7 ms·

> Flexbox is awesome. No need for grid framework; Yes, great, if you can ignore all the IE users. Is that what "modern" means? I'd love to use flexbox where I

by davedx 10y ago

> Flexbox is awesome. No need for grid framework; Yes, great, if you can ignore all the IE users. Is that what "modern" means? I'd love to use flexbox where I work, but it's just not feasible to give up all the customers we would lose.

MatekCopatek 10y ago
This largely depends on your target audience. Flexbox is only problematic for IE <= 9, which, according to caniuse.com accounts for less than 1% of all browsers. But this should always be checked against more relevant stats (your country, old website you're redesigning, etc.), so yeah, if you know you have a lot of people on IE9 and lower, flexbox is out of the question.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
kilian 10y ago
Flexbox is supported in all versions of IE that Microsoft themselves still support (IE 11 and up). You can still support it in IE10 too, albeit with a different syntax. That means even windows installations that haven't been updated since 2012 will support flexbox.
- hackerboos 10y ago
  CanIUse reports bugs in IE11. Anyone had issues in day-to-day development?
  - freshyill 10y ago
    Check here for a pretty comprehensive listing of flexbox-related bugs. https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs I haven't come across anything in IE 10 or 11 that I haven't been able to work around pretty easily.
  - thirdsun 10y ago
    Of course. there are lots of minor issues and surprising results with flexbox in modern IE and Firefox once you use it in more advanced ways. See https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs for an overview. Nevertheless I use flexbox almost everywhere. It's a great system to arrange anything from general layout to smaller components. There's absolutely no way that I'll deal with any kind of hacks to get basic things like vertical centering right.
  - ggurgone 10y ago
    Most of them are fixed in https://github.com/suitcss/components-grid https://github.com/suitcss/components-grid
- fizzbatter 10y ago
  Unfortunately that still leaves out a ton of users. I know that's a tiny percentage, but tiny nonetheless. The shop i'm heading to soon has a small number of clients (<5k, each being very important), but with many using ancient systems. IE8/9 iirc. We use Table layouts for our "old compatible" product, and i don't think we'll ever move on from that. Some clients just refuse to update it seems. Luckily (for my sanity) we have a "new age" product that we can use responsive layouts for.
  - gbog 10y ago
    "Refuse to update" well yes, I would too, refuse to do something that is notoriously breaking a lot of working stuff for no known benefit. For example java applets developped for IE6 that is vital, because it drives the 10 years old exotic scanner, and nobody dares touching it.
  - gotofritz 10y ago
    Supporting old browsers should be treated as a special case though, like "people with js disabled" or something. Then of course you don't use flexbox (or serve different css fles or have a scaled down design or whatever). But the "norm" is that flexbox is now safe for most users.
- NKCSS 10y ago
  It's still common to find Citrix environments with IE 8/9 here in .nl healthhcare sector
  - javajosh 10y ago
    Someone should write an exploit for IE 8/9 that upgrades them to Firefox.
    - talmand 10y ago
      Google did that back in the day with Chrome. https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-getting-started https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-get... Discontinued though.
freshyill 10y ago
Why not both? Global flexbox support is >96% and in the US it's >97%. Unless you're aiming for a 1:1 pixel-perfect experience in crappy old versions of IE, it's negligibly simple to detect IE (or lack of flexbox support), and just use something else. You can usually get pretty close to a lot of flexbox layouts with display: table and related properties, and also falling back to floats for others. In a worst case scenario, you can provide old IE with a more mobile-like experience and just let things stack up.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- spdustin 10y ago
  Enterprise in the US. IE9 still rules, in many cases. I actually work all over this space, do not tell me otherwise. And now I have to maintain two codebases?
  - vinceguidry 10y ago
    Your problem is actually simpler than if you had to maintain modern consumer-facing web apps, which have to deal with users across three broadly-defined screen sizes and a variety of mobile APIS. If you're serving the enterprise, then you can make assumptions about your audience that greatly simplify development.
    - spdustin 10y ago
      Those assumptions are nowhere near as simple as you think when you are in a space that supports a large majority of all enterprise. You would shudder to see what real-world browser support is like when you write software to be used in that space.
  - intrasight 10y ago
    My experience is that that ceased to be the case about a year ago. Now everyone also has Chrome.
ggurgone 10y ago
There is a suit component for making flexible layouts in legacy browsers https://github.com/suitcss/components-arrange https://github.com/suitcss/components-arrange It is not as feature-rich as flexbox is but it works great - I built a similar one when I used to work at Yelp https://www.yelp.com/styleguide#section-arrange https://www.yelp.com/styleguide#section-arrange and it scales well.
guessmyname 10y ago
Last week I was in an interview with Amazon for a position in their web development team. One of the questions was related to this, they asked me to describe how to create the layout for a web page with two columns, I immediately thought about Flexbox but decided to describe the code using "float: (left|right)" and box-sizing, I felt that the two interviewers didn't like my answer because it is outdated.
- Brendinooo 10y ago
  I can't find the source right now, but I've read that flexbox for page layout can still be problematic because a lot of times when you use flexbox it'll rely on the content inside of it to determine its flex width. So you'll get a bunch of page reflows while content is being loaded, which is less than ideal.
  - numbnuts 10y ago
    Sounds like this one: https://jakearchibald.com/2014/dont-use-flexbox-for-page-layout/ https://jakearchibald.com/2014/dont-use-flexbox-for-page-lay...
- asb 10y ago
  Honestly that sounds like a case where you could improve your interview technique (or perhaps the interviewers could have done better on drilling down into your thinking). The fact you considered multiple options, evaluated them mentally and decided to describe the approach that would have highest compatibility is great, and explaining your thinking to the interviewers could have helped.
- talmand 10y ago
  I feel the interviewers didn't do their part in that exchange considering there are multiple valid ways of completing that task. As an interviewer I would have followed up with saying that method is not allowed for some made up reason, what's another way to do it?
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bobbytherobot 10y ago
I've been using flexbox for the past 1.5 years. I'll add fallbacks, but it really is minimal if you are willing not to have it pixel perfect. Sometimes though I will use the fallback because it actually does it better than flexbox.

by davedx 10y ago

MatekCopatek 10y ago

This largely depends on your target audience. Flexbox is only problematic for IE <= 9, which, according to caniuse.com accounts for less than 1% of all browsers. But this should always be checked against more relevant stats (your country, old website you're redesigning, etc.), so yeah, if you know you have a lot of people on IE9 and lower, flexbox is out of the question.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

kilian 10y ago

Flexbox is supported in all versions of IE that Microsoft themselves still support (IE 11 and up). You can still support it in IE10 too, albeit with a different syntax. That means even windows installations that haven't been updated since 2012 will support flexbox.

hackerboos 10y ago
CanIUse reports bugs in IE11. Anyone had issues in day-to-day development?
- freshyill 10y ago
  Check here for a pretty comprehensive listing of flexbox-related bugs. https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs I haven't come across anything in IE 10 or 11 that I haven't been able to work around pretty easily.
- thirdsun 10y ago
  Of course. there are lots of minor issues and surprising results with flexbox in modern IE and Firefox once you use it in more advanced ways. See https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs https://github.com/philipwalton/flexbugs for an overview. Nevertheless I use flexbox almost everywhere. It's a great system to arrange anything from general layout to smaller components. There's absolutely no way that I'll deal with any kind of hacks to get basic things like vertical centering right.
- ggurgone 10y ago
  Most of them are fixed in https://github.com/suitcss/components-grid https://github.com/suitcss/components-grid
fizzbatter 10y ago
Unfortunately that still leaves out a ton of users. I know that's a tiny percentage, but tiny nonetheless. The shop i'm heading to soon has a small number of clients (<5k, each being very important), but with many using ancient systems. IE8/9 iirc. We use Table layouts for our "old compatible" product, and i don't think we'll ever move on from that. Some clients just refuse to update it seems. Luckily (for my sanity) we have a "new age" product that we can use responsive layouts for.
- gbog 10y ago
  "Refuse to update" well yes, I would too, refuse to do something that is notoriously breaking a lot of working stuff for no known benefit. For example java applets developped for IE6 that is vital, because it drives the 10 years old exotic scanner, and nobody dares touching it.
- gotofritz 10y ago
  Supporting old browsers should be treated as a special case though, like "people with js disabled" or something. Then of course you don't use flexbox (or serve different css fles or have a scaled down design or whatever). But the "norm" is that flexbox is now safe for most users.
NKCSS 10y ago
It's still common to find Citrix environments with IE 8/9 here in .nl healthhcare sector
- javajosh 10y ago
  Someone should write an exploit for IE 8/9 that upgrades them to Firefox.
  - talmand 10y ago
    Google did that back in the day with Chrome. https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-getting-started https://www.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/chrome-frame-get... Discontinued though.

freshyill 10y ago

Why not both? Global flexbox support is >96% and in the US it's >97%. Unless you're aiming for a 1:1 pixel-perfect experience in crappy old versions of IE, it's negligibly simple to detect IE (or lack of flexbox support), and just use something else. You can usually get pretty close to a lot of flexbox layouts with display: table and related properties, and also falling back to floats for others. In a worst case scenario, you can provide old IE with a more mobile-like experience and just let things stack up.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
spdustin 10y ago
Enterprise in the US. IE9 still rules, in many cases. I actually work all over this space, do not tell me otherwise. And now I have to maintain two codebases?
- vinceguidry 10y ago
  Your problem is actually simpler than if you had to maintain modern consumer-facing web apps, which have to deal with users across three broadly-defined screen sizes and a variety of mobile APIS. If you're serving the enterprise, then you can make assumptions about your audience that greatly simplify development.
  - spdustin 10y ago
    Those assumptions are nowhere near as simple as you think when you are in a space that supports a large majority of all enterprise. You would shudder to see what real-world browser support is like when you write software to be used in that space.
- intrasight 10y ago
  My experience is that that ceased to be the case about a year ago. Now everyone also has Chrome.

ggurgone 10y ago

There is a suit component for making flexible layouts in legacy browsers https://github.com/suitcss/components-arrange https://github.com/suitcss/components-arrange It is not as feature-rich as flexbox is but it works great - I built a similar one when I used to work at Yelp https://www.yelp.com/styleguide#section-arrange https://www.yelp.com/styleguide#section-arrange and it scales well.

guessmyname 10y ago

Last week I was in an interview with Amazon for a position in their web development team. One of the questions was related to this, they asked me to describe how to create the layout for a web page with two columns, I immediately thought about Flexbox but decided to describe the code using "float: (left|right)" and box-sizing, I felt that the two interviewers didn't like my answer because it is outdated.

Brendinooo 10y ago
I can't find the source right now, but I've read that flexbox for page layout can still be problematic because a lot of times when you use flexbox it'll rely on the content inside of it to determine its flex width. So you'll get a bunch of page reflows while content is being loaded, which is less than ideal.
- numbnuts 10y ago
  Sounds like this one: https://jakearchibald.com/2014/dont-use-flexbox-for-page-layout/ https://jakearchibald.com/2014/dont-use-flexbox-for-page-lay...
asb 10y ago
Honestly that sounds like a case where you could improve your interview technique (or perhaps the interviewers could have done better on drilling down into your thinking). The fact you considered multiple options, evaluated them mentally and decided to describe the approach that would have highest compatibility is great, and explaining your thinking to the interviewers could have helped.
talmand 10y ago
I feel the interviewers didn't do their part in that exchange considering there are multiple valid ways of completing that task. As an interviewer I would have followed up with saying that method is not allowed for some made up reason, what's another way to do it?

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

bobbytherobot 10y ago

I've been using flexbox for the past 1.5 years. I'll add fallbacks, but it really is minimal if you are willing not to have it pixel perfect. Sometimes though I will use the fallback because it actually does it better than flexbox.