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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

#161

Post by masklinn »

yuhong wrote: post #154
rpeden wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Which doesn't detract much from the point: it was a proprietary extension by a specific browser, later adopted by all others.

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

#162

Post by lukeschlather »

mcpherrinm wrote: post #156
ken wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Are you free to use those on non-Microsoft host operating system? I thought the last time I checked the host had to be Windows Professional.

Also you have to re-download the image every 3 months, and get it set up again. I can't just toss a virtualbox image on my personal Ubuntu machine and test in IE6-8. I need a Windows computer to test my personal sites (which are barely worth development time.)

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

#163

Post by ilaksh »

yuhong wrote: post #116
ilaksh wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I noticed that neither you nor the other person who replied promptly seemed to notice or respond to my main point in any way.

Well, MS is betting on modern HTML for Metro.

I actually am confused about that.. is there a link explaining how HTML5 in Metro will work? This may just sound cynical, but I have to assume that they are partly trying to set up another way to run more interference on the web platform by encouraging a bunch of Microsoft-specific "HTML5" applications.

I mean I know there must be plenty of people at Microsoft who are genuinely enthusiastic about HTML5 and the web as a platform, but when it comes right down to it, I don't know how the business execs who actually understand the technology issues can really support HTML5 as a common application development platform, because I just don't see how that cannot lead directly to less sales of the operating system and everything else.

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

#164

Post by tiernano »

lukeschlather wrote: post #162
mcpherrinm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft provides free Virtual Machine images for testing Internet Explorer. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...

Are you free to use those on non-Microsoft host operating system? I thought the last time I checked the host had to be Windows Professional. Also you have to re-download the image every 3 months, and get it set up again. I can't just toss a virtualbox image on my personal Ubuntu machine and test in IE6-8. I need a Windows computer to test my personal sites (which are barely worth development time.)

It is setup like a trial edition of Windows. It can be installed on anything really. Microsoft say the requirements are Windows XP and Above, but i did see code to convert from a VHD to a Virtual Box image. Also, you only need to download every 3 months if you want the latest, patched edition from MS. If you want to do it yourself, you can just recreate the image yourself (sysprep).

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

#165

Post by [deleted] »

lukeschlather wrote: post #162
mcpherrinm wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Microsoft provides free Virtual Machine images for testing Internet Explorer. http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...

Are you free to use those on non-Microsoft host operating system? I thought the last time I checked the host had to be Windows Professional. Also you have to re-download the image every 3 months, and get it set up again. I can't just toss a virtualbox image on my personal Ubuntu machine and test in IE6-8. I need a Windows computer to test my personal sites (which are barely worth development time.)

[deleted]

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

#166

Post by irrelative »

masklinn wrote: post #159
irrelative wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Of course a developer isn't a testing environment. Developers don't cost a fixed $300.

If there are differences between IE and (Chrome|Firefox|Opera), then it will require additional developer time. Just testing for those differences will require additional developer time.

I don't want to demonize IE. Supporting any browser requires testing. IE has been especially reluctant to adopt web developer trends and needs to work hard to regain developers' trust. Supporting it isn't just the cost of a testing environment.

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

#168

Post by qw »

rhizome wrote: post #33
mikeryan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It just does, by coincidence, for now So you're saying its just a fluke that IE9+ supports the same standards as Firefox and Chrome? Amazing luck that.

Historically speaking, yes, but perhaps intentional in the present day. Who's to say, and better yet, who's going to spend scarce developer resources on proving it one way or the other? Unless you're doing corporate, that is.

who's going to spend scarce developer resources on proving it

This was the argument many had a decade ago about IE6. Lots of people designed for IE6 first and didn't spend time on alternative browsers. They were lucky that IE6 continued to be popular for so many years, but in the end it has caused a lot of problems. These days the markets move a lot quicker, so failing to support IE9 today may prove an expensive decision in a year or two.

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

#169

Post by puppybeard »

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…

> "Because FF and Chrome are cross-platform, I and my fellow developers can test on our OS of choice."

Speaking from experience, you can't always. Having done a lot of browser-testing, I've seen the same version of the same browser behave differently on the same OS. Between OS's there are more discrepancies.

Most of your users are going to be using Windows, so test on Windows first.

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

#170

Post by jcheng »

ilaksh wrote: post #163
yuhong wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, MS is betting on modern HTML for Metro.

I actually am confused about that.. is there a link explaining how HTML5 in Metro will work? This may just sound cynical, but I have to assume that they are partly trying to set up another way to run more interference on the web platform by encouraging a bunch of Microsoft-specific "HTML5" applications. I mean I know there must be plenty of people at Microsoft who are genuinely enthusiastic about HTML5 and the web as…

I know people on the IE team, and they are genuinely enthusiastic about HTML5 and the web as a platform. In recent years IE pioneered sandboxed tabs, GPU-accelerated rendering engines, and some privacy stuff (that I found incredibly boring but they thought was really important). They didn't need to do that stuff. If Chrome hadn't reignited the browser wars so strongly, I wouldn't be surprised if IE would've been closing in on Firefox quality-wise at this point.

In the time I worked at MS and was able to get the inside scoop on how different product teams work, I found that the cynical explanation was almost never the truth. I can't think of a single person I met at MS who was playing to lose. If the IE team is underdelivering compared to other browser vendors, it's not due to an exec telling them not to try. You would probably be shocked at how difficult it is to ship software at Microsoft, for a variety of reasons, none of them malicious.

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