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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

#41

Post by revorad »

nkassis wrote: post #38
revorad wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds really interesting. For a niche app like that, I guess you would need to run with the best technology available. Hopefully, your users will see the value and not mind switching browsers.

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

#42

Post by StavrosK »

BrandonM wrote: post #32
StavrosK wrote: post #9

I 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 fav…

I can understand that, given that effort is finite. When Firefox users were enough to support, it made sense for apps to do so.

We're not trying to be mean, we'd love to support everyone, but when it comes to spending a day trying to find and fix an IE-only bug that affects 2% of your userbase (sure, it might be a bit higher if we didn't have the bug in the first place) or write a feature that will improve the service for 100% of the userbase, the latter takes priority...

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

#44

Post by nkassis »

revorad wrote: post #41
nkassis wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That sounds really interesting. For a niche app like that, I guess you would need to run with the best technology available. Hopefully, your users will see the value and not mind switching browsers.

I think that even with something for a general audience, sometimes to choose between spending time trying to support everyone or spend the time building something really good for most people. At least that how I see it.

Thanks for finding it interesting.I'd like to show this app around cause it's so much fun even with no knowledge of the science. A few things need to be resolved before the data set is completely open.

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

#46

Post by paulirish »

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.)

If you're making the decision to unsupported IE completely (or just IE6, etc), it's wise to offer the Chrome Frame plugin to any IE users that come along: http://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-gett...

Within the last two weeks code was checked in to allow non-admin level installs, so when that debuts everyone that gets prompted can actually install it.

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

#47

Post by Macha »

BrandonM wrote: post #32
StavrosK wrote: post #9

I 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 fav…

Because now it's one version for standards, one for IE. As opposed to then, which was one version per browser.

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

#48

Post by Macha »

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.

I built a school website. Nearly 80% IE :(. And mostly IE6 at that. It's like stepping back in time.

And Chrome? 64% on my personal blog, and a Linux majority at that, single digits on this school website.

It really depends on your audience.

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

#49

Post by rmc »

tomjen3 wrote: post #39
nailer wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (y…

I would guess "website number" does mean the web address. My 50 year old landlady gave me her "email number".

I'd also saw Patrick is talking about 2 different browsers on the same computer. "don't talk to each other" probably means they don't share cookies. If the user logs into one website with one browser, then the other browser doesn't become aware of each other. Clearly the 2 browsers don't talk to each other.

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

#50

Post by magamiako »

Word of advice:

At least make the site functional in IE7/8, and develop for future standards and supporting IE9.

I'm an IT guy, and it's not that I want to "lock down my users", but there are very specific things you can do in IE from a centralized standpoint that you cannot do with Chrome or Firefox.

Trust me, the situation is a lot more complex than just telling your users to download another browser. We're not on the web of yesteryear where you could just provide a link on your site like the Netscape days.

A few things of note:

-Trusted and untrusted site zones. Some areas of the internet require more or less functionality than others. This is something very easily managed centrally in the IE-world, not something doable easily in the Chrome/FF world.

-SSL Certificates. There might be an entirely internal structure to SSL. Not every SSL-enabled internal site for example needs to be signed with an external CA. You can very well set up your own CA for use. With IE (and AD), you can distribute easily to your infrastructure certificates as needed. For example here, developers might want to write SSL-enabled websites for external use without first buying the external certificate. Depending on the size of your dev team, you can either one-by-one apply it to Firefox or you can shove it in the domain and push it out as they bring up their machines. Thankfully, Chrome uses the internals Windows Certificate store--Firefox, however, does not.

-Business-level home page. Again, while "possible", it's certainly more difficult. Marketing might need to see a page customized for them. Certain web-enabled apps do this with SSO, but certain others do not. There are many ways to handle that but it all depends on your business needs. The easiest way is to apply it as an OU-level policy to your organization for each user. If at some point in the future it changes, you can change the policy and as the users relog, the policy updates. Again, fine if you're assuming 5-10 computers. Not fine if you've got 5,000-10,000.

There are many, many reasons to use IE and it has little to do with "nazi-operators" and more to do with what Microsoft brings to the table on the management side of things.

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