14 ms·

Aw man. As a bootstrapping web business guy, I can say I've had way more problems with supporting iPads and iPhones than IE. IE costs me $0 to support, and I do

by mixonic 14y ago

Aw man. As a bootstrapping web business guy, I can say I've had way more problems with supporting iPads and iPhones than IE. IE costs me $0 to support, and I don't even bother (nobody asks!). Supporting hip and popular Apple browsers can run me a grand in a fast minute. Pleasing early adopters without working really well on the iPad3 is a tough sell. I think startups fighting to support < IE9 is a done decision (don't do it). Start worrying about mobile and tablet platforms instead. 'cause the future, it's knocking. I'm not crazy about getting an iPad myself, but I'm starting to feel cornered into spending hundreds of $$ on one just to keep those early adopters happy. I think this is where the real browser/device compatibility discussion is, not around IE.

shaggyfrog 14y ago
Is there something intrinsic to the WebKit versions on iOS products, or are your problems more general, i.e. learning how to support "limited" devices again (relatively small CPU, GPU, memory)? What is it about the iPad 1 & 2 that is giving you so many more problems compared to the iPad 3? I found I was spending way more time on IE bugs with Web app I recently did (~1000 users/month) than any other browser by far.
- Chris_Newton 14y ago
  There are definitely oddities about how iOS Safari does things. Handling orientation changes and using high-resolution images for the devices with Retina displays are repeat offenders.
  - shaggyfrog 14y ago
    Well, adding support for Retina displays is definitely an iOS-specific thing (at least right now). But orientation changes? Is that not a general "mobile issue" for you? Or is (are) the WebKit build(s) in iOS doing something specifically bad compared to (say) Android?
    - Chris_Newton 14y ago
      If you rotate an iPad from portrait to landscape, for example, then the default behaviour in Safari is to show the same page layout as you had before, but scale it up to the new width. That's far from ideal if your site uses a responsive design that could adapt quite happily to use the extra width in a landscape orientation.
      - barumrho 14y ago
        Can't you disable zooming to solve that problem?
        bigiain 14y ago
        I suggest you ask your 40+ year old users (or any users with less than 20/20 vision) about what they think of you disabling zooming on them…
        Chris_Newton 14y ago
        Yes, but that workaround has accessibility problems of its own.
      - bigiain 14y ago
        Can I just mention that at least on my phone, websites that "adapt" to landscape mode often bug the hell out of me. With my getting-old-eyesight, I often rotate to landscape mode to get bigger text so I can read it more easily. When a website goes "Oh look, more horizontal pixels, I'll shrink the middle column and add some nav on the left and ads on the right!"; I'll usually just hit [back] and move on to some other site. (Possibly interesting idea: add some analytics so that you can detect portrait/landscape orientation changes, and report on bounce rates immediately afterwards…)
        Chris_Newton 14y ago
        In our defence, we do our best to keep the standard zoom gesture working and we use a reasonable default font size. We're not 21 any more either. ;-) However, for most of our users, a zoomed single-column layout is going to be less useful than switching to two columns when in landscape mode on an iPad. On an iPhone, you should see a single-column layout in either orientation using the design we're currently testing.
- josephcooney 14y ago
  What percentage of your users were on IE?
  - shaggyfrog 14y ago
    I think around 70-80%; the product the Web app was supporting was targeting schools/non-profits and other demographics where IE usage is high.
    - josephcooney 14y ago
      So isn't it fairly natural that IE would account for most of the bugs (if that represents 3/4 of your users)?
- aethr 14y ago
  Hover states are a big one. Also making call-to-action targets bigger for the less precise pointing device (ie, your users' fat fingers). Making sure you use Flash fall-forwards with HTML5 video/audio available for iPad / non-flash devices. iPads and iPhones also have great support for CSS3 transforms (3D included with hardware acceleration), but some of the other "common" CSS3 and HTML5 technologies do bog down on the slower processor. Your average desktop may not have a dedicated video card and a browser with hardware acceleration, which creates a smaller intersection of features that will work with no brains on iPads and (generic) desktops. The list, of course, goes on, and it will continue to grow with time. As with the well known deficiencies of IE (floating, clearing, zindex bugs, etc) however, the iPad caveats and corner cases are becoming more of a known quantity. As with IE, just takes a bit more planning.
  - lloeki 14y ago
    > Making sure you use Flash fall-forwards with HTML5 video/audio available for iPad / non-flash devices. Can't you for the love of all that is binary do it the other way around? I hate it when sites push Flash on me on the desktop when there's a pure html version ready a user agent string away.
    - WiseWeasel 14y ago
      Desktop browser support for h.264 video via HTML5 is a crap shoot. Sometimes it works well (Safari), sometimes it works poorly (Chrome), and sometimes it doesn't work at all (Firefox and IE9-).
      - chucknelson 14y ago
        I think he's just asking for a flash fall-back if native playback through HTML5 isn't supported. Maybe that is what "fall-forwards" already meant, but I'm not too familiar with that term...
Chris_Newton 14y ago
We're in a similar position, except that we did recently drop the money for a new iPad. FWIW, it's actually a nice piece of kit, as long as you don't mind playing by Apple's rules of course. However, the browser idiosyncracies drive me nuts, and we spent considerable time not just updating all our graphics but also redoing way too many different parts of our HTML, CSS and JavaScript in order to get the high-res images to display properly and to have the correct version of each image download efficiently on both Retina and lower resolution displays. Not all of this is Apple's fault. Some of it comes from limitations in the current HTML and CSS specs, which would apply to high-res displays on Android devices as well. But some of it seems to be entirely due to choices in how iOS Safari does things, and the problems aren't limited to high-res images. I'm still not entirely happy with many of the solutions we are using. I think we have a practical workaround for most of the issues, but often the results behind the scenes are just nasty and hacky. And as you say, it has been vastly more work than supporting IE9, which required approximately zero extra effort.
dclowd9901 14y ago
I'm confused why you believe you need hardware for testing? iOS simulator should be plenty sufficient in any standard dev environment...
- vibrunazo 14y ago
  Buying a mac to run the simulator on is much more expensive than buying an ipad.
  - nsmartt 14y ago
    And buying multiple versions of the iPad is also more expensive than a mac to run the simulator?
  - WiseWeasel 14y ago
    You can get a refurbished Mac Mini for around the same cost as a new iPad.
- shaggyfrog 14y ago
  As an almost universal rule of thumb, there is no perfect simulator/emulator substitute for a target hardware platform. For example, the iOS Simulator runs in an x86 environment. There's no way to throttle it to run at hardware spec speeds, never mind that the Safari in Simulator is quite possibly running different code than the Safari that ships on the devices themselves.
- FireBeyond 14y ago
  So you don't need iOS hardware, just Apple hardware... so much better!
  - nyackguy 14y ago
    People without Apple hardware create websites?
    - deleted 14y ago
      [deleted]
fritzy 14y ago
So very amused by this!
blahbap 14y ago
"Early adopters" - surely we're beyond calling IPad owners early adopters? As for desktop and tablet support, is it really that hard with excellent toolsets such as Bootstrap etc. ?
- darklajid 14y ago
  iPad _3_ owners are 'early adopters' to me - and I understand the gp as having trouble supporting the latest and greatest features - or changes- in those things. Like the retina display, which does seem to require some dev love to look decent, according to statements on this very site.
  - eddieroger 14y ago
    Sure, they're early to you, but not to the consumers or industry. The adoption cycle applies to a product family, not model. The iPad is not a new device.
kaichanvong 14y ago
This is where things like 320 and up: https://github.com/malarkey/320andup https://github.com/malarkey/320andup and future GUI libraries (Twitter bootstrap as a single example), will start to change everything. The main problem with what you've mentioned is the size issue. So for startups that are dire in need of building fast and getting things right but not looking stunningly beautiful - this is an option. The people with too much money to know what to do with it, can then build things in a crazy way with agencies for the logo, different agency for web design and then a 3rd agency for build etc.
drhowarddrfine 14y ago
Then you're doing it wrong. I've been doing web dev for eight years and have a staff of 8 developers. We can spend up to 50% of our time getting things to work in IE. The extra time we spend fixing the few problems with anything else has NEVER been billed to our clients cause we consider that almost nothing. And I'm talking about the iPhone, iPad, Android and any browsers you care to bring up. IE has always been the worst browser on the planet by far and will always be years behind all others in modern standards support and practices.

by mixonic 14y ago

shaggyfrog 14y ago

Is there something intrinsic to the WebKit versions on iOS products, or are your problems more general, i.e. learning how to support "limited" devices again (relatively small CPU, GPU, memory)? What is it about the iPad 1 & 2 that is giving you so many more problems compared to the iPad 3? I found I was spending way more time on IE bugs with Web app I recently did (~1000 users/month) than any other browser by far.

Chris_Newton 14y ago
There are definitely oddities about how iOS Safari does things. Handling orientation changes and using high-resolution images for the devices with Retina displays are repeat offenders.
- shaggyfrog 14y ago
  Well, adding support for Retina displays is definitely an iOS-specific thing (at least right now). But orientation changes? Is that not a general "mobile issue" for you? Or is (are) the WebKit build(s) in iOS doing something specifically bad compared to (say) Android?
  - Chris_Newton 14y ago
    If you rotate an iPad from portrait to landscape, for example, then the default behaviour in Safari is to show the same page layout as you had before, but scale it up to the new width. That's far from ideal if your site uses a responsive design that could adapt quite happily to use the extra width in a landscape orientation.
    - barumrho 14y ago
      Can't you disable zooming to solve that problem?
      - bigiain 14y ago
        I suggest you ask your 40+ year old users (or any users with less than 20/20 vision) about what they think of you disabling zooming on them…
      - Chris_Newton 14y ago
        Yes, but that workaround has accessibility problems of its own.
    - bigiain 14y ago
      Can I just mention that at least on my phone, websites that "adapt" to landscape mode often bug the hell out of me. With my getting-old-eyesight, I often rotate to landscape mode to get bigger text so I can read it more easily. When a website goes "Oh look, more horizontal pixels, I'll shrink the middle column and add some nav on the left and ads on the right!"; I'll usually just hit [back] and move on to some other site. (Possibly interesting idea: add some analytics so that you can detect portrait/landscape orientation changes, and report on bounce rates immediately afterwards…)
      - Chris_Newton 14y ago
        In our defence, we do our best to keep the standard zoom gesture working and we use a reasonable default font size. We're not 21 any more either. ;-) However, for most of our users, a zoomed single-column layout is going to be less useful than switching to two columns when in landscape mode on an iPad. On an iPhone, you should see a single-column layout in either orientation using the design we're currently testing.
josephcooney 14y ago
What percentage of your users were on IE?
- shaggyfrog 14y ago
  I think around 70-80%; the product the Web app was supporting was targeting schools/non-profits and other demographics where IE usage is high.
  - josephcooney 14y ago
    So isn't it fairly natural that IE would account for most of the bugs (if that represents 3/4 of your users)?
aethr 14y ago
Hover states are a big one. Also making call-to-action targets bigger for the less precise pointing device (ie, your users' fat fingers). Making sure you use Flash fall-forwards with HTML5 video/audio available for iPad / non-flash devices. iPads and iPhones also have great support for CSS3 transforms (3D included with hardware acceleration), but some of the other "common" CSS3 and HTML5 technologies do bog down on the slower processor. Your average desktop may not have a dedicated video card and a browser with hardware acceleration, which creates a smaller intersection of features that will work with no brains on iPads and (generic) desktops. The list, of course, goes on, and it will continue to grow with time. As with the well known deficiencies of IE (floating, clearing, zindex bugs, etc) however, the iPad caveats and corner cases are becoming more of a known quantity. As with IE, just takes a bit more planning.
- lloeki 14y ago
  > Making sure you use Flash fall-forwards with HTML5 video/audio available for iPad / non-flash devices. Can't you for the love of all that is binary do it the other way around? I hate it when sites push Flash on me on the desktop when there's a pure html version ready a user agent string away.
  - WiseWeasel 14y ago
    Desktop browser support for h.264 video via HTML5 is a crap shoot. Sometimes it works well (Safari), sometimes it works poorly (Chrome), and sometimes it doesn't work at all (Firefox and IE9-).
    - chucknelson 14y ago
      I think he's just asking for a flash fall-back if native playback through HTML5 isn't supported. Maybe that is what "fall-forwards" already meant, but I'm not too familiar with that term...

Chris_Newton 14y ago

We're in a similar position, except that we did recently drop the money for a new iPad. FWIW, it's actually a nice piece of kit, as long as you don't mind playing by Apple's rules of course. However, the browser idiosyncracies drive me nuts, and we spent considerable time not just updating all our graphics but also redoing way too many different parts of our HTML, CSS and JavaScript in order to get the high-res images to display properly and to have the correct version of each image download efficiently on both Retina and lower resolution displays. Not all of this is Apple's fault. Some of it comes from limitations in the current HTML and CSS specs, which would apply to high-res displays on Android devices as well. But some of it seems to be entirely due to choices in how iOS Safari does things, and the problems aren't limited to high-res images. I'm still not entirely happy with many of the solutions we are using. I think we have a practical workaround for most of the issues, but often the results behind the scenes are just nasty and hacky. And as you say, it has been vastly more work than supporting IE9, which required approximately zero extra effort.

dclowd9901 14y ago

I'm confused why you believe you need hardware for testing? iOS simulator should be plenty sufficient in any standard dev environment...

vibrunazo 14y ago
Buying a mac to run the simulator on is much more expensive than buying an ipad.
- nsmartt 14y ago
  And buying multiple versions of the iPad is also more expensive than a mac to run the simulator?
- WiseWeasel 14y ago
  You can get a refurbished Mac Mini for around the same cost as a new iPad.
shaggyfrog 14y ago
As an almost universal rule of thumb, there is no perfect simulator/emulator substitute for a target hardware platform. For example, the iOS Simulator runs in an x86 environment. There's no way to throttle it to run at hardware spec speeds, never mind that the Safari in Simulator is quite possibly running different code than the Safari that ships on the devices themselves.
FireBeyond 14y ago
So you don't need iOS hardware, just Apple hardware... so much better!
- nyackguy 14y ago
  People without Apple hardware create websites?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

fritzy 14y ago

So very amused by this!

blahbap 14y ago

"Early adopters" - surely we're beyond calling IPad owners early adopters? As for desktop and tablet support, is it really that hard with excellent toolsets such as Bootstrap etc. ?

darklajid 14y ago
iPad _3_ owners are 'early adopters' to me - and I understand the gp as having trouble supporting the latest and greatest features - or changes- in those things. Like the retina display, which does seem to require some dev love to look decent, according to statements on this very site.
- eddieroger 14y ago
  Sure, they're early to you, but not to the consumers or industry. The adoption cycle applies to a product family, not model. The iPad is not a new device.

kaichanvong 14y ago

This is where things like 320 and up: https://github.com/malarkey/320andup https://github.com/malarkey/320andup and future GUI libraries (Twitter bootstrap as a single example), will start to change everything. The main problem with what you've mentioned is the size issue. So for startups that are dire in need of building fast and getting things right but not looking stunningly beautiful - this is an option. The people with too much money to know what to do with it, can then build things in a crazy way with agencies for the logo, different agency for web design and then a 3rd agency for build etc.

drhowarddrfine 14y ago

Then you're doing it wrong. I've been doing web dev for eight years and have a staff of 8 developers. We can spend up to 50% of our time getting things to work in IE. The extra time we spend fixing the few problems with anything else has NEVER been billed to our clients cause we consider that almost nothing. And I'm talking about the iPhone, iPad, Android and any browsers you care to bring up. IE has always been the worst browser on the planet by far and will always be years behind all others in modern standards support and practices.