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We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

paydirtapp.com

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Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#91
post #77
post #67

There is not supporting IE, and there is blocking IE. You are blocking IE - I know because I changed my user agent on my firefox browser and you blocked me, and that is not cool! You don't even offer an option to let me try anyway! Use feature detection if you must, ignore IE completely in testing if you wish, but do not actively block it or you are just as bad as those who only support IE.

Completely disagree. There are two very major problems with this idea: 1. Your reputation suffers when users encounter issues while using the browser that you don't support. 2. The support cost of "letting users try anyway" is non-zero, and probably significant.

As a counterexample, let's consider Google's blocking of Opera. Google routinely blocks Opera when rolling out new stuff. I kind of get it, because of your point 1.

However, they sometimes offer a "try anyway"-link and sometimes not. The times that I can not easily "try anyway" makes me dislike Google much more than the times that I "try anyway" and it ends up broken in funky ways.

Bottom line; Yes, your reputation suffers when users encounter issues. Your reputation also suffers when users encounter the big blocking issue of not being welcome at all.

Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#93
Graceful Degradation - look it up.

The baseline compatibility should be "functional but not necessarily beautiful".

Not wasting time getting pixel-perfection in IE is wise. Blocking IE is retarded.

The fact that you haven't even considered using Chrome Frame says a lot about your dev skills. Or, you know, lack of.

Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#94
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I completely agree with you. But there may be some kind of security issues with IE. Some vulnerability to site's authentication system or something? not impossible, you see.

The security of the application should never rely on the client-side. If you're using Javascript or similar for authentication, you're doing it wrong.

The user might get the wrong impression that he's being supported when he's not, and go ahead and buy some service that's not going to get support.

At least a big warning is justified.

Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#95
post #85
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Completely disagree. There are two very major problems with this idea: 1. Your reputation suffers when users encounter issues while using the browser that you don't support. 2. The support cost of "letting users try anyway" is non-zero, and probably significant.

You still can put a big red sign with "This browser is not supported, here's why.", and let the user decide if they want to try it with IE just to see if is worth it the browser change.

If they have already tried with all versions of IE, and they know it doesn't work, then why let people bump into the problems themselves.

They are going to fail either way - it's better to fail gracefully, no?

Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#96

This widely depends on your geographics. Writing from Brazil here : still over 70% of the visitors, on average, to most sites I monitor are using some version of IE. So claiming a "feature" like that down here would be like rejecting 70% customers on a popular mall because they're not wearing red shoes(or some other arbitrary reason).

They are not selling the product in Brazil.

Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#97
post #60

> "In reality we've received exactly zero requests for IE support, angry or otherwise." Why would someone bother contacting you when it appears that your site is broken? In other words, the call to action doesn't display technical competence - indeed it implies a level of technical incompetence which probably is not justified. "We're really sorry, but Paydirt isn't playing nice with your browser" doesn't inspire conf…

You must also understand the costs of supporting IE, I think is bigger than the revenue of those 1.6%

Depends on the revenue obviously.

Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#98
post #90
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really fix either problem, IMO.

IE9 is actually not that bad, and IE 10 should hopefully be very good. As a developer my bigger problem with IE9 is that sometimes I forget to comment a console.log after testing. Their problem is that they want to be "pixel-perfect" across all browser. I get why, but as a User I don't really care as long as everything else works. And chance are that with IE9 and IE10 it will. I'm not a IE user, but when we stop supp…

You may use log() instead of console.log() for that. See http://paulirish.com/2009/log-a-lightweight-wrapper-for-cons...

Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#99
post #90
post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't really fix either problem, IMO.

IE9 is actually not that bad, and IE 10 should hopefully be very good. As a developer my bigger problem with IE9 is that sometimes I forget to comment a console.log after testing. Their problem is that they want to be "pixel-perfect" across all browser. I get why, but as a User I don't really care as long as everything else works. And chance are that with IE9 and IE10 it will. I'm not a IE user, but when we stop supp…

The only thing IE10 seems to lack that's really significant seems to be WebGL. Which means IE9 may be the last version of IE that will ever "hold back" the web.

Re: We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature

#100
Can someone with a windows machine proxy this into IE and see if anything is broken? I can't believe there is much overhead in making things look fine in IE(>=9). Especially a straight-forward site such as theirs.

I haven't heard of paydirtapp before, but now I'm stuck with the impression that they are silly. Trying (and succeeding) to get publicity by being silly.

I should make a post about banning users on iOS 3.x, or perhaps all Opera users?

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