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Dropped IE support for Instapaper

marco.org

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Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#61

Post by sprsquish »

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…

It absolutely is our job as engineers to change the world. We're the experts. We've done the research and have the evidence to support our positions. From there it's our duty to show the rest of the world the best solution for the problem. In this case I think the problem is number of developer cycles that go into IE compatibility. Imagine if all that time went to the actual product.

Often rubbing something in someone's face is the only way to evoke change. To degrade the experience and let the user know why it's been degraded gives them a clearer understanding of the problem. Being struck with the same problem enough times tends to get someone to act to solve it.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#62

Post by Hexstream »

rm999 wrote: post #57
nostrademons wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you adopt a strategy where you need to spend less time supporting IE idiocy, you'll have more time to spend working on making your site more user-friendly.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#63

Post by sam_in_nyc »

jasonkester wrote: post #54
SystemOut wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Voted up for developing Twiddla for IE.

I share your sentiment.. I develop against IE first then test it against the "good" browsers... which rarely screw it up. IE sucks for script debugging.. I mean EPIC suck. You're not even told what line of what file is screwed up (IE seems to concatenate everything into 1 file when giving the error report), but I've learned to rely on myself not to make common scripting mistakes, and created a cross-browser "console" object to aid in debugging.

Safari has the worst script debugging on the planet. It essentially tells you whether or not there was an error. Oh, wait... and how many errors, total. Thanks, Safari!

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#64

Post by noblethrasher »

jasonkester wrote: post #55
feverishaaron wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Not to mention that IE's box-model (in quirks-mode) is actually sane compared to the W3C standard.

see : http://books.google.com/books?id=ZCPWYFoWaMIC&pg=PA289&#...

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#65

Post by eli »

SystemOut wrote: post #51
nonrecursive wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Depends on how focused you are on corporate users and the undsutry. In some industries 30% of ALL traffic is IE6. That's trending down, but slowly. Perhaps 1 or 2 points a month.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#66

Post by nuclear_eclipse »

ciscoriordan wrote: post #19
dcurtis wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For those who are curious, here's the browser makeup of Hacker News traffic to all of my articles that have been on the front page here: http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/Browsers_-_Google_Analyt...

Does iPhone's Safari get categorized under Safari in that chart? If yes, you might want to separate it.

Google Analytics doesn't let you separate iPhone from Mac Safari, unless you specifically choose to look at Browser/OS pairs, in which case you get "Firefox / Linux", "Firefox / Windows", ... "Safari / Macintosh", "Safari / iPhone", etc.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#67

Post by bdotdub »

jasonkester wrote: post #55
feverishaaron wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Just because it's older doesn't mean that it should be the standard.

"Standards organizations" are there for a reason, so that issues like this wouldn't be so egregrious. Microsoft has had a while to fix it, and 8 years later far too many people are still using an old deprecated browser.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#68

Post by avocade »

This is what every sane web designer should do. I made this decision many years ago for a web based task manager I built with Ruby on Rails (43actions.com), and have never looked back.

Sure I got _a lot_ of negative comments for it (and still do), but in this particular case I definitely put my own sanity way ahead of the larger (but dwindling) market share.

Sorry to now be a bit inflammatory (this single question is one that boils my blood every time), but put simply IE sucks ass! IT SUCKS ASS! I _HATE_ IE. MICROSOFT HAS _ZERO TASTE_ (thanks Steve Jobs for that very early insight). Ok, enough said. Sorry.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#69

Post by jasonkester »

sam_in_nyc wrote: post #63
jasonkester wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Voted up for developing Twiddla for IE. I share your sentiment.. I develop against IE first then test it against the "good" browsers... which rarely screw it up. IE sucks for script debugging.. I mean EPIC suck. You're not even told what line of what file is screwed up (IE seems to concatenate everything into 1 file when giving the error report), but I've learned to rely on myself not to make common scripting mistake…

Get VS.NET, and suddenly IE has the best script debugging around. Firebug rocks and all, but VS.NET will drop you into a breakpoint will a full call stack, watch, step thru, etc. It's a proper debugger.

And yeah, it takes about the same level of effort to develop against IE as it does against FF. The advantage is that your stuff generally then works right in Firefox first try.

Re: Dropped IE support for Instapaper

#70

Post by jasonkester »

ken wrote: post #29
noblethrasher wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but it's not usually one bug. A bug here and a bug there and pretty soon you're talking about real money. IE7 isn't so bad but I'm seriously contemplating dropping support for IE6 very soon.

And it's not just bugs, but lack of features. For example, I have requirements for simple 2D graphics with client-side interactivity. If we only had to support Firefox/Safari/Opera/Chrome, we could use SVG, but for users with IE (which has neither SVG or Canvas), that means Flash. Doing simple graphics with Flash is well over 10x more work than just splatting some XML inline into your page (which I've also done for p…

You're mistaken. IE has had SVG support since IE5, long before Safari and Firefox introduced Canvas. And the nice kids at Google have built a little library that lets you emulate most Canvas functionality via SVG:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/iecanvas

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