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Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

bartvanzon.com

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Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#111

Post by axefrog »

decode wrote: post #102
axefrog wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your blinders are industrial grade. Developing for Windows is in fact a pleasure. MS have more love for their development community than you realise, and this is reflected in the tools and technology they provide. .Net is incredible. Really. > IE 9 is only supported IN WINDOWS 7 Supporting WebKit in iOS requires me to BUY AN IPAD just to test properly! Supporting WebKit on Android requires me to buy an Android phone…

> PowerShell, the current standard shell for modern Windows version is really powerful. Get with the times. Do you actually use PowerShell as an interactive console on a daily basis? When I tried to learn it, it seemed powerful for scripting, but nearly impossible to use interactively. I ended up using bash under cygwin, because it seemed to be the best option available.

Yeah I use it most days. I use Console2 though (open source console window replacement), which removes some of the physical limitations I'd otherwise have to put up with.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#112

Post by robert_nsu »

skrebbel wrote: post #18

I really subscribe to the attitude in this post. We're developers, we're supposed to make decent software. Our users won't care whether it's our fault or somebody else's if the software doesn't work. Just like you don't go blaming the database if your app becomes slow, you shouldn't blame the browser for rendering your page wrong, even if you're right ! Dammit, we're grown ups here. Make decent software! Test it! Aut…

I agree. Or at the very least, identify what your users are using (in my case IE9 and webkit via iOS) and test accordingly. Granted I am only making things for internal consumption among a very small pool of users, but still If I decided to only test for Safari and Chrome, I need my teeth kicked in for being lazy.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#113

Post by iandanforth »

perssontm wrote: post #104
rickmb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to encourage my team to test better against IE by creating a nice setup on which they could easily use all relevant IE versions. After two days of struggling with all the insanity of Windows licensing, installing and the crap support for running older / multiple versions of IE I've seen more than enough of Microsoft for the next five years. Nothing has changed since 2000. Just setting up the tools for support…

Just get an account at www.crossbrowsertesting.com . I did around 2 years back I think, and its really convenient. you vnc to whatever os/browser combo you like and test it out. They have a demo for local testing as well, but I've always used a reverse ssh tunnel for that. Note, Im not affiliated with crossbrowsertesting.com in any way.

I have also enjoyed the Scout service from Saucelabs. It is a fully in-browser experience. They do all the VM work and stream you the screen.

Full Disclosure: I am friends with one of the founders and was in a promotional video for saucelabs.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#114

Post by jasonlotito »

rickmb wrote: post #96
axefrog wrote: post #3

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…

I tried to encourage my team to test better against IE by creating a nice setup on which they could easily use all relevant IE versions. After two days of struggling with all the insanity of Windows licensing, installing and the crap support for running older / multiple versions of IE I've seen more than enough of Microsoft for the next five years. Nothing has changed since 2000. Just setting up the tools for support…

It's not really difficult at all to test.

MS provides the virtual machines free of charge, and VirtualBox is free as well. That's everything you need to run and test in IE, from IE6 to IE9 right now.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#116

Post by jasonlotito »

stutter wrote: post #66
masklinn wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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 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 mo…

> 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.

The official ones work. I'm actually installing the IE7 version as we speak, IE8 and IE9 are running fine in VirtualBox.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#117

Post by ethermal »

nadvorny wrote: post #74
TazeTSchnitzel wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's not that IE9 is bad. It's that IE is not only IE9. It's IE7,8,9 and 10. Testing on all IE versions takes as much time as testing on all other browsers. They all have their unique issues. And you can't run all of them on one machine safely. And you usually use IE7 as the least common denominator, thus sacrificing functionality.

VMs run all of them crazy easily. And using unity you can have all versions on your desktop at once and open. I do it every day. My default browser is IE 9, so when i launch I always launch in IE 9 do all of my testing debugging there, almost never even look at another browser until it works 100% there. Then my browser for surfing is Opera, all others for testing.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#118

Post by base698 »

jasonlotito wrote: post #114
rickmb wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I tried to encourage my team to test better against IE by creating a nice setup on which they could easily use all relevant IE versions. After two days of struggling with all the insanity of Windows licensing, installing and the crap support for running older / multiple versions of IE I've seen more than enough of Microsoft for the next five years. Nothing has changed since 2000. Just setting up the tools for support…

It's not really difficult at all to test. MS provides the virtual machines free of charge, and VirtualBox is free as well. That's everything you need to run and test in IE, from IE6 to IE9 right now.

I used to have a beast of a machine with a VM for IE6 - 9. It was super easy to test all of them simultaneously.

In modern times however, I think when we try to support IE it will be 9 and higher. It's not that it's too much work, rather that IE 8 and lower users are hurting the internet.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#119

Post by ethermal »

masklinn wrote: post #45
stutter wrote: post #31

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…

IE9's debug tools are hands down the best at this point in time. Although Chrome's is cacthing up, pound for pound you will be far more productive in IE9s debug tools then firebug, dragon fly or any other at the moment. I think there is just too much bias at play here.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#120

Post by base698 »

skrebbel wrote: post #84
dlikhten wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a lot of FUD style arguments please let me elaborate: a) Developing on windows is absolutely attrocious. If MS wants me to develop on windows, PUT SOME FUCKING EFFORT INTO IT. b) Developing for Chrome, I support ALL operating systems. c) Developing for FF, I support ALL operating systems. d) Developing for Opera, I support ALL operating systems. e) Developing for Safari, I support OSX, Windows XP, Vista, 7, 8…

> a) Developing on windows is absolutely attrocious. If MS wants me to develop on windows, PUT SOME FUCKING EFFORT INTO IT. Eh? I guess you entirely missed out on the .NET Framework, Powershell, and recent Visual Studios. These are excellent dev tools, in ways the average Emacser will find hard to appreciate. (much in the way the average Visual Studio nerd will find a decent terminal hard to appreciate) From the rest…

Unix is the one with 70 character commands? Have you even seen Unix?

It's not a matter of taste, at all. Once you learn the language you can do quickly do anything. Hell you can refactor your entire source tree faster than someone can find the refactor button in their IDE.

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