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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

#201

Post by robocat »

talmand wrote: post #186
ricardobeat wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

You can do something similar with Synergy. Laptop acts like another monitor, e.g. mouse over to the left and your keyboard and mouse now control the laptop, and cut&paste between machines mostly works too.

Synergy works well, although it is old and unobvious how to set it up. I haven't seen anything better yet :-) However, I only used it between Linux and XP (I use virtual machines now).

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

#202

Post by nirvdrum »

robocat wrote: post #200
nirvdrum wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

BizSpark is really great for a lean startup (we did use it), but it also incurs significant time costs: - the website was a nightmare to use (maybe it has improved) - it was impossible to work out what you could and couldn't do - I suggest just use it and ignore details. - you incur a time debt three years later sorting out OS/Office installs. If you are funded, MSDN and proper licenses might make more sense.

The admin interface sucks. Downloading software and getting your keys couldn't be much easier though. I haven't had to deal with the accounting end of it yet, so I can't speak to that.

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

#203

Post by nirvdrum »

jneen wrote: post #195
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...

Yep, that's what I was referring to when I said "opposite of straightforward". I've been reading a lot of these kinds of articles from the IE team lately ("Our browser is better now, why does everyone still hate us?"). And I have to admit, IE9 is a huge leap forward in terms of standards compliance and general non-wonkiness. But until they really focus on making the development and testing processes better, I'm still…

To be fair, IE introduced the first JavaScript profiler I had come across. The problem is the toolchain is locked at the time of the browser release. They need to have something periodically updated if the browser isn't going to update that frequently.

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

#204

Post by nirvdrum »

JangoSteve wrote: post #192
masklinn wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've had Windows-specific Chrome or Firefox issues in the past 7 years.

That may be the case, but it's quite possible you just didn't catch them. Most people really don't do a rigorous comparison and even if they do, it's so menial a task that the brain shuts down and things slip through the cracks.

I've dedicated the last 2.5 years of my life to auto-detecting differences between browsers and have tested thousands of sites across a variety of fields. I was kinda surprised at the number of rendering issues I've come across with Firefox and Chrome in various combinations of versions and OS. I've even seen some pretty substantial rendering differences between Win XP and Win 7 in Firefox.

Anyway, your experience could be totally different. I've just come across a lot devs that have adopted this hivemind mentality around Firefox & Chrome and as a result, they stop testing thoroughly with them. Without thorough testing you can't know if you have problems, so it's really hard to conclude anything because the key data are missing. There's a gap between perception and reality.

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

#205

Post by JangoSteve »

nirvdrum wrote: post #204
JangoSteve wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can count on one hand the number of times I've had Windows-specific Chrome or Firefox issues in the past 7 years.

That may be the case, but it's quite possible you just didn't catch them. Most people really don't do a rigorous comparison and even if they do, it's so menial a task that the brain shuts down and things slip through the cracks. I've dedicated the last 2.5 years of my life to auto-detecting differences between browsers and have tested thousands of sites across a variety of fields. I was kinda surprised at the number…

It's also possible that each issue, once figured out, became something I know how to avoid. There really just aren't that many things that break in a browser across operating systems.

Also, in my mind, there is a huge difference between "this font doesn't render pixel-perfect in this os/browser combo", and "the javascript broke". One causes much more customer support cost than the other.

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

#206

Post by nirvdrum »

JangoSteve wrote: post #205
nirvdrum wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be the case, but it's quite possible you just didn't catch them. Most people really don't do a rigorous comparison and even if they do, it's so menial a task that the brain shuts down and things slip through the cracks. I've dedicated the last 2.5 years of my life to auto-detecting differences between browsers and have tested thousands of sites across a variety of fields. I was kinda surprised at the number…

It's also possible that each issue, once figured out, became something I know how to avoid. There really just aren't that many things that break in a browser across operating systems. Also, in my mind, there is a huge difference between "this font doesn't render pixel-perfect in this os/browser combo", and "the javascript broke". One causes much more customer support cost than the other.

I actually go well out of my way to avoid pixel-perfect stuff. The cases I mentioned all affect opacity or position by > 30px. There's actually a lot that can go wrong given the different windowing systems. I'd expect there to be more rendering bugs than JavaScript because of that. I can't speak to the functional side as well as I'd like, but I should ping someone at Sauce Labs to see what they've experienced.

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

#207

Post by ricardobeat »

talmand wrote: post #186
ricardobeat wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Using OpenKeyVal (http://openkeyval.org/), the bookmarklet looks like this:

    (function(){
        var data = { data: location.href }
        jQuery.post('http://api.openkeyval.org/myownkey', data)
    }())
And on each client you have a screen-sized iframe + an "update" button that triggers:

    $.getJSON('http://api.openkeyval.org/myownkey', function(data){
        iframe.src = data
    })
You have to remember to use your local IP address, not localhost. I ended up making a small nodejs server so we could use websockets and drop the update button.

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

#208

Post by SamReidHughes »

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.

Okay, but why would we pick a stupid way of looking at it?

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

#209

Post by JangoSteve »

nirvdrum wrote: post #206
JangoSteve wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also possible that each issue, once figured out, became something I know how to avoid. There really just aren't that many things that break in a browser across operating systems. Also, in my mind, there is a huge difference between "this font doesn't render pixel-perfect in this os/browser combo", and "the javascript broke". One causes much more customer support cost than the other.

I actually go well out of my way to avoid pixel-perfect stuff. The cases I mentioned all affect opacity or position by > 30px. There's actually a lot that can go wrong given the different windowing systems. I'd expect there to be more rendering bugs than JavaScript because of that. I can't speak to the functional side as well as I'd like, but I should ping someone at Sauce Labs to see what they've experienced.

Fair, but I was more alluding to the fact that shifted elements, while a nuisance, don't necessarily cause a site to stop functioning like JS can (assuming I'm working on a JS-heavy web app).

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

#210

Post by [deleted] »

nirvdrum wrote: post #206
JangoSteve wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's also possible that each issue, once figured out, became something I know how to avoid. There really just aren't that many things that break in a browser across operating systems. Also, in my mind, there is a huge difference between "this font doesn't render pixel-perfect in this os/browser combo", and "the javascript broke". One causes much more customer support cost than the other.

I actually go well out of my way to avoid pixel-perfect stuff. The cases I mentioned all affect opacity or position by > 30px. There's actually a lot that can go wrong given the different windowing systems. I'd expect there to be more rendering bugs than JavaScript because of that. I can't speak to the functional side as well as I'd like, but I should ping someone at Sauce Labs to see what they've experienced.

[deleted]
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