Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

bartvanzon.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 176 posts

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#21

Post by sgift »

slig wrote: post #13

Did you guys forget what pain in the ass was a couple of years ago when IE was the most used browser everywhere? Seriously, f. Microsoft. Just because finally they made a decent browser, doesn't mean that we should be that grateful. Their business was "make a shitty browser while we can", and now that they can't anymore "ok, sorry guys, here's very nice browser, btw, it won't work on our most used OS version, even th…

"We" simply prefer to base our decisions on the current state of affairs, not on the way things where years ago. If your business requires you to support IE, do it. If not: don't. But please don't make it sound like you have some holy war to fight. Thanks.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#22

Post by gaius »

I think a general problem with "webdevs" is they have "year zero" mentality - anything prior to the release of their favourite framework, didn't really exist, and if they do acknowledge its existence, it's only to observe how worthless it is. It's almost religious in nature. You see this in particular in the Ruby world where they are forever reinventing the wheel, but it's certainly not limited to them.

IE6, because I am old, and remember, was the first browser that you could build real applications with desktop feel in (e.g. Outlook Web Access). Lots of in-house developers jumped on it, and wrote millions of lines of code. You might think it's too much work to support IE6; they think it's too much work with too little reward to rewrite everything in whatever's trendy this week, because it basically does what their users need and they have real, actual work to do.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#23

Post by axefrog »

sgift wrote: post #21
slig wrote: post #13

Did you guys forget what pain in the ass was a couple of years ago when IE was the most used browser everywhere? Seriously, f. Microsoft. Just because finally they made a decent browser, doesn't mean that we should be that grateful. Their business was "make a shitty browser while we can", and now that they can't anymore "ok, sorry guys, here's very nice browser, btw, it won't work on our most used OS version, even th…

"We" simply prefer to base our decisions on the current state of affairs, not on the way things where years ago. If your business requires you to support IE, do it. If not: don't. But please don't make it sound like you have some holy war to fight. Thanks.

^ This.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#24

Post by acuozzo »

Supporting IE isn't too much work. Trying to bend and twist WWW browsers to render something other than formatted-text-and-images-with-limited-interaction is too much work. You're bound to run into problems when treating document-display programs as ``platform''s.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#26

Post by valuegram »

gaius wrote: post #22

I think a general problem with "webdevs" is they have "year zero" mentality - anything prior to the release of their favourite framework, didn't really exist, and if they do acknowledge its existence, it's only to observe how worthless it is. It's almost religious in nature. You see this in particular in the Ruby world where they are forever reinventing the wheel, but it's certainly not limited to them. IE6, because…

>> anything prior to the release of their favourite framework, didn't really exist, and if they do acknowledge its existence, it's only to observe how worthless it is. It's almost religious in nature.

For me at least, its not about religion but economics. Writing standards compliant code that works in all modern browsers costs a certain amount. Writing standard compliant code that is also backwards compatible with older technologies and legacy browsers may cost significantly more. The cost is one issue, of course the larger program is the value. Legacy browsers like IE6&7 compose slightly over 3% of the market share last month. Without even getting into the demographics of those people, it often isn't worth it to tweak for those specific cases.

That being said, I always leave it up to the customer. This is the issue in the browsers, here is your traffic effected, this is what it would cost to fix.

I can see the agitation with IE6&7, but the newer releases have gotten much better. For the most part, something I develop mainly in FireFox works fine in the newer IE releases.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#27

Post by bwm »

I think it depends on how far along you are in your product development lifecycle. If you're at the MVP stage or you're making big changes to your product regularly, then don't support IE, it'll slow iteration time in a similar (although not to the same extent) way that launching with an iPhone and Android app would. If you've got product market fit, paying users and have the bandwidth to support it then you probably should.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#29

Post by EdiX »

axefrog wrote: post #19
givan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After the IE 6 pain no web developer will forgive microsoft for the time lost and pain. They test for IE only because lots of people use it or because their jobs require this, nobody likes IE, it always had bugs, was insecure and most important non standard. IE9 is closer to normal, but microsoft lost is trust, they had the chance to change something much earlier and they did nothing, they are only acting now because…

Oh come on. Microsoft is not some horrible uncle who did you a great wrong and needs "forgiving". It's a company. The people who work there come and go, change departments and so forth. Yeah, sure, the people who worked in the highest positions back in the day employed some shitty tactics way back when, but times have changed, many of those people have moved on and much of the company's outlook has shifted significan…

    Yeah, sure, the people who worked in the highest positions back in the day employed some shitty tactics way back when
Like not allowing other browser on some devices, requiring locked down BIOS, patent lawsuits against competitors. Oh, wait, that all happened this year.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#30

Post by xutopia »

Supporting IE can be too much work. The Microsoft Knowledge base acknowledges issues and then tells you that the solution is to change your IE options or upgrade your browser. As if that will help with my users.

Sure the latest versions of IE are not as painful to support but if you check worldwide statistics you'll notice that old versions of IE are still sticking around.

Post reply on HN