Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE • Hacker News Board

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#101

Post by eropple » Tue, May 08, 2012, 11:28 PM UTC

politician wrote: post #18

josefresco wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem really is that they are lumping ALL IE users into one "incompatible bucket" irregardless of the version and features supported. There's no need to get religious here, just support the browsers that have the features your web app needs.

You're talking about feature testing and progressive enhancement. Adopting that strategy doesn't mean that you no longer have to test every browser, it just means that you don't support a common level of functionality across browsers. Indeed, you'll still end up testing all the browsers all of the time, just with different expectations. These guys have been burned by IE to the point where they don't want to test it p…

> These guys have been burned by IE to the point where they don't want to test it period.

Alternate Character Interpretation: they want some hits from HN because "look at us, we don't support IE!!!".

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#102

Post by rbanffy » Tue, May 08, 2012, 11:34 PM UTC

jneen wrote: post #69

rbanffy wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AFAIK, Internet Explorer 10 user agent string starts with "Mozilla" ;-)

Most user-agent strings start with "Mozilla". It's a quirk from the very weird history of the user-agent string. http://webaim.org/blog/user-agent-string-history/

That doesn't change the fact IE started its life by pretending to be Netscape.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#103

Post by MicroAndMacro » Tue, May 08, 2012, 11:34 PM UTC

billpatrianakos wrote: post #97

It's easy to say IE9+ works but in the real world people aren't upgrading their version of IE like users of other browsers tend to do. While IE9 and above are much better than their predecessors by a long shot they still require you to jump through more hoops compared to any other browser. IE9 supports gradients but you have to feed it so,e conditional CSS for it to work as expected. Overall it's misleading to say "I…

Bill. Just wanted to let you know that Microsoft has been auto-updating all users that have opted into MS updates on their Windows machines since January. A majority of XP users should now be on IE8, all other Windows machines should have IE9. http://www.geek.com/articles/geek-pick/microsoft-decides-to-...

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#104

Post by rwallace » Tue, May 08, 2012, 11:38 PM UTC

billpatrianakos wrote: post #97

It's easy to say IE9+ works but in the real world people aren't upgrading their version of IE like users of other browsers tend to do. While IE9 and above are much better than their predecessors by a long shot they still require you to jump through more hoops compared to any other browser. IE9 supports gradients but you have to feed it so,e conditional CSS for it to work as expected. Overall it's misleading to say "I…

Be that as it may, it remains the case that the right solution is "we don't support older versions of IE" (unless the client is willing to pay extra for that of course), not "we don't support IE at all". In the real world, you get much better reactions from telling people "we don't support the old versions, you need to upgrade" than from "we're on a crusade against your platform in its entirety". This remains true _whether or not_ the people in question are willing to upgrade just yet.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#105

Post by ricardobeat » Tue, May 08, 2012, 11:55 PM UTC

jneen wrote: post #72

If I, as a developer, decide my site supports a browser, I know I'm going to have to spend some time doing QA on that browser. Standards are cool, but I've run into enough FF and Chrome bugs that I always test. That being said, the cost of testing in IE is waaay higher than the cost of testing in FF and Chrome. Why? Because FF and Chrome are cross-platform, I and my fellow developers can test on our OS of choice. Wit…

We just keep a couple spare, old win laptops around for testing on IE. They have Win7 with IE9, plus VMs for Also, neither Chrome, Safari or Firefox behave exactly the same on win/mac/linux. Delicate layouts and javascript-heavy apps still have to be tested.

IE9 has a large share of the web, and is still growing. It's a perfectly ok browser (except for lack of WebGL). Not supporting it or adding a "not optimized for..." message reeks of "Optimized for 800x600" in the old days. Users shouldn't have to pay the toll.

And please, if you are going to do this, do not block browsers by UA. Show a warning, whatever, but just don't lock them out. It's annoying.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#106

Post by Karunamon » Tue, May 08, 2012, 11:57 PM UTC

OllieJones wrote: post #93

Karunamon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Until Microsoft gets IE 9 and 10 adoption up I'm not sure that's something Microsoft can do. See for example the amount of XP deployments out there. Tell people that it's unsupported, no security updates, whatever. Enterprise customers and home customers who are terrified of change will not do it . Part of me wishes MS forced updates like these. Sure it would probably break a few ancient mission critical ActiveX ap…

> Part of me wishes MS forced updates like these. > Sure it would probably break a few ancient > mission critical ActiveX apps, and > my god the outcry would be immense and furious, > but it would be better for everyone in the long run YOU tell the famous doctors in hospitals you're going to break the medical-imaging app they use that depends on IE6. I'M not telling them that. Seriously. It's not as simple as ripping…

I never said it was simple. In fact, it'll be anything but. On top of that, what the hell is a life-critical app doing connected to the internet and pulling down windows updates anyways?

What I would do optimally is put down a drop dead date, say two years in the future. "On this date, any computers connected to Windows Update directly will be updated to IE10. This is not optional".

Vendors then have two years to get their poop in a group. If they still don't get it done, customers can complain to the vendors. What are they going to do, migrate to Linux?

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#107

Post by ilaksh » Tue, May 08, 2012, 11:59 PM UTC

IE9 may have caught up on some things, but there are a lot of things it doesn't do, that Safari/Chrome and Firefox (as well as Opera in most cases) do do. So even if it might not be quite as hard now to get it to layout properly (it still is not the same as Chrome/Safari/Firefox/Opera, really, things just don't behave the same unless you train yourself to avoid things that IE9 doesn't like), there are lots of other reasons to avoid IE:

■ WebGL (3D) ■ WebSockets ■ HTML5 Forms (validation mechanism, CSS3 selectors) ■ FormData ■ HTML5 multifile-upload ■ HTML5 video (only with certain file formats) ■ CSS3 Transitions (for animations) ■ CSS3 Text Shadow ■ CSS3 Gradients ■ CSS3 Border Image ■ CSS3 Flex box model ■ Application Cache (offline) ■ Web Workers (threads in JavaScript) ■ Drag’n Drop from Desktop ■ SMIL Animations (SVG animations) ■ File API ■ JavaScript Strict Mode ■ ForeignObject (embed external content in SVG) ■ ClassList APIs ■ HTML5 History API

Why are most of these features either already implemented in other browsers or available in development versions, but completely missing from Internet Explorer? Why haven't more of these features made it into the hands of Windows users? Its not because Microsoft can't figure out how to implement or deploy these features. Its because the web platform is fundamentally antagonistic to Microsoft's business model with its dominant Windows monopoly on business software, PC games and operating system deployment.

Those features which enhance the web browser to make it most competitive with the desktop MUST not be deployed to Windows users any faster than absolutely necessary. It is an absolute business imperative for Microsoft to drag its feet and disrupt the web platform as much as it possibly can, because when all web browsers have web workers, 3D WebGL, WebSockets, File API, Gradients, Drag and Drop, HTML5 forms etc., it simply won't make business sense to write applications specific to Microsoft's platform. Pretty soon after that happens, it won't make sense to continue the Windows and Office licensing lock-in.

So the relationship between a web developer (who understands the nature of the web platform) and Microsoft is fundamentally antagonistic.

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#108

Post by ricardobeat » Wed, May 09, 2012, 12:01 AM UTC

toast76 wrote: post #53

tnorthcutt wrote: post #25

They were using many CSS3 features supported since IE9, like transforms & border-radius, but just not adding the –ms vendor prefix entry They had the “-ms” prefix for CSS3 gradients which was added in IE10 They added support for -khtml-box-shadow but not -ms-box-shadow??? They didn’t support Opera either unfortunately All this crap recently about web standards and Opera adopting the webkit prefix and how bad some peo…

I think you'll find that they're using LESS or SASS or something. Such that when you define a box shadow that it produces the appropriate CSS for each respective browser.

Neither adds that automatically, you define the prefixes yourself (or use a framework that does).

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#109

Post by biot » Wed, May 09, 2012, 12:01 AM UTC

mistercow wrote: post #94

rpeden wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seems to me there has, for a long time, been a double standard when MS is involved. The response I often see is: Something non-standard but cool in IE? "Screw MS, they're trying to embrace and extend the web!" Something non-standard but cool in another browser? "I don't understand why people are complaining! Good ideas like these eventually become standards, and this is how innovation happens!"

There is no double standard. If any single browser had the marketshare that IE had in its heyday, it would be irresponsible and anticompetitive for them to implement nonstandard features. But marketshare is spread much more evenly among the players today, so it's pretty much understood that a production site cannot rely on a browser-specific feature. Hell, most people don't even rely on modern standard features becau…

You might have a fair point regarding things like ActiveX which only work on Microsoft's own platform and serve to further lock-in to Windows. However, as was pointed out above, XMLHttpRequest is one such nonstandard feature that Microsoft introduced. How is that feature irresponsible and anticompetitive?

Re: Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

#110

Post by recoiledsnake » Wed, May 09, 2012, 12:02 AM UTC

snowwrestler wrote: post #84

recoiledsnake wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I use Opera as my main browser and I cringe when clicking on a link in HN which supposedly shows off usage of cool new features in HTML/CSS/JS/WebGL whatever. Then I hunt around the site which breaks on me with no message. Then have to trawl through the HN comments to realize that it only works in Chrome and no one bothers to put that in the headline or on the site. Note that this happens to lots of Google cool featu…

Honest question, and I promise I'm not trying to be antagonistic: why do that to yourself? Why not Chrome or Safari or even Firefox? Why keep using Opera at all?

Because I've been using it for 10+ years and I like that it's lightweight. I do have Chrome and Firefox installed and used to use Chrome for a while on my laptop, but got drawn back to Opera. Opera also handles tens of tabs easily with lower memory than Chrome or FF.

>why do that to yourself

All the sites I regularly visit work properly in Opera, and I don't think it's worth it to switch my browser of choice just to see a HTML5 or WebGL demo on HN.