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Dropped IE support for Instapaper

marco.org

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Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#51

Post by SystemOut »

nonrecursive wrote: post #41
SystemOut wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the post? He said less than 10% of his traffic is IE6. I'd say he is making the right call based on those demographics. When you look at resource decisions you have to look at the target market...and somehow I don't think it's corporate. If he was targeting corporate users he'd probably also build a Crackberry app. And your 40% is just way off base unless you're writing salesforce.com apps or something l…

I think eli was replying to the parent comment, not commenting on the article. Also, 40% of 2/3 is about 26% of the whole, which I wouldn't call "wildly off base" even for your site.

I said 20% of our IE traffic is IE6 which is 20% of 70% which is more like 14% so that would be a pretty large deviation from 26% when I'm trying to determine where to put resources. When you factor in trending over the next 6 months you have to realize that number is going to drop probably another 5-10% of overall traffic.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#52

Post by baddle »

pj wrote: post #49
swombat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"build /one/" has proven time and again to be a failing strategy if you want that /one/ to be any good.

Not true. We have /one/ interstate system. We have /one/ electric grid. We have /one/ internet. Most people have one water/sewer system. These things have worked fine for many years. Just extrapolate the situation from what it is to where it would be if there were 100 browsers and they all worked differently. /Then/ how productive would developers be? Look at the recent post from instapaper not supporting IE anymore.…

You can use asterisks to make italics.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#53

Post by pj »

baddle wrote: post #52
pj wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not true. We have /one/ interstate system. We have /one/ electric grid. We have /one/ internet. Most people have one water/sewer system. These things have worked fine for many years. Just extrapolate the situation from what it is to where it would be if there were 100 browsers and they all worked differently. /Then/ how productive would developers be? Look at the recent post from instapaper not supporting IE anymore.…

You can use asterisks to make italics .

The asterisk requires 2 keys, SHIFT+8, the / requires one key, so I use that. Plus, the slanted nature of the / implies that everything between them should be slanted.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#54

Post by jasonkester »

SystemOut wrote: post #35
jasonkester wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30% cost to support 70% of your userbase seems like a win to me. This is only an issue for developers who target Firefox initially. That's the wrong way to go about web development. Run IE7 on your dev box and build everything against it. That's what your users will have, so that should be your first priority. Step two is making it work for FF. The added benefit to that approach is that you'll find less cross platfor…

But IE6 isn't 70% of your userbase. Maybe 70% of your userbase is IE but only maybe 20-25% of that is IE6 so spending 30% more time/resources on IE6 is what I would call a major fail. But hey, that's just me. And have you ever tried to develop complex ui sites on IE? I'm sorry...it just sucks and there is no good way around that. And I'm someone who knows IE6/7 quirks pretty good. Their script debuggers are utter cra…

Yes. I developed the most complex UI site I've ever seen, Twiddla, on IE first followed by Firefox.

I never understood all the IE hate, to be honest. Until Chrome came out, I used IE7 as my daily browser. It's just better than Firefox in my opinion.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#55

Post by jasonkester »

feverishaaron wrote: post #25
jasonkester wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

30% cost to support 70% of your userbase seems like a win to me. This is only an issue for developers who target Firefox initially. That's the wrong way to go about web development. Run IE7 on your dev box and build everything against it. That's what your users will have, so that should be your first priority. Step two is making it work for FF. The added benefit to that approach is that you'll find less cross platfor…

I disagree. IE is the moving target. If you want maintainable code, it is best to build to standards, then hack to IE with conditionals.

IE has had the same box model since 1995. It is, and always has been the standard.

If you recall, Netscape used that same box model until version 6. So if you'd like to look for a point where standards were broken, look to W3C and Mozilla. It's certainly not Microsoft's fault that the "standards" organization decided to change the fundamental way things are rendered in a browser.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#56

Post by weavejester »

pj wrote: post #49
swombat wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"build /one/" has proven time and again to be a failing strategy if you want that /one/ to be any good.

Not true. We have /one/ interstate system. We have /one/ electric grid. We have /one/ internet. Most people have one water/sewer system. These things have worked fine for many years. Just extrapolate the situation from what it is to where it would be if there were 100 browsers and they all worked differently. /Then/ how productive would developers be? Look at the recent post from instapaper not supporting IE anymore.…

We have one internet, but it's made up of many privately owned networks. We have one electric grid, but electricity is generated by a number of companies. Your examples show that having a single standard is good, not necessarily that a single product is good.

A single browser is a bad idea for several reasons. Firstly, there would be an inclination toward being very conservative. If you make a breaking change, you break every site on the web. If you implement a new feature, you'd better be sure it's the right feature, or be stuck with it for a good many years to come. If you have a bug, fixing it could break sites that rely on that bug for rendering.

Conversely, if you have several browsers in the market, each can afford to try out different things. Opera has done a lot with SVG; Safari has added a lot of custom CSS effects; Firefox is doing some interesting work with inline videos and faster Javascript.

Secondly, different browsers fit different niches that aren't necessarily compatible. Do you make your uberbrowser fast and lean? Or plug in a lot of extensions? Add a mail client? A bittorrent client? Should you have a smart address bar? Something that integrates well with a particular OS? Something that can be run on a phone? Or a console? Or a PC? Or a netbook?

Third, I'm not aware of any software product that has been written in a competition-free enviroment and has turned out to be any good.

Fourth, the state of standard support in browsers generally isn't that bad. If your site works in Firefox, it probably works in Safari and Opera as well. I have very little problems when it comes to cross-browser support... except when it comes to IE. I don't presume to speak for everyone here, but 99% of all my browser headaches in the last few years can be laid squarely at the door of Microsoft.

In other words, the root of most browser woes is due to IE, which web developers support because it has a majority market share, a market share maintained by Microsoft's rather anti-competitive practise of bundling it's browser with its OS. We didn't get into this mess by having too much competition; we got into it by having too little.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#57

Post by rm999 »

nostrademons wrote: post #22
rm999 wrote: post #15

This article seems like an excuse to criticize IE. "Instapaper is severely degraded in this browser" is fine. "... because IE does not support basic web standards" comes off as catty. I understand the frustration that IE isn't fully compatible, but as engineers it's not our job to change the world to suit our own needs; we shouldn't be converting users to a different architecture or web browser. IMO, 10% is a lot of…

Perhaps I'm just bitter because I've been doing mostly IE compatibility stuff at work lately, but "because IE does not support basic web standards" does not seem all that inaccurate to me.

Of course it's true, but why would joe six pack user care? It's not user friendly.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#58

Post by MarcoArment »

Thanks for all of the discussion, everyone. To help clarify my argument, I've published Instapaper's browser usage stats from February as reported by Google Analytics:

http://www.marco.org/83217369

Internet Explorer was used for 3.63% of visits to the site during the month before I made this change.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#59

Post by sam_in_nyc »

brk wrote: post #40
sam_in_nyc wrote: post #30

I'm under the impression that this site doesn't do all that much. Ok... you store URLs, then mark them as "read" and "unread." Not necessarily a good or bad thing.. I'm sure it's incredibly useful. That's not my point. My point is, how can a 2 page website drop support for a whole browser? Just seems like laziness to me.

I think he did a pretty good job explaining why he made the choice to drop support for IE in TFA.

I read: author wanted to make his website pretty, but IE was making it hard, especially since he was developing on a Mac which made it harder to test, so author dropped support for IE. Author then explains less than 10% of his users use IE, anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Sparks browser war.

While I admit, IE really blows, and I hate developing for it, it's really not that bad. It's manageable if you test on it often, which author failed to do. Is it hard to make a 9 cell table to get rounded corners? Or how about learning "hasLayout" which fixes virtually every IE6+ css rendering bug?

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#60

Post by sprsquish »

sam_in_nyc wrote: post #59
brk wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think he did a pretty good job explaining why he made the choice to drop support for IE in TFA.

I read: author wanted to make his website pretty, but IE was making it hard, especially since he was developing on a Mac which made it harder to test, so author dropped support for IE. Author then explains less than 10% of his users use IE, anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Sparks browser war. While I admit, IE really blows, and I hate developing for it, it's really not that bad. It's manageable if you test on it…

I think Marco's point was that he's created this site as a fun side project. Supporting IE isn't fun. The vast majority of the site's users aren't IE users so he wont get a lot of flack from its users.

I agree that developing for IE isn't the worst thing ever, but it's certainly not fun. I have to side with Marco on this, if I were to build a site just for fun, I'd probably never look at it in IE.

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