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Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

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Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#21

Post by JeffJenkins »

StavrosK wrote: post #15
JeffJenkins wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you know whether it was not supporting IE and a broken bookmarklet that caused your IE numbers to be so low? If I used IE and your service had a poor experience I'd probably use another bookmarking service. edit: also, if the service is still new, you might largely be getting early adopters and not supporting IE could inhibit growth.

We do support IE now, so those numbers should start to stabilise, but still, the percentage is very low. It probably is early adopters we're getting, but I don't think there's a way for the bookmarklet to work with IE in the way it works with other browsers. I've tried disabling all security settings, but IE still won't allow JS access to the iframe.

I did a quick test with google's "Note In Reader" bookmarklet in IE8. The first time I clicked it I got an error about a pop-up being blocked. I clicked to allow the pop-up (which caused the page to refresh) and then it seems to have worked. It brought up a pop-up window which let me add a comment on the page I was on. It's definitely functional, but not ideal.

Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#22

Post by jaspero »

shimonamit wrote: post #16

It all depends on your market. You can't ignore IE if your customers are on locked down, corporate workstations with guerrilla IT departments dictating IE only. Know your market, then decide accordingly.

I agree, but the author says they build for 'tech' companies and they want the product out the door fast. In that case, I would care less about IE when the market is around 2%. IMO you can gracefully decrease your support for IE when the traffic is below 10%. The amount of work you do to make your sites work of IE does not justify for the 10%. Just my opinion.

Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#23

Post by patio11 »

jbyers wrote: post #2

The inverse is sadly still true. 49.61% of our visitors used IE in the last 30 days. 10M+ uniques, predominantly users in schools.

My customers also remain committed to the "blue Googles."

There are blue Googles and green Googles. The blue Googles and green Googles can't talk to each other. This is why you need to use only your school website number to sign into BCC when you're on the blue Googles but you should use your AOL website number to sign in when you're on the green Googles.

Technical support in non-technical markets often involves very interesting forensic reconstruction of customer mental models.

Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#24

Post by StavrosK »

JeffJenkins wrote: post #21
StavrosK wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do support IE now, so those numbers should start to stabilise, but still, the percentage is very low. It probably is early adopters we're getting, but I don't think there's a way for the bookmarklet to work with IE in the way it works with other browsers. I've tried disabling all security settings, but IE still won't allow JS access to the iframe.

I did a quick test with google's "Note In Reader" bookmarklet in IE8. The first time I clicked it I got an error about a pop-up being blocked. I clicked to allow the pop-up (which caused the page to refresh) and then it seems to have worked. It brought up a pop-up window which let me add a comment on the page I was on. It's definitely functional, but not ideal.

Hmm, I wonder how they did that. Maybe the popup has different permissions than the iframe, or maybe they pass the selected text. Unfortunately, their code is obfuscated, but thanks for the tip.

Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#25

Post by sharan »

wccrawford wrote: post #6

'Tech' is just too broad. If you're developing for KDE, then ignoring IE is very safe. If you're developing an addon for Visual Studio, then I'd probably not ignore IE. For a generic 'tech' answer, I'd make sure the basic functionality works on IE, if ugly, and concentrate on Firefox and Chrome. (And if you do, Opera and Safari usually work without changes.)

In the same vein, this applies to demographics outside the 'Tech' world too. We build several products for a film festival market. Our support for IE is very product specific even within this niche domain and not something you would risk generalizing without testing the hypothesis out yourself.

For example, two of our products are (i) A film submission form field and (ii) A schedule for the screenings at the festival.

With basic IE support for both, we noticed In hindsight this makes sense. Most people submitting films are the filmmakers or their crew- think Apple's primary target market, hence Safari and FF is what we see a lot of. We've stopped incremental updates for IE on the submission form as long as it remains functional.

However, people looking at schedules are at their enterprise jobs possibly in Phoenix during the day and trying to figure out what films to catch after work. That might explain the high prevalence of IE.

While it is obvious in hindsight, these are not assumptions I would be willing to make without looking at hard data specific to my product. Regardless of whether it's Tech or Filmmaker centric.

Edit: Clarity.

Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#26

Post by lwhi »

If the majority of people used IE, would that be a good reason to forget about supporting other browsers?

I'd say it wouldn't; I reckon content produced for the web should always allow people the freedom to choose how they view it.

Not supporting IE6 is something I could maybe understand - but forgetting about IE7 and IE8, because of time constraints, is a maybe bit lazy.

It's not that difficult to use principles of progressive enhancement and a CSS resets script to iron out inconsistencies.

Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#28

Post by spanktheuser »

It depends on your target market. My start-up, http://www.MORExchange.com, targets mortgage borrowers. Real estate agents are an important referral channel.

We're currently in an invite-only beta. But among our few hundred users, we're definitely seeing a skew towards Firefox / Webkit and away from IE. That said, the combined versions of IE are still 40% of our traffic. And I'm fairly convinced that IE share will grow as our product enters open registration.

That said, we decided to abandon IE 6 support during development. Metrics so far indicate that this was the right decision. We're only seeing 2% of our requests coming from that abomination.

We're also not doing anything special for IE 7 & 8. They get the uglified version of the UI sans opacity, drop shadows, gradients, rounded corners, etc. I'm setting up analytics right now to see if browser version affects our conversion rate. I'm betting it doesn't.

Of course, we're not doing anything terribly unusual. We have no burning need for the canvas element, for example. So supporting IE 7 & 8 hasn't been terrible for us. I'd imagine that's a significant limitation for other start-ups.

We're also a traditionally funded company. So we have the luxury of being a bit more ambitious with our initial product. If we were bootstrapping and attempting to find customer fit, I'd probably just target the latest Firefox / Webkit.

Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#29

Post by bobds »

catshirt wrote: post #19
bobds wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you think Chrome usage at 40% is not bogus? I agree that your own stats are the best source, but not when you've only been public for less than a month and half your audience is coming from the likes of HN and Techcrunch.

As a blog directed towards programmers, I have to ask what your visitor browser breakdown is; I don't know why you'd think 40% is bogus for this type of audience.

If you mean my personal blog, Chrome is at ~15%, less than IE. It's only been up for 2 months though, so I wouldn't put much trust in my stats.

I think it's bogus because global Chrome usage is around 10%, according to the sources I linked to above. The fact that 40% of their visitors use Chrome now, does not mean that their potential future visitors will match that statistic.

Discounting a lot of future users that use IE based on one month's worth of analytics is madness.

Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE

#30

Post by smithbits »

When launching a new version of our website earlier this year we ran the numbers for the previous six months and found that 10% of our sales were not only IE, but IE 6. We're a small manufacturer that sells direct to customers and that 10% more than covered the extra time developing and testing for IE6. There was nothing sexy about the task, but none of use were willing to walk away from 10% of our sales.
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