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Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

bartvanzon.com

131–140 of 176 posts

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#131
One thing, many of these anti-IE articles seem to ignore is business outside of the United States.

We are a global business and China's most popular browser (at least with users hitting our site) seems to be Maxthon which is based on the Trident rendering engine (which of course is what IE uses). This makes it nearly impossible for us to ever consider cutting off IE support unless we wanted to neglect one of our largest growing user-bases in the world.

Make sure you seriously consider which parts of the world your app could potentially be used in and do the research to find out what browsers they use in that area.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#132
The web is a platform like any other. Supporting IE takes testing and development time and more importantly SUPPORT time.

So why block IE users and not just let them fend for themselves since you don't "support" it? Because you're still going to get people trying to use your site in IE. They're going to send you support emails and they're going to complain to people about your shitty app not working. That costs time, money, and reputation.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#133

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. This declaration needs a huge bold flashing caveat: developing on windows for windows is a pleasure, Microsoft provides excellent development tools, helps, documentation and contact points for its ecosystem and usually goes multiple extra miles to be helpful to their developer community. If you…

> The (huge) sticking point is cross-platform development and work on Windows.

It's still pretty good thanks to the work the Xamarin guys have done.

We have a large .NET code based developed on Windows for Windows and out of curiosity once we tried to compile under Mono. We were expecting hundreds of issues and we ended up with only a few errors and if I'm not mistaken I believe it had to do with some of the file based handling code we had. Granted we never fixed those and attempted to run it, but I think they've done some amazing work.

Even now, one of the only ways (maybe the only?) to build a re-usable library for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone 7 is to build .Net library that compiles under Mono.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or it's the truth and his ~450 projects have been of low to medium css/js complexity. Or even high complexity and he got really, really, really lucky.

I'd say 80% of all projects were done within 24hrs (standard delivery time) while other projects were 40-page multy-style apps (mostly custom "CRM" solutions). Heck, I even had requests do make the markup IE6-only.

So in other words your apps mostly involved rendering text to a page and letting form submissions edit the database. Which explains why IE support is incredibly easy for you.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I sincerely hope this is a joke. If it isn't, can you demonstrate where IE9 is objectively better than Chrome or Firebug? Because I can do the opposite. As a quick example, IE9 won't let you inspect elements inside of an iframe dynamically generated with JavaScript.

I've got a simpler one: you can't inspect an element on the console, it's going to print the first 10 properties (as a string, so you can't actually see their value when they're an object or an array) then it tells you to add the object to your watch (in a sub-tab of a different tab) to explore the rest.

In fact the console in general is still garbage, they improved support for the console API but still only handles barely half of it (no group/groupEnd, no time/timeEnd, no count, no trace, ...); the console does not understand (and is useless for) DOM objects (let alone jQuery objects); console API calls refuse to link to their source line; ...

Then there's the DOM inspector which will fail to display JS-generated DOM[0] and provides no way to edit the DOM live (beyond attributes, woot, attributes) (let alone put inspectors/breakpoints on DOM changes) and provides no way to see what events are bound on a node, or the network log which is a mess of useless tabs and the last network log to not know about JSON, or the javascript source/debugger which provides no way to jump to a given line (let alone a given function) and takes pain to split all useful information across 5 different tabs to ensure it's never possible to eyeball the situation you're in.

And that's 5mn into opening the thing. God, I can hardly believe somebody would state IE9's debug tools are good, they're not even remotely a match for Dragonfly, let alone Firebug or the WDT/CDT.

[0] super awesome when combined with applications which generate all of their DOM via code.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a) Developing on windows is absolutely attrocious. If MS wants me to develop on windows, PUT SOME FUCKING EFFORT INTO IT. This declaration needs a huge bold flashing caveat: developing on windows for windows is a pleasure, Microsoft provides excellent development tools, helps, documentation and contact points for its ecosystem and usually goes multiple extra miles to be helpful to their developer community. If you…

> The (huge) sticking point is cross-platform development and work on Windows. It's still pretty good thanks to the work the Xamarin guys have done. We have a large .NET code based developed on Windows for Windows and out of curiosity once we tried to compile under Mono. We were expecting hundreds of issues and we ended up with only a few errors and if I'm not mistaken I believe it had to do with some of the file bas…

Well that's a bit of a special case, you're talking about cross-platform from windows using tools (Mono) developed pretty much specifically for that purpose.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#138
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…

What I have trouble with is why that's valid when on the reverse side of the coin, one must literally buy Apple hardware to test in an Apple environment.

Safari is available for Windows. If developers were running Windows they could test IE, Chrome, FireFox and Safari all at once.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#139
post #79

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…

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…

You don't have to buy an Android phone to debug Android webkit. Just get the toolkit and run the emulator. (Which is a bit slow unless you install an x86 image and Intel HAXM).

The same applies for Apple, you just have to download their SDK and use their Simulator - though that requires Apple hardware.

Re: Supporting IE Is Too Much Work

#140
post #79

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…

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…

You can run an emulator for both the iPad/iPhone iOS stuff on top of an Apple Mac OS X machine, same with the Android development environment. At that point you can test your website using WebKit on a "mobile" device without actually owning a mobile device.
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