4 ms·

I signed up to say this: This is the lowest quality article I have ever read for a product which virtually no-one knows (except the minute techcrunch ecosystem

• yuhong 15y ago
  If IE10 is good enough it won't be hard as long as you don't depend on WebKit-specific stuff or WebGL, and this site does support Firefox.
• ccozan 15y ago
  Sorry, did you actually checked the website? Your argument regarding Windows tablet market seems really shallow. They already optimize it for iOS devices and Android which is like 90% of the market. I agree, the market is webkit all over, which sounds like a monoculture. But, there is no windows tablet yet and for design professionals ( which the website targets ) this is IMHO not the target. So, no early optimization. I am not going to comment on "actually used at least 5 orders of magnitude more often by 5 orders of magnitude more people" because this seems to be disconnected from reality.
  • gouranga 15y ago
    It isn't disconnected from reality. Consider China alone - IE is still king there as it is in the majority of large organisations (who still like to have control over their users with AD/Group Policy). I'm not saying preemptively design for it, but if you preemptively exclude its predecessors and your path will be frought with many less turds to not step in i.e: In 2 years: "Oh shit we did it all in Webkit and Gecko features - The growing 20% of Windows tablet market doesn't support it - we're going to have to rewrite or ship an app both of which are costly".
    • anthonyb 15y ago
      If your business/startup is still around in 2 years, you can probably afford a redesign for IE.
    • rsynnott 15y ago
      > "Oh shit we did it all in Webkit and Gecko features - The growing 20% of Windows tablet market doesn't support it - we're going to have to rewrite or ship an app both of which are costly". If Windows tablets take off (and that still seems like rather a big if), you'd hope they have a vaguely compatible browser.
      • Isofarro 15y ago
        Vaguely compatible doesn't help if the site is deliberately locking out browsers that look like the current crop of Internet Explorer browsers. Doesn't look like that they are User-Agent sniffing, so that means that maybe they are detecting features. That's kinda the right way of doing it - except for their failure to adhere to progressive enhancement best practices. But feature detection isn't "No Internet Explorer support here" approach. So the story seems at odds with the actual behaviour of their site. Now what happens when an Internet Explorer - either on the desktop or tablet, or phone, passes the feature detection in place on this site? You don't get the "Go Away!" message, but instead you get an insufficiently tested experience which exposes the lack of attention on quality - that's something that's going to turn away an audience geared to wanting to see quality. If you are going to publicly stop supporting an entire browser range, make sure your developers don't leave obvious gaps in that non-support. Maybe here's one place where User-Agent sniffing actually complements the actual requirement.
    • Isofarro 15y ago
      You are not far off. South Korea are stuck in this monoculture tar pit: http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monoculture/ http://blog.mozilla.com/gen/2007/02/27/the-cost-of-monocultu... Webkit is just another form of monoculture.
  • yuhong 15y ago
    No early optimization, but no stupidity like having only vendor prefixed versions of CSS3 features that reached Candidate Recommendation and are already implemented unprefixed in major browsers, like border-radius which was mentioned in the comments to this article.
• tomelders 15y ago
  Developing for ie in the old days was usually at the expense of other browsers because of stuff like active x. There was no way to port that stuff to other browsers, which is why you had ie only websites. there will never come a time when writing standards compliant code becomes the problem your predicting. But the reality of today is that writing standards compliant code for ie is somewhere between difficult and impossible defending on what you're trying to accomplish. IE is deserving of the trashing it receives.
  • Isofarro 15y ago
    "Developing for ie in the old days was usually at the expense of other browsers because of stuff like active x" Errr... no. Active X was a tiny part of the problem. IE's problem was to support basically any quality of markup thrown at it, when other browsers couldn't. Then developers rely on this, which pushes their sites into IE-only zones. As time passes it gets progressively more difficult to extract a site out of this tar-pit. It amuses me that the arguments for not supporting IE echo the same arguments IE-only advocates were using as a reason not to support other browsers a decade ago.
    • tomelders 15y ago
      I said "stuff like active x". And I wouldn't say it's a tiny part of the problem. I still encounter clients (usually in government) who are forced to use IE6 because of some legacy webware they depend on which uses Active X. No one is using the same arguments for not supporting IE. People are saying browsers should adhere to the standards, which is totally different.
• tomelders 15y ago
  Developing for ie in the old days was usually at the expense of other browsers because of stuff like active x. There was no way to port that stuff to other browsers, which is why you had ie only websites. there will never come a time when writing standards compliant code becomes the problem your predicting. But the reality of today is that writing standards compliant code for ie is somewhere between difficult and impossible defending on what you're trying to accomplish. IE is deserving of the trashing it receives.
• rsynnott 15y ago
  > and Windows v.next peak grows (which it will as it always does) What is v.next?
  • archangel_one 15y ago
    version.next, ie. the next version of Windows.