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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

#181

Post by angusgr »

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.)

I haven't tried them, but the page says:

"may or may not work in other hosting environments."

&

"simply shutdown the VPC image and discard the changes you’ve made from undo disks to reset the image back to its initial state. By doing either of these methods, you can technically have a base image which never expires although you will never be able to permanently save any changes on these images for longer than 90 days."

... so it seems pretty positive, really.

Which, as someone who'd like to see more Free operating systems and less proprietary ones, is a bit of a shame! :P

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

#182

Post by SchizoDuckie »

In my opinion this is the beginning of the end for Microsoft. People are shouting out that they're done with it, and Microsoft is trying the same trick as before: Creating unneccesary lock-in where there is absolutely no use.

Why did the first beta of IE10 work on windows 7 and now you need to download a 3.2 gb unfinished operating system? It's bullshit, It's insane, and once again the developers are being assraped by Microsofts marketeers.

You can shout from the top of the highest building that you release a new version every month, Microsoft, but you way overplayed your hands. Now there's 4 major versions to support, hundreds of bugs to test. Developer environments to setup, weird registry hacks to do to get things working, and NO FRICKING DEBUG TOOLS.

I'm one of the happy few people that are allowed to code for mostly webkit-based devices, and even though there's loads of fragmentation there, it's no were near as shitty as the experience i've had the past 8 years building IE compatibility.

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

#183

Post by nirvdrum »

robocat wrote: post #176
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...

But the virtual images are designed to run in VirtualPC. I managed to get one running in VitualBox on Linux, but it was complex, time consuming, and had other problems. Then the VM expired after a few months, yayyy, more time wasting. I.e. they cost nothing but your time...

A BizSpark account will cost you $100 over the course of 3 years. You can get every OS they've released and run them on whatever you want. Yes, you'll have to spend time installing the OS, but Win 7 installs pretty quickly these days and that's the only way you're getting IE 9 anyway. It was a pretty good investment for us. I run Win 7 in VMWare Player on Linux & VMWare Fusion on Mac pretty regularly.

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

#184

Post by nirvdrum »

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.

Standards-compliant seems to have taken on an odd shift. Most of the cool new stuff people want to use aren't in any published standard. They're draft specifications and implemented through browser vendor extensions. So, it's more like a de facto standard because a lot of people are doing it and changing the draft after the fact is going to be painful as a result. But the whole de facto standard thing is what got IE in trouble in the first place.

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

#185

Post by nirvdrum »

snowwrestler wrote: post #84
recoiledsnake wrote: post #36

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?

AS far as browsers go, I think Opera innovates better than anyone. The speed dial interface you see in other browsers now was copied from them and poorly at that. Unified search & address bar appeared in Opera first (at least that's the first place I saw it). Custom search engines & shortcuts are awesome. And I rather like the mail client.

Don't get me wrong, it has its downsides. But it's much lighter weight on memory than Firefox and better on CPU than Chrome in my experience. And I don't get all the weird ass blitting issues I seem to have with Safari. I've also run into far fewer crashes. So, when it works on a site it's phenomenal to use. When it doesn't, it kinda sucks.

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

#186

Post by talmand »

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.…

Could you possibly share this bookmarklet?

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

#187

Post by mistercow »

masklinn wrote: post #161
yuhong wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

OK, NCSA was wrong to add those tags to Mosaic without going through standards channels or making them "experimental" and accessible through explicitly temporary syntax. However, I have not seen any evidence (much less the hard proof we have as Microsoft is concerned) that they added those tags with anticompetitive motivation, especially considering that Mosaic predated the browser war.

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

#188

Post by mistercow »

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...

The images arbitrarily expire after about two and a half months, and then (last time I used them at least), there's an interval of time where they don't put up new ones. I don't have time to download 11 GB of disk images every three months, and I certainly can't have MS arbitrarily making it so that I can't test in their awful browser for months at a time.

If you want to support IE, owning a copy of Windows is not optional.

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

#190

Post by ajanuary »

noveltyaccount wrote: post #143
gebe wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am an Opera user as well but I really tried to do the Chrome switch when I got a new laptop and decided on a fresh install of everything. I was thinking that it might be time to begin a new chapter in my personal browser-history-life and hop on the Chrome bandwagon. It didn't take more than a day or two until I got drawn back to Opera though. I know it's just mostly/only about "old habits die hard" but I just feel…

Ctrl + Shift + T in Chrome to un-close a tab.

I think their point was that Ctrl+Z is more intuitive than Ctrl+Shift+T, though I don't necessarily agree with that.
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