61–70 of 176 posts
It takes time, dedication, skill, and a lot of specialist knowledge of bugs, quirks, standards and tools.
That's the reason that front end development is a role in its own right, and not just a function of someone else's role.
I honestly think a lot of hacker types really do live in a bubble where they think it's still 2000, Microsoft is still the same evil company they were, Apple still can do no wrong, most people now use Macs "if they know what's good for them", RoR, node.js and Python are really the only valid technologies for back end development and so forth. Certainly plenty of folks out there using the aforementioned technologies a…
IE9 is not that bad. To prove to myself that it was not, I forced myself to use it as my main browser for a while. It was not painful at all. It had reasonable speed, and although lacking some CSS3 features that are nice, it is generally a decent browser. And it runs one of my Canvas demos much more smoothly than Chrome or Firefox, since it hardware accelerates canvas rendering.
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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.
Yeah, they should be more like Apple and make it so you can install whatever you wan... oh wait...
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Hmmm In IE9 you can switch browser mode to previous versions (back to IE7). Seems a lot of people on HN are still stuck X years ago when things sucked and they refuse to look at things as they are today, just like you state in your "IE9 might be amazing [...]" comment. That just calls into question, though, your comments on how hard it _is_ to develop for IE. All you have said is how hard it _was_ to develop for IE.…
You can, but then you're not testing IE7, you're testing IE9 in IE7 mode. That's a condition which may be worth testing in some circumstances, but it's not the same as testing IE7 properly.
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Safari testing on Windows is "hard". For whatever reason Safari on Win can produce different outcomes than on Mac. Further I don't even have the option of running OS X in a vm unless I settle for a hackintosh. "First, the development tools available to Internet Explorer are absolute butt hole" Yes the build-in dev tools are not on par with the other browsers but I wouldn't say that Visual Studio is butt hole. I don't…
> Safari testing on Windows is "hard". For whatever reason Safari on Win can produce different outcomes than on Mac. FYI, all browsers can and do. That happens on Firefox and Chrome as well (though maybe less regularly)
You don't have comments on your blog, so I'll comment here: IE testing is "hard" on a Mac because of the vm requirement, yes. However, that's not even my main issue. If Microsoft facilitated having VMs of each windows installation + browser version available for that OS to developers, it'd still be "hard" but at least they'd be helping. IE only runs on Windows, so if you want to test for Windows you have a bunch of s…
> If Microsoft facilitated having VMs of each windows installation + browser version available for that OS to developers Which they do, they've been offering complete VM images with various combinations of Windows and IE for some time, the current offering is XP + IE6, Vista + IE7, Win7 + IE8 and Win7 + IE9: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157... While the images are for VirtualPC, I've yet t…
I've used the IEVMs project on github to install these VMs before; it failed. I'm trying it again as we speak, maybe it's a viable solution, maybe not.
> IE9's devtools are significantly better than IE8's: more feature and much more stability. They are nowhere near WDT/Firebug yet (or even Dragonfly), but they are a huge improvement over the POS that IE8's devtools are.
Obviously the problem here is that IE9 represents 25% of the currently in-use IE browsers and has (to quote rey bango, http://blog.reybango.com/2012/05/08/hey-paydirt-your-site-wo...) 35% world-wide Win7 marketshare, which as I saw somewhere (maybe arstechnica) only has 50% marketshare. So you're looking at ~17.5% give or take for other versions of windows running IE9, call it a conservative 25% adoption for all IEs across the web.
TL:DR; IE9 has a ways to go before it's new amazing developer tools are valued significantly. Until then, we're still stuck with IE6-8 ):
You make valid points; and the VMs available on their site should help testing availability. It's too bad that the debugging is still second-class and torture ):
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> Safari testing on Windows is "hard". For whatever reason Safari on Win can produce different outcomes than on Mac. FYI, all browsers can and do. That happens on Firefox and Chrome as well (though maybe less regularly)
I'd be curious what the market share of Safari is for Windows. I'd say it was so niche that it might not be worth the bother...
From what I understand, it's there more as a testing tool for developers using Windows than for any sort of market share, even on OSX Safari does not enjoy a tremendously high marketshare even though it's the bundled browser.
You don't have comments on your blog, so I'll comment here: IE testing is "hard" on a Mac because of the vm requirement, yes. However, that's not even my main issue. If Microsoft facilitated having VMs of each windows installation + browser version available for that OS to developers, it'd still be "hard" but at least they'd be helping. IE only runs on Windows, so if you want to test for Windows you have a bunch of s…
Has it occurred to you that at least you're legally allowed to virtualise Windows+IE for web development testing? On the Windows side of things, devs aren't even allowed to virtualise MacOS! And you complain about lack of options for Mac developers! Pot calling the kettle black?
Though, certainly a +1 for choosing Mac as your primarily development environment; as it can run all the other operating systems you'd care about (:
You don't have comments on your blog, so I'll comment here: IE testing is "hard" on a Mac because of the vm requirement, yes. However, that's not even my main issue. If Microsoft facilitated having VMs of each windows installation + browser version available for that OS to developers, it'd still be "hard" but at least they'd be helping. IE only runs on Windows, so if you want to test for Windows you have a bunch of s…
I'm not a html/css frontend developer so I don't need to test on IE too often, however, when I do I use Virtualbox with some different windows installations. Works like a charm. I have no experience with the development tools in IE8+ (I've been a Mac user for a while now), but I've been told they're pretty descent. I completely agree though, debugging in the older IE's is hell... But the thing is, the user couldn't c…