That's a ridiculous overgeneralization. You need metrics for your own site, you need to know the expectations of your users, you need to judge how much time and effort supporting IE will take for your app, etc.
Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
31–40 of 62 posts
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#32I can tell you this is also true for historious, Chrome is at 46%, Firefox 27%, Safari 20% and IE 3%. Opera is 1.8%, but that's probably all me :( We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users. Hell, until very recently, our bookmarklet didn't work with IE (some XSS security settings? We never figured it out), but now it eschews the nice overlay it uses for other browsers an…
> We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users.
I totally understand and agree with this sentiment. I do find it rather ironic, however, that developers today are using the same arguments for ignoring IE that were used for ignoring Firefox users 5+ years ago. Firefox users made a huge fuss about sites that were IE-only, and now many of those same users are returning the favor.
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#33Minecraft forum and wiki have 60m page views a month, 13% are Internet Explorer: http://i.imgur.com/m1WVO.jpg
I figured this might be interesting for some of you, although we're less technology...
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#34I made the decision to go ahead and use tech IE doesn't yet support in my app. I'll see how it works out in the end but currently I have users all over the world and none of them complained about this. In fact to be able to use some of the features they have to install a webgl enable browser which hasn't been an issue for my users either.
My users are scientist and researchers, but not all of them are completely computer literate. I hand hold them a little bit with the setup.
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#35The 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…
Could you elaborate? are these googles browsers, or something else? what cant they talk to each other? Thanks.
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#36I made the decision to go ahead and use tech IE doesn't yet support in my app. I'll see how it works out in the end but currently I have users all over the world and none of them complained about this. In fact to be able to use some of the features they have to install a webgl enable browser which hasn't been an issue for my users either. My users are scientist and researchers, but not all of them are completely comp…
The problem might be that a lot of users silently drop out if you don't support IE properly.
Part of my user base is also scientists and researchers, so I'm curious what your app or website is.
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 u…
It's not just a statistics problem, it's also a logic problem. I don't think it's in poor judgement to assume their audience, given their function and distribution channels, are largely Chrome and Firefox.
The key part of this post is that it is directed to startups. They're not suggesting they should dismiss IE users forever, but like many comments say it is about delegating resources properly where they matter.
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#38I made the decision to go ahead and use tech IE doesn't yet support in my app. I'll see how it works out in the end but currently I have users all over the world and none of them complained about this. In fact to be able to use some of the features they have to install a webgl enable browser which hasn't been an issue for my users either. My users are scientist and researchers, but not all of them are completely comp…
The problem might be that a lot of users silently drop out if you don't support IE properly. Part of my user base is also scientists and researchers, so I'm curious what your app or website is.
It's a 3D visualization app for a neuroimaging dataset(can't say much more, should be public soon). We wanted to make that dataset available online to a lot of users and provide a good interface to use it. I started building it with O3D which provided a plugin for IE and really good performance but now that Google moved O3d to WebGL I followed. I'd love to support IE but that's not possible with the current tech and WebGL has served us well so I we won't abandon it just for IE.
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Could you elaborate? are these googles browsers, or something else? what cant they talk to each other? Thanks.
A guess (until Patric comes back): the blue Googles is the internet explorer icon, which is used to start Google (really go Googles website). The green Googles is what ever the hell people use to sign into AOL with, they can't talk to each other because the computers are behind different nats.
I am hoping that the "website number" is not the http adresse, but the number they have to dial to connect to the internet (yes dial like it was 1995 and you could still go on a plane with a bottle of water) because it would be disturbing if the teachers called "www.bingocardcreater.com" a "website number".
Re: Tech/Startup focused product? Don't support IE
#40I think if you use a modern javascript framework (i.e jQuery), and test regularly, it shouldn't be that difficult / time costly anymore to support IE7 and IE8. In my experience jQuery abstracts away most of the incompatibilities.
It's mostly style that's the problem. IE8 is better but you don't get any niceties (rounded corners, etc). IE9 looks like it will be marginally better (eg, you now get rounded corners, but not much else).
Why is it that people should expect home pages to be the same pixel-for-pixel between different browsers? As long as the functionality is there, why do a few rounded corners matter?