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How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

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Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#41

Post by r00fus »

Hario wrote: post #10

I'm no expert on these sorts of things, but it seems like the story goes something like this: 1. Dev checks out his site using IE 2. Dev realizes that IE users were getting scary warnings about his software 3. Dev has to pay up money to a third company to make the scary warnings go away. Seems like a bad state of affairs to me.

So what's better? The App Store model, where you pay 30% + $99/year to sell your apps? Or paying for a certificate to prove your software's originator identity? Even OSX will likely soon make buying outside the Mac App Store cumbersome. About the only "free" market is Android or the Web.

I suppose if you're selling to the Windows market, the App Store will be required in a few years as Metro becomes the dominant Windows UI (and Metro apps have to be sold in the Microsoft App Store).

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#42

Post by DeanCollinsNYC »

Thats ok Twitter with their massive dev team and budget have had a massive IE8 scripting problem which is locking up any browser that tries to reply to a tweet (posting and retweeting works fine).

its day 35 and counting Twitter.

lol make me chuckle that not a single person over there is using IE8 abnd that these basic problems are not being picked up by their QA testing.

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#43

Post by jasomill »

redbeard0x0a wrote: post #15
jasomill wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gatekeeper is not nearly as bad for small developers, though. Unless Microsoft has started offering, as part of a $99 MSDN subscription, the ability to generate a signed certificate that doesn't expire for five years automatically from inside Visual Studio as soon as you've signed in with your Microsoft ID. The problem with Microsoft's strategy has always been the reliance on companies like VeriSign for whom recurrin…

Last I checked, you didn't even need the $99 Mac Developer program to get a signing certificate. You just needed an Apple Developer Id. The $99 program allows you to submit apps to the app store and gives you access to pre-release binaries, etc.

Even better — I was already a member of the paid program when Mountain Lion was announced, and this point wasn't clear from the original announcement.

Even more significant: as a registered developer, it took me less than ten minutes on developer.apple.com to obtain a Developer ID, to use it to successfully sign an executable and an installer package, and to verify the resulting signatures.

In contrast, as an MSDN Universal member, Microsoft directs me to a list of root certificates installed in current versions of Windows [1], leaving me to puzzle out which are willing and able to sign third-party code-signing certificates (as, presumably, organizations like the French Secrétariat Général de la Défense Nationale are not).

As an aside, the official copy of this list is posted on TechNet as an unlocked wiki page I'm permitted to edit!?!

[1] http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2...

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#44

Post by Turing_Machine »

SomeCallMeTim wrote: post #24
tomjen3 wrote: post #13

While that is nice to know, it still smells of Raketeering to me. "that is some nice software you have there, would be a shame if users thought it was dangerous" "pay a little money to one of these approved companies and that warning will go away" If MS was serious about this only being for security they could issue the certificates for free and prove me wrong. On the other hand, why is it that about 20% of users cli…

>If MS was serious about this only being for security they could issue the certificates for free and prove me wrong. Make it too easy, and the scamware software will just get a free cert and sign apps. It takes some amount of effort, possibly by a human, to approve you to receive a cert. Even the "free" certs I've applied for have taken time and human interaction on the side of the registrar, and I'm certain those ce…

Apple gives out free developer id certificates. There's no reason Microsoft couldn't do the same.

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#45

Post by batgaijin »

gmurphy wrote: post #9

In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understand…

I have an android 3. Never updated it, never customized anything.

This phone is so terribly broken and nonfundtional at times you wouldn't believe me.

I decided against focusing on android mobile dev (although I'm a gnu/linux gguy because the experience is so friggin terrible, and Google is just letting the carriers molest the users at this point.

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#46

Post by einhverfr »

justindocanto wrote: post #37
gmurphy wrote: post #9

In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understand…

5% of 'the market' does not translate to 5% of users on your site. Depending on the site's demographic, as a developer, I see approx 15% Mac users making up traffic. Not to mention an ADDITIONAL 25% iPhone users. That's an average of 40% of apple traffic on the sites I work on. Some of which are getting 30k - 60k hits a month. Obviously this isnt the same stats across the board on all websites... but It is by no mean…

Indeed. According to Google, something like 39% of viewers on my blog are running Windows and 9% are running IE. There are more Mac and Linux users together than there are Windows users....

Somehow I don't think this translates to the general market.

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#47

Post by jasomill »

qntmfred wrote: post #22

I was browsing HN on my WP7 and this link gave me a "We're having trouble with this site's security certificate" message

That's probably because the news.ycombinator.com certificate is rooted an Entrust certificate thumbprinted "‎50 30 06 ...", trusted by Windows [1] but not Windows Phone [2].

Yet another reason Apple's "one and only one way to do it" approach to code signing certificates may not be such a bad idea after all.

[1] http://social.technet.microsoft.com/wiki/contents/articles/2...

[2] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/gg521150(v=VS.92).as...

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#48

Post by keithnoizu »

Although ~half of your revenue came from the IE users the numbers may not significantly improve after resolving this issue as the ie users that completed downloads are also the IE users invested enough in the application to download it despite the ie warning.

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#49

Post by CamperBob2 »

ascendant wrote: post #29
CamperBob2 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd love to hear how this isn't grounds for a product disparagement lawsuit. Are any attorneys familiar with SmartScreen Filter? A couple of relevant points that may be overlooked: 1) Signing your code, even with an expensive class-3 Authenticode certificate from Verisign that allows you to sign kernel drivers, is no guarantee that IE will not accuse you of distributing potential malware. 2) Contrary to various posti…

Do you have a better idea? Signature-based malware scanning is a joke and a half. I know CA"s can be gamed but unless you're proposing a better solution then don't complain.

Yes; they can do what they're doing now, but drop the scary language. Scaring users with non-specific threatening language does not enlighten them.

Since it's almost unheard-of for malware to be signed with a legitimate, unrevoked certificate, they could also afford to give signed executables much greater leeway when deciding what to report to the user. People seem to be assuming that signing the .exe is enough to keep the dire warnings from appearing. That is not the case, or at least it wasn't the case a few months ago.

Finally, they can provide a standardized method for whitelisting URLs (and not individual executables) instead of what they're doing now, which is apparently nothing.

Re: How not using Internet Explorer put me out of touch and cost me dearly

#50

Post by CrazedGeek »

batgaijin wrote: post #45
gmurphy wrote: post #9

In general, not using the platform your users use is a path to trouble. For example, because so many designers in the valley use Macs, we continually have to fight an OS X bias in our design process; when designing something, you tend to calibrate it against what you're used to, but when OS X is only 5% of the market, OS X-based designers of client software end up with a massive blind spot when it comes to understand…

I have an android 3. Never updated it, never customized anything. This phone is so terribly broken and nonfundtional at times you wouldn't believe me. I decided against focusing on android mobile dev (although I'm a gnu/linux gguy because the experience is so friggin terrible, and Google is just letting the carriers molest the users at this point.

Considering that Android 3.0 was never on phones...

If you mean Gingerbread (2.3), it was always rock solid when I used it. So no, I don't believe you.

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