6 ms·

I have no love for IE, but does anyone remember when we designed web pages to work on any browser?

by dec0dedab0de 5y ago

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago
Yes. And it sucked. Lots of extra code and testing.
- bnt 5y ago
  So what's the alternative? Code in Chrome and yolo?
  - greggturkington 5y ago
    The alternative is having a sane process for determining what browsers you support, an a rock-solid QA and release process.
  - Someone1234 5y ago
    They support Edge, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. That's 87.86% of what users are using (per Wikimedia's stats). To support the 1.76% of IE users, it will require a disproportionate amount of work that could negatively impact other development that benefits many more people. That's the reality: Development time is a zero-sum game. If you do this you aren't doing this other thing, and in this case we're talking about under 2% that likely should be discouraged from using it. PS - And this coming from someone whose uses are primarily on IE11 still (see my other post in the thread). Just because I personally benefit from IE11 staying around a few more years, doesn't mean the entire web should bend to that. IE11 must die, we just cannot turn on a needle, and when Edge dropped support for Java Applets/Flash it forced tons of organizations into IE11 for many more years than they would have wanted.
  - dspillett 5y ago
    Code to standards and expect the browsers to implement those standards reasonably. Avoid the bleeding edge to support those held back at LTS versions of common browsers, or if you use new tricks make sure they don't make things unusable on older-but-LTS browsers. Whether you consider IE11 an LTS browser or not is a matter for you to decide (yes, as it will be getting security updates for some time still, or no as it is seven years old, not getting any feature/support updates, and support for it is deprecated by even its own manufacture's apps). Support accessibility by not using fancy things for the sake of it, and if you do something fancy make at least a little effort to have things degrade gracefully for those with accessibility issues. A lot of sites/apps skip this step, but shouldn't.
- cutler 5y ago
  So charge extra for IE support.
greggturkington 5y ago
Designed, or developed? I've been in front-end dev for about 15 years and I don't remember that. I remember developing web applications to work in browsers that led to a significant number of our business' conversions, and practicing progressive enhancement in general.
atonse 5y ago
Yes, and we had to always use the lowest common denominator. Thankfully, with IE gone, the "lowest common denominator" is now pretty awesome. I just wish we had that with email rendering engines.
kijin 5y ago
Yeah, somewhere in the late 2010s we seem to have lost interest in the idea of graceful degradation. It's one thing for a website to look a bit ugly and actions to require a few more clicks when accessed with an outdated browser. It's a completely different thing when you're left staring at a blank screen. The latter is what happens when an entire frontend framework decides that they'd rather give you no experience than a degraded experience because they don't want to maintain polyfills anymore. I do sympathize with the hate for IE, having suffered it for long enough. But once we've decided that IE users don't deserve anything, who's next? How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice. First they came for IE, and I did not speak out ... you know how the poem ends.
- mwcampbell 5y ago
  I think you have a valid point. However, I'd like to offer a factual correction on this part: > How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? As far as I know, this was only ever an issue on Windows, and it's not anymore. IMO, the best third-party screen reader for Windows is NVDA [1], and it's free and open-source. Even a user stuck on Windows XP or Vista can get a version of NVDA from 2017 that works well with Chromium (assuming one can get a Chromium-based browser that runs on those old versions of Windows). On all other platforms, the screen reader is built into the platform itself, and updated along with it. Windows itself has had Narrator built in for a long time now, and Narrator in Windows 10 is getting good (disclosure: I was on the Narrator team at Microsoft for 3 years), but there are still valid reasons to use a third-party screen reader on Windows. [1]: https://www.nvaccess.org/ https://www.nvaccess.org/
  - kijin 5y ago
    You are right, but we must remember that poor people in poor regions are disproportionately more likely to be stuck on very old hardware. According to StatCounter, 5.7% of PC users in Africa are still on XP or Vista, compared to only 0.6% in North America. That's almost 10 times as much. Rallying against older browsers was once supposed to be a good fight against evil monopolists. Now it's about kicking away the ladder from people who are already the poorest and most powerless in the world, making them even less able to take advantage of the latest information and communication tools. And we're not even realizing what we're doing because we're so used to the first world fast upgrade cycle.
JohnWhigham 5y ago
There was never a time when that was the case.
pornel 5y ago
I remember when we wrote pages for web standards, and then wasted hours hacking them to behave in IE that didn't support the standards.
- philliphaydon 5y ago
  Now people write for chrome, and then spend hours hacking them to support web standards.
  - agloeregrets 5y ago
    More like Chrome is the Web Standard now. Generally stuff that runs in chrome, runs fine in Firefox and Edge, Safari can be a little weird sometimes but overall it's way easier these days.
    - pornel 5y ago
      There are some fine differences. Google likes to blur the line between actual Web standards (which have consensus via W3C or WHATWG), Chrome's prototypes that may inform future standards, and self-serving Google APIs that only have "Web" in their name. Sometimes it's just Google releasing whatever they want, use it on google.com and youtube.com while serving slower/buggier fallbacks to others, so other vendors have no choice but to implement Google's non-standard invention to avoid looking broken. Google gets away with this a lot, because there are also many actual standards that Safari is ignoring. Without following dozens of mailing lists and bug trackers it's hard to tell what Google is pushing for themselves (e.g. AMP was a motivation for many "standards" proposals), and where others are dragging their feet.
      - agloeregrets 5y ago
        > Google gets away with this a lot I think the point seen here is really that if the standards org doesn't impact the browsers and the browser in question has greater than 60% market share then that browser is the standards org and the W3C doesn't matter. Who is going to harm Google? How would the W3C enforce their standards? If most of your users are on Chrome and Chrome sets the feature set rather than the W3C, why wouldn't you just build to Chrome?
dspillett 5y ago
That was when we had no choice but to force in hacks to make things work on browsers that didn't quite follow the same standards. You ended up only being able to use the lowest common denominator feature set or using many hacks & polyfills. Better is to stick with standards and make the browser makers implement them properly. Of course things aren't perfect still (Safari has a reputation for being slow on the uptake so you can't use the latest & greatest if you need to support those users, and it is best to avoid the bleeding edge anyway (at least sticking as far back as the oldest LTS release of common browsers)).
daniellarusso 5y ago
I feel it is less of a struggle now. I remember having to support IE 6 through 9, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera. I think at least 25% of the team’s time was spent on getting IE 6 to behave acceptably. No built-in browser debugger or ‘developer tools’ for some of those. I will say, though, there were only a few screen resolutions to consider. …and lots of <table>s.
- akie 5y ago
  I remember doubling estimated development time if the site needed to support IE5.
hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago
Yup, and I don't want to go back to resorting to hacks to piles of hacks to support them all. It's good that most modern browsers just work for the most part these days. I am working on a few different apps right now and none of them are targeting IE. It's a huge time suck and just not worth doing at the expensive of improving other parts of the application.
agloeregrets 5y ago
The problem is that IE chains your feet compared to every other single browser. CSS Vars? Nope! JS performance that is 1/50th that of Chrome on the same platform? Yep! Weird-ass rendering choices that make zero sense compared to the W3C standards? MS has you! Basically, IE11 didn't change with the web so it's really out there now. You can develop for Firefox and all the Webkit/Blink offshoots just fine, but IE holds you up.
aranchelk 5y ago
The operative word here is “pages”. Developers of statics sites should try to support everything. For full-featured web apps on a budget, the challenges of cross compatibility can be insurmountable.
seumars 5y ago
Not sure what you mean. This is way less of a problem as it was even 5 years ago. Even a modern tool like Babel, which was pretty much mandatory in webdev build is becoming less important given the pace at which browsers standardise specs nowadays.
bwat49 5y ago
I think websites should be designed to work in all modern browsers, but IE is a deprecated/dead browser that takes extra work to support. Dropping support for IE is the right thing to do at this point.
cout 5y ago
I started using the web in 1994, and no, I don't ever remember a time when people designed web pages to work on any browser. In the mid-90s, the internet was filled with pages that had "best viewed with Netscape Navigator" or "best viewed with Internet Explorer" icons. Twenty-five years later that mentality hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will. It costs too much to target more than one or two browsers.
oliyoung 5y ago
1993? but honestly, we've ALWAYS had these issues, you should've been there when we had to support IE on Mac
forgotmypw17 5y ago
I still do it today, and proudly support IE3+, Nescape 2+, Opera 3+, Links, Lynx, Dillo, w3m, NetSurf, and many others.

I have no love for IE, but does anyone remember when we designed web pages to work on any browser?

TedDoesntTalk 5y ago

Yes. And it sucked. Lots of extra code and testing.

bnt 5y ago
So what's the alternative? Code in Chrome and yolo?
- greggturkington 5y ago
  The alternative is having a sane process for determining what browsers you support, an a rock-solid QA and release process.
- Someone1234 5y ago
  They support Edge, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox. That's 87.86% of what users are using (per Wikimedia's stats). To support the 1.76% of IE users, it will require a disproportionate amount of work that could negatively impact other development that benefits many more people. That's the reality: Development time is a zero-sum game. If you do this you aren't doing this other thing, and in this case we're talking about under 2% that likely should be discouraged from using it. PS - And this coming from someone whose uses are primarily on IE11 still (see my other post in the thread). Just because I personally benefit from IE11 staying around a few more years, doesn't mean the entire web should bend to that. IE11 must die, we just cannot turn on a needle, and when Edge dropped support for Java Applets/Flash it forced tons of organizations into IE11 for many more years than they would have wanted.
- dspillett 5y ago
  Code to standards and expect the browsers to implement those standards reasonably. Avoid the bleeding edge to support those held back at LTS versions of common browsers, or if you use new tricks make sure they don't make things unusable on older-but-LTS browsers. Whether you consider IE11 an LTS browser or not is a matter for you to decide (yes, as it will be getting security updates for some time still, or no as it is seven years old, not getting any feature/support updates, and support for it is deprecated by even its own manufacture's apps). Support accessibility by not using fancy things for the sake of it, and if you do something fancy make at least a little effort to have things degrade gracefully for those with accessibility issues. A lot of sites/apps skip this step, but shouldn't.
cutler 5y ago
So charge extra for IE support.

greggturkington 5y ago

Designed, or developed? I've been in front-end dev for about 15 years and I don't remember that. I remember developing web applications to work in browsers that led to a significant number of our business' conversions, and practicing progressive enhancement in general.

atonse 5y ago

Yes, and we had to always use the lowest common denominator. Thankfully, with IE gone, the "lowest common denominator" is now pretty awesome. I just wish we had that with email rendering engines.

kijin 5y ago

Yeah, somewhere in the late 2010s we seem to have lost interest in the idea of graceful degradation. It's one thing for a website to look a bit ugly and actions to require a few more clicks when accessed with an outdated browser. It's a completely different thing when you're left staring at a blank screen. The latter is what happens when an entire frontend framework decides that they'd rather give you no experience than a degraded experience because they don't want to maintain polyfills anymore. I do sympathize with the hate for IE, having suffered it for long enough. But once we've decided that IE users don't deserve anything, who's next? How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice. First they came for IE, and I did not speak out ... you know how the poem ends.

mwcampbell 5y ago
I think you have a valid point. However, I'd like to offer a factual correction on this part: > How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? As far as I know, this was only ever an issue on Windows, and it's not anymore. IMO, the best third-party screen reader for Windows is NVDA [1], and it's free and open-source. Even a user stuck on Windows XP or Vista can get a version of NVDA from 2017 that works well with Chromium (assuming one can get a Chromium-based browser that runs on those old versions of Windows). On all other platforms, the screen reader is built into the platform itself, and updated along with it. Windows itself has had Narrator built in for a long time now, and Narrator in Windows 10 is getting good (disclosure: I was on the Narrator team at Microsoft for 3 years), but there are still valid reasons to use a third-party screen reader on Windows. [1]: https://www.nvaccess.org/ https://www.nvaccess.org/
- kijin 5y ago
  You are right, but we must remember that poor people in poor regions are disproportionately more likely to be stuck on very old hardware. According to StatCounter, 5.7% of PC users in Africa are still on XP or Vista, compared to only 0.6% in North America. That's almost 10 times as much. Rallying against older browsers was once supposed to be a good fight against evil monopolists. Now it's about kicking away the ladder from people who are already the poorest and most powerless in the world, making them even less able to take advantage of the latest information and communication tools. And we're not even realizing what we're doing because we're so used to the first world fast upgrade cycle.

JohnWhigham 5y ago

There was never a time when that was the case.

pornel 5y ago

I remember when we wrote pages for web standards, and then wasted hours hacking them to behave in IE that didn't support the standards.

philliphaydon 5y ago
Now people write for chrome, and then spend hours hacking them to support web standards.
- agloeregrets 5y ago
  More like Chrome is the Web Standard now. Generally stuff that runs in chrome, runs fine in Firefox and Edge, Safari can be a little weird sometimes but overall it's way easier these days.
  - pornel 5y ago
    There are some fine differences. Google likes to blur the line between actual Web standards (which have consensus via W3C or WHATWG), Chrome's prototypes that may inform future standards, and self-serving Google APIs that only have "Web" in their name. Sometimes it's just Google releasing whatever they want, use it on google.com and youtube.com while serving slower/buggier fallbacks to others, so other vendors have no choice but to implement Google's non-standard invention to avoid looking broken. Google gets away with this a lot, because there are also many actual standards that Safari is ignoring. Without following dozens of mailing lists and bug trackers it's hard to tell what Google is pushing for themselves (e.g. AMP was a motivation for many "standards" proposals), and where others are dragging their feet.
    - agloeregrets 5y ago
      > Google gets away with this a lot I think the point seen here is really that if the standards org doesn't impact the browsers and the browser in question has greater than 60% market share then that browser is the standards org and the W3C doesn't matter. Who is going to harm Google? How would the W3C enforce their standards? If most of your users are on Chrome and Chrome sets the feature set rather than the W3C, why wouldn't you just build to Chrome?

dspillett 5y ago

That was when we had no choice but to force in hacks to make things work on browsers that didn't quite follow the same standards. You ended up only being able to use the lowest common denominator feature set or using many hacks & polyfills. Better is to stick with standards and make the browser makers implement them properly. Of course things aren't perfect still (Safari has a reputation for being slow on the uptake so you can't use the latest & greatest if you need to support those users, and it is best to avoid the bleeding edge anyway (at least sticking as far back as the oldest LTS release of common browsers)).

daniellarusso 5y ago

I feel it is less of a struggle now. I remember having to support IE 6 through 9, Safari, Chrome, Firefox and Opera. I think at least 25% of the team’s time was spent on getting IE 6 to behave acceptably. No built-in browser debugger or ‘developer tools’ for some of those. I will say, though, there were only a few screen resolutions to consider. …and lots of <table>s.

akie 5y ago
I remember doubling estimated development time if the site needed to support IE5.

hahamrfunnyguy 5y ago

Yup, and I don't want to go back to resorting to hacks to piles of hacks to support them all. It's good that most modern browsers just work for the most part these days. I am working on a few different apps right now and none of them are targeting IE. It's a huge time suck and just not worth doing at the expensive of improving other parts of the application.

agloeregrets 5y ago

The problem is that IE chains your feet compared to every other single browser. CSS Vars? Nope! JS performance that is 1/50th that of Chrome on the same platform? Yep! Weird-ass rendering choices that make zero sense compared to the W3C standards? MS has you! Basically, IE11 didn't change with the web so it's really out there now. You can develop for Firefox and all the Webkit/Blink offshoots just fine, but IE holds you up.

aranchelk 5y ago

The operative word here is “pages”. Developers of statics sites should try to support everything. For full-featured web apps on a budget, the challenges of cross compatibility can be insurmountable.

seumars 5y ago

Not sure what you mean. This is way less of a problem as it was even 5 years ago. Even a modern tool like Babel, which was pretty much mandatory in webdev build is becoming less important given the pace at which browsers standardise specs nowadays.

bwat49 5y ago

I think websites should be designed to work in all modern browsers, but IE is a deprecated/dead browser that takes extra work to support. Dropping support for IE is the right thing to do at this point.

cout 5y ago

I started using the web in 1994, and no, I don't ever remember a time when people designed web pages to work on any browser. In the mid-90s, the internet was filled with pages that had "best viewed with Netscape Navigator" or "best viewed with Internet Explorer" icons. Twenty-five years later that mentality hasn't changed, and I don't think it ever will. It costs too much to target more than one or two browsers.

oliyoung 5y ago

1993? but honestly, we've ALWAYS had these issues, you should've been there when we had to support IE on Mac

forgotmypw17 5y ago

I still do it today, and proudly support IE3+, Nescape 2+, Opera 3+, Links, Lynx, Dillo, w3m, NetSurf, and many others.