.

Except Chrome and Firefox both regularly have issues showing up on one platform and not the other, so "Chrome or Firefox testing environments" include the browser and all 3 primary platforms at the very least.

Oh look at that, one of those platforms being Microsoft Windows you've already paid for the license you need for testing FF and Chrome.

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

#159

Post by masklinn »

irrelative wrote: post #129
barista wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you just agreed the premise of your whole argument above is not valid. Just saying.

He said that a testing environment costs $300. If developer time were free, then yes, he would have agreed that his argument is invalid. Developer time is rather valuable, especially when considering opportunity costs.

A developer is not a testing environment, and the developer price is paid for testing in Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera or what have you. MSIE is no different on that front.

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

#160

Post by masklinn »

jneen wrote: post #77
FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ievms[1] aims to make testing IE on a non-Windows box less complicated (it depends on VirtualBox). [1] https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

That sounds useful. This gets me though: > The VMs provided by Microsoft will not pass the Windows Genuine Advantage and cannot be activated. I mean, there's a workaround, but where's the love from Microsoft? Don't they want me to be able to test on their browser so my sites will support it?

> This gets me though:

Why? They have no reason to pass WGA, and this is only mildly annoying for actual users, as a development VM I don't remember it ever causing me any issue.

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