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Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine In IE

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

#81

Post by [deleted] »

FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #73
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…

ievms[1] aims to make testing IE on a non-Windows box less complicated (it depends on VirtualBox). [1] https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

[deleted]

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

#82

Post by tensor »

jneen wrote: post #77
FuzzyDunlop wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ievms[1] aims to make testing IE on a non-Windows box less complicated (it depends on VirtualBox). [1] https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

That sounds useful. This gets me though: > The VMs provided by Microsoft will not pass the Windows Genuine Advantage and cannot be activated. I mean, there's a workaround, but where's the love from Microsoft? Don't they want me to be able to test on their browser so my sites will support it?

This is really not a big problem. A non-activated version of windows will run for a while before rebooting. It's mildly annoying to have to reboot every now and then in extended testing, but it works sufficiently well.

Microsoft's suggested solution is to just start from the raw image each time you start the vm. This way it will run without problems for 30 days. The images come pre-setup so you don't need setup time unless you want to install some extra debugging tools.

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

#83

Post by rpeden »

gaius wrote: post #71
mistercow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, MS doesn't get to dodge blame that easily. They blatantly used non-standard features in their browser to stifle competition. Many developers were complicit in this but that was according to Microsoft's design.

Non standard features like... XMLHttpRequest? The entire AJAX industry, they invented. What were you saying again?

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!"

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

#84

Post by snowwrestler »

recoiledsnake wrote: post #36
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 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?

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

#85

Post by [deleted] »

brlewis wrote: post #2

This may be schadenfreude, but as someone who's been around the web a long time, it really tickles me to see Microsoft have to fake their user agent string to get around an arbitrary browser restriction. Other browsers used to fake the IE user agent string. I suppose it's full circle since IE originally had to pose as Netscape's browser (Mozilla compatible).

[deleted]

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

#86

Post by dutchbrit »

Claiming they no longer support IE means they'll stop writing "hacks" for IE from now (not as in last month) onwards.. But still, silly that they simply block IE and don't just show an extra message saying use X for the "ultimate experience". Maybe they should only block IE once they have an update that really will interfere with IE users.

But on the other hand, that might piss of paying customers that actually use IE and refuse/aren't allowed to use anything else..

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

#88

Post by OllieJones »

aneth wrote: post #61

What does it mean to "not support" a browser? Does it mean you know your site is broken in the browser? Does it mean you block that browser? Does it mean you intentionally broke your site in that browser? None of the above. It means you don't want to waste your QA time testing and fixing minor quirks in the browser and you don't want your users having a degraded experience on that browser. To protect your users, you…

There's lots of enterprisey stuff out there that only "supports" various versions of IE, and bounces out other makes and models of browser. HN folks may or may not see much of that, because that stuff is typically in various corporate portal technology.

In health-care IT in particular, there's a popular radiology app that uses an ActiveX control that is bug for bug compatible with IE6 and doesn't work on IE7. That's an important reason for browser-upgrade inertia in that business. Another reason is the risk of hassles. What hospitals use now sorta works. An upgrade to IE7 might cause some patient-critical thing to break, and then all hell would break loose and the IT folks would get sacked.

It may or may not be good startup marketing to slam IE. For those of us who serve health-care and other institutional customers, it makes us green with envy, no doubt.

But it is definitely good startup engineering, if you can get away with it, to cut down the workload of qualifying various browsers by simply eliminating a vendor from the test matrix.

I don't notice Microsoft offering any labor or money to help developers qualify on their browser products, or to incent the big institutions (who provide substantially all their revenue) to upgrade.

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

#89

Post by sliverstorm »

rickmb wrote: post #75
eagsalazar wrote: post #58

Doesn't anyone realize they just wrote that article and disabled ie9 to attract hipster freelance designers and developers? The whole thing is basically a PR stunt since they realized 99% of their hits were from Mac anyway. Especially having their article on Hacker News was just to get attention from the large freelancer following on HN. I'm no fan of IE. However explicitly blocking IE9 is just idiotic for any other…

From the way you throw the word "hipster" around like an epithet, I already guessed you are not a Mac or Windows user... Sorry, couldn't resist. My point is, making all those assumptions about people and their motives is just as "idiotic" as blocking IE9 in the first place.

The veracity of those assumptions has little to do with whether or not Paydirt shared that thought process.

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

#90

Post by mistercow »

gaius wrote: post #71
mistercow wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, MS doesn't get to dodge blame that easily. They blatantly used non-standard features in their browser to stifle competition. Many developers were complicit in this but that was according to Microsoft's design.

Non standard features like... XMLHttpRequest? The entire AJAX industry, they invented. What were you saying again?

If the features hadn't been useful, it wouldn't have worked. Are you seriously going to argue that their strategy – their explicit strategy – was not incredibly harmful to innovation and competition?

Also saying they "invented" XMLHttpRequest is a stretch. If I make a browser with a nonstandard rot-13 function, did I "invent" JSRot13?

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