6 ms·

It’s Time To Stop Blaming Internet Explorer

givan 14y ago
This is a microsoft advertorial, don't bother.
- rsanchez1 14y ago
  Really, so anything that doesn't criticize Microsoft is a Microsoft advert? Then does that make most of the tech blogosphere one giant Apple advert?
  - sliverstorm 14y ago
    anything that doesn't criticize Microsoft is a Microsoft advert? That's about the sum of it
rsanchez1 14y ago
Well, at least they were balanced enough to let Nicholas post a response. He posted something similar on his own blog (actually most of it is the same with some editorializing), and I have to agree. All the whining about Internet Explorer is really getting old. As Nicholas said, there has been enough whining. Microsoft has already listened, Microsoft has already made an effort to get people off IE 6-8 and onto IE 9, and Microsoft is pushing IE 10 hard with Windows 8. Beyond that, do we really need more whining? If it's users of old browsers you have a problem with, either suck it up and support them, or just don't support them and either make them see the hard way that they need to upgrade their browser, or see them go to a different web site and save yourself some work and/or whining.
- randomdata 14y ago
  I expect much of the remaining whining comes from the disparity between stakeholders wanting to support everyone, and their developers wanting to let the IE holdouts suffer the consequences.
Toshio 14y ago
Stop blaming the main culprit for blocking technological progress over the last decade? I say those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Never forget IE6 nazism.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Shortest thread ever.
- BobPalmer 14y ago
  Godwin's law[1] in the first few comments? Really? I have to agree that this unrelenting and irrational hatred is getting downright silly. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law
halayli 14y ago
Here's what I can extract: IE9 is damn good because. Yup that's all.
- hessenwolf 14y ago
  I have to use IE in work. Damn, it's crap.
  - alanmeaney 14y ago
    get a new job! (joke)
valisystem 14y ago
IE lags advanced features with years late. This is hurting web developement. I don't understand how anyone can find this perfectly normal, or even acceptable from a major vendor like microsoft, the company supposed to bring technology into every people's house.
- randomdata 14y ago
  I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm curious to know why, exactly, it does hurt web development? I believe more people use modern Gecko/WebKit than there are iPhones, yet we'll happily make an entire application that is limited to the just the iPhone device and not think twice. Is this a case of taking statistics too far? To hear that only 50% of the people with web browsers can use your application doesn't sound great, never mind that 50% in real numbers is far greater than 100% of iPhones (or whatever, insert your own example here).
  - cageface 14y ago
    This because the iPhone offers a completely different user experience than a desktop browser. IE is just another desktop browser with essentially no intrinsic value over the alternatives.
  - valisystem 14y ago
    It does not hurt my web development much, you are totally right. I am more concerned about the fact that the limitations and difficulties brought by browsers I don't use applies also, to me, through the products of other people.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    A couple of years ago there was a lot of talk about how the web development advances so much slower than native languages, and that it will take a decade or more before you'll be able to do the things you can with native apps right now. That's exactly what this is about. Microsoft is the one slowing the web development even more now, by not adopting the latest features on time.
    - 14y ago
padolsey 14y ago
> Yes, complaining is useful to get people to listen. Microsoft is listening, so continuing to complain doesn’t do anything except perpetuate an attitude that I would rather not have in Web development. That makes no sense. He says that complaining made MS listen but then he says to stop complaining because it creates a bad atmosphere...
- rurounijones 14y ago
  It makes perfect sense providing you: 1. Believe that the complaining was to effect change 2. Believe that that change has been effected due to Microsoft's actions in trying to kill off IE6. (This seems to be the position he is taking based on my reading) If you agree with the above then further complaining serves no purpose except to vent your frustrations which is his main point. Of course if you do not agree with the above then that is fine, but saying "makes no sense" is a tadge harsh.
einhverfr 14y ago
I agree with a lot the author's views. The fact is that as long as you cater to problems of the past, you are stuck with them. If you start giving people a compelling reason to upgrade, many will. In the LedgerSMB project we made a decision back in 2006 to only support browsers with features that made our lives easier. Because of our i18n framework, we decided to drop all support for all browsers that didn't support button elements per the standard. Yes, at the heigh of IE6, we dropped support for IE6. However, we could do this because would tell businesses "if you want to use LedgerSMB, install Firefox." This wouldn't have worked for the general public, but for the general public we probably wouldn't have done i18n much at all. But anyway we chose buttons because according to the standard, what you display and what is submitted are only loosely coupled, which makes i18n easier (just translate the inner string and leave the value constant). IE6 handled buttons horribly. When you clicked on a button element of type submit it would send the value of all buttons on the form. Worse, it submitted the wrong information (innerHTML instead of value). This made it impossible on the server side to see which buttons were actually clicked. Too bad. Then IE7 came out and it was better. We thought at first we could support it. But we were wrong. IE7 still sent innerHTML instead of value. We had to wait until IE8 to support IE again. I think that this is what the author is getting at when he laments people blaming circumstances they can't control. We looked at it and we asked "what choices do we have? What should we do?" We then decided that we wouldn't be hurt too badly at the time by dropping IE and that turned out to be a good bet. In the end it really is about choices and how we think about them. An e-commerce site may have different choices available than we did. But you make your choices and you do the best you can.
- masklinn 14y ago
  Yep. Technically for your precise case you could probably have rigged a JS shim to fix IE's behavior, something along the lines of: * On click of an input[@type=submit] or a button * Disable all other input[@type=submit] or button * On form submit, setTimeout(re-enable buttons) then un-register self The fact that it also sends retarded stuff would probably be harder to fix, but not much. Though I can easily understand that being considered "not worth it", it's a hack (as most shims are), and unless you had a big customer base clamoring for IE support there wasn't much value in it.
alanmeaney 14y ago
I wrote a blog post related to this last week. 'In work why two browsers are better than one' http://fundsacademy.com/blog/ http://fundsacademy.com/blog/
EnderMB 14y ago
The biggest issue holding back Web Development isn't Internet Explorer. It's incompetent developers. I agree entirely with this post. Sure, coding a site to work in IE6 is a pain in the ass, especially when working with JavaScript-powered elements on a site that need to work in every browser. I've always followed the Yahoo graded browser support (http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/ http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/) baseline when building new sites and have even moved it over to personal projects. I would chalk it up to experience with older browsers, but I've worked with students fresh out of university that have had to pick up projects that have IE6 as a requirement, and they've coped just fine. Many of the developers that are so up-in-arms over cross-browser support are largely new developers or aren't that good at their job. They'll only be versed in what their favourite blogs will preach, they'll use any jQuery plugin or JS polyfill they think sounds good to make their site better, they've never used the profiler within Firebug and never check the size of their web pages. I spend a lot of time on /r/web_design on Reddit and it is not uncommon to see users posting "great websites" that use Modernizr to "make their sites cross-browser" and weigh in around the 5-10MB mark for something as simple as a basic home page. A large number of front-end developers probably wouldn't last a month at your average agency or development team for a large website. We all want IE6 and to an extent IE7 to die a horrible death, and Microsoft have clearly done their best to try and get people off a dead platform and onto a new OS. However, we're not talking about rocket science, we're talking about rejigging some code or learning the nuances of each browser your users use. Quoting the latest StatCounter figures (or whatever backs up your argument) to provide an argument for ditching old browsers will have battle-hardened developers laugh in your face, because they aren't your users! If you're making an application then you have a case for not supporting legacy browsers, but if you're complaining that setting up your crappy WordPress-powered site is too hard in IE6 then either shut up or find alternative employment.
- lucian1900 14y ago
  From my meagre experience, the biggest problem with IE6 and 7 (and to some extent 8) is incorrect layout. Beyond very simple pages, it becomes almost impossible to get the same page to look even remotely the same on both IE6 and modern browsers. One solution I've seen used is to disable styles entirely on IE6 (and suggest Chrome Frame) and deal with IE7/8 quirks only.
gitarr 14y ago
As long as Microsoft will not implement the same features, in a similar time frame and in a compatible way as the other browser vendors they should be blamed and shamed. The article says IE9 is a damn good browser without qualifying why they think that it is, I respectfully disagree.
- ch0wn 14y ago
  I agree. The speed at Chrome and Firefox are evolving is mind-boggling. There's WebGL, WebRTC, new Audio APIs, transitions, css filters and it feels like every other week there's something new that isn't just implemented but actually pushed out to the user. Microsoft is nowhere close to that.
  - josteink 14y ago
    There's WebGL, WebRTC, new Audio APIs, transitions, css filters and it feels like every other week there's something new that isn't just implemented but actually pushed out to the user And all that before any of the features has been standardized and finalized. And now we hate MSIE for in the past doing what Chrome is doing now while at the same time we hate the current MSIE for being what we demanded MSIE to be in the past. Mindboggling indeed. Sounds like Chrome is the new MSIE to me.
- Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
  You have no sympathy for the fact that they've done the right thing in rebuilding the browser from the ground up to prevent future problems which has been what's slowing them up? From an engineering perspective this is absolutely the right thing to have done, something technologists would have encouraged them to do at the time in the long term interest of the product. It has short term draw backs (some constraints on functionality in the current version) but was the best decision for the product and, given that IE as the default browser on Windows will always have a significant market share for the web in general, for the web in general. Sure, say that it's not as good as Firefox and Chrome right now but "blamed and shamed"? It feels to me as if you're coming pretty close to beating up on someone for doing the right thing.
jiggy2011 14y ago
I'm curious as to what is in it for Microsoft to maintain their own rendering/JS engine these days. It would seem simpler for them just to build IE on top of webkit/V8 like everyone else.
jabiko 14y ago
> The only reason it doesn’t have all of the features as Chrome and Firefox is because they rebuilt the thing from scratch so that adding more features in the future would be easier. Let me say that again: they rebuilt the browser from scratch. Is there any source for this? I doubt that IE9 was build from scratch.
- mmcnickle 14y ago
  "With IE9, we rewrote our layout engine from scratch." -- Jason Weber, lead program manager for IE performance [1] "Microsoft debuted the new browser at a launch event at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. Dean Hachamovitch, the corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, told the story of how Microsoft built IE9 from scratch." [2] [1]http://www.geekwire.com/2011/geeks-guide-to-ie9/ http://www.geekwire.com/2011/geeks-guide-to-ie9/ [2]http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/after-40-million-downloads-microsoft-launches-internet-explorer-9/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/after-40-million-downloads-mi...
UnoriginalGuy 14y ago
We've seen IE 6 usage drop to below 2%; and that is with almost all of our customers being business users too. We don't deal with governments or the military however so your mileage might vary. The iPad has a higher usage on our properties in every measurable way. A lot of web developers I've known who complain constantly about IE7 and newer are also still developing for quirks mode for some ungodly reason. While IE7 definitely isn't perfect, when you use it in strict mode it seems at least as consistent as Firefox or Chrome are. It seems the call of "IE sucks!" has almost become so ingrained that people can rarely justify the opinion (ditto with "Vista sucks," "Windows is insecure," "Macs cannot get viruses," etc). Frankly once an opinion reaches critical mass in the technology world certain individuals just start parroting it without any thought or consideration as to WHY it was true in the first place.
deleted 14y ago
[deleted]
Beltiras 14y ago
IE9: slightly less shitty than it's predecessors. Ye, I'm totally sold.
masto 14y ago
It's great that Microsoft has (for whatever reason, it doesn't matter) taken up the banner of standards compliance, modernization, etc. It doesn't change the fact that IE9 is still a pain in the ass for real-world developers making the current generation of applications. I'm not talking about web sites, I mean the full-featured applications we engineers claim can be done in modern "HTML5" browsers without plugins. When the business people say "ok, we want one", one of the first discussions everyone has is which browsers have to be supported. That's really code for "how much extra do you want to spend to make it look right in Internet Explorer"? You can make blanket statements that anyone who has trouble with IE9 is incompetent, but I know from working with them that we have an amazing frontend team who are building a great "desktop quality" application. And the numbers in the bug database tell the story: 37 IE9-specific issues reported, only one or two for other browsers. These aren't issues of baseline support or graceful degradation, they're basic behavior and layout problems. Some examples: IE9: When editing the xxx field it overlaps the chart icon IE9: Data points not displayed when hovering the mouse over the locus points in chart IE9: xxx dropdown is obscured by above pane and also overlaps start date IE9: Clicking on Logout link spawns Session Time Out modal even though session has not expired Can smart developers fix these kinds of problems? Sure, they can and do. The question is whether it's worth adding 15-20% more work to a project to support IE9. Is it time to stop blaming Internet Explorer? Not at all: it's time to start properly accounting for the effort it takes to support Internet Explorer so that businesses can weigh the true cost against market share when making the "minimum browser" decision.
DaNmarner 14y ago
There's a difference between "blaming IE" and "stopping innovation". We blame IE because we don't want to get into the same situation again, not because we don't innovate. The author doesn't seem to understand this distinction. Therefore he contradicts himself as in: 'It’s not actually old browsers that are holding back the web...“old browsers”, just represent constraints to the problems that we have to solve. ' Yes, constraints can inspire innovation, but removing them inspires even more!
mcmillion 14y ago
"Internet Explorer 9, on the other hand, is a damn good browser." No. It's not.
89a 14y ago
The only time to stop blaming IE is when we start ignoring IE
dexterchief 14y ago
I believe IE 6+, are perfect. The are functioning exactly as designed to prevent web apps from competing with Microsoft's bread and butter desktop apps. They do that by forcing developers to choose between writing non-standard stuff that ties them to Microsoft or increasing my development costs by supporting their weirdness + the standards. To me this article misses the point, things like progressive enhancement is part of the extra cost/complexity that I have to absorb when I don't choose Microsoft. Every time I have to do ANYTHING beyond following the recent standards to the letter, Microsoft has succeeded with their strategy of forcing me to choose them or raising my cost to compete with them. Yes there are a bunch of techniques that can help once you choose to absorb the cost, but how I am a crappy developer or a whiner for not cheerfully accepting the burden?

givan 14y ago

This is a microsoft advertorial, don't bother.

rsanchez1 14y ago
Really, so anything that doesn't criticize Microsoft is a Microsoft advert? Then does that make most of the tech blogosphere one giant Apple advert?
- sliverstorm 14y ago
  anything that doesn't criticize Microsoft is a Microsoft advert? That's about the sum of it

Well, at least they were balanced enough to let Nicholas post a response. He posted something similar on his own blog (actually most of it is the same with some editorializing), and I have to agree. All the whining about Internet Explorer is really getting old. As Nicholas said, there has been enough whining. Microsoft has already listened, Microsoft has already made an effort to get people off IE 6-8 and onto IE 9, and Microsoft is pushing IE 10 hard with Windows 8. Beyond that, do we really need more whining? If it's users of old browsers you have a problem with, either suck it up and support them, or just don't support them and either make them see the hard way that they need to upgrade their browser, or see them go to a different web site and save yourself some work and/or whining.

randomdata 14y ago
I expect much of the remaining whining comes from the disparity between stakeholders wanting to support everyone, and their developers wanting to let the IE holdouts suffer the consequences.

Toshio 14y ago

Stop blaming the main culprit for blocking technological progress over the last decade? I say those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Never forget IE6 nazism.

chris_wot 14y ago
Shortest thread ever.
BobPalmer 14y ago
Godwin's law[1] in the first few comments? Really? I have to agree that this unrelenting and irrational hatred is getting downright silly. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwins_law

halayli 14y ago

Here's what I can extract: IE9 is damn good because. Yup that's all.

hessenwolf 14y ago
I have to use IE in work. Damn, it's crap.
- alanmeaney 14y ago
  get a new job! (joke)

valisystem 14y ago

IE lags advanced features with years late. This is hurting web developement. I don't understand how anyone can find this perfectly normal, or even acceptable from a major vendor like microsoft, the company supposed to bring technology into every people's house.

randomdata 14y ago
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm curious to know why, exactly, it does hurt web development? I believe more people use modern Gecko/WebKit than there are iPhones, yet we'll happily make an entire application that is limited to the just the iPhone device and not think twice. Is this a case of taking statistics too far? To hear that only 50% of the people with web browsers can use your application doesn't sound great, never mind that 50% in real numbers is far greater than 100% of iPhones (or whatever, insert your own example here).
- cageface 14y ago
  This because the iPhone offers a completely different user experience than a desktop browser. IE is just another desktop browser with essentially no intrinsic value over the alternatives.
- valisystem 14y ago
  It does not hurt my web development much, you are totally right. I am more concerned about the fact that the limitations and difficulties brought by browsers I don't use applies also, to me, through the products of other people.
- mtgx 14y ago
  A couple of years ago there was a lot of talk about how the web development advances so much slower than native languages, and that it will take a decade or more before you'll be able to do the things you can with native apps right now. That's exactly what this is about. Microsoft is the one slowing the web development even more now, by not adopting the latest features on time.
  - 14y ago

padolsey 14y ago

> Yes, complaining is useful to get people to listen. Microsoft is listening, so continuing to complain doesn’t do anything except perpetuate an attitude that I would rather not have in Web development. That makes no sense. He says that complaining made MS listen but then he says to stop complaining because it creates a bad atmosphere...

rurounijones 14y ago
It makes perfect sense providing you: 1. Believe that the complaining was to effect change 2. Believe that that change has been effected due to Microsoft's actions in trying to kill off IE6. (This seems to be the position he is taking based on my reading) If you agree with the above then further complaining serves no purpose except to vent your frustrations which is his main point. Of course if you do not agree with the above then that is fine, but saying "makes no sense" is a tadge harsh.

einhverfr 14y ago

I agree with a lot the author's views. The fact is that as long as you cater to problems of the past, you are stuck with them. If you start giving people a compelling reason to upgrade, many will. In the LedgerSMB project we made a decision back in 2006 to only support browsers with features that made our lives easier. Because of our i18n framework, we decided to drop all support for all browsers that didn't support button elements per the standard. Yes, at the heigh of IE6, we dropped support for IE6. However, we could do this because would tell businesses "if you want to use LedgerSMB, install Firefox." This wouldn't have worked for the general public, but for the general public we probably wouldn't have done i18n much at all. But anyway we chose buttons because according to the standard, what you display and what is submitted are only loosely coupled, which makes i18n easier (just translate the inner string and leave the value constant). IE6 handled buttons horribly. When you clicked on a button element of type submit it would send the value of all buttons on the form. Worse, it submitted the wrong information (innerHTML instead of value). This made it impossible on the server side to see which buttons were actually clicked. Too bad. Then IE7 came out and it was better. We thought at first we could support it. But we were wrong. IE7 still sent innerHTML instead of value. We had to wait until IE8 to support IE again. I think that this is what the author is getting at when he laments people blaming circumstances they can't control. We looked at it and we asked "what choices do we have? What should we do?" We then decided that we wouldn't be hurt too badly at the time by dropping IE and that turned out to be a good bet. In the end it really is about choices and how we think about them. An e-commerce site may have different choices available than we did. But you make your choices and you do the best you can.

masklinn 14y ago
Yep. Technically for your precise case you could probably have rigged a JS shim to fix IE's behavior, something along the lines of: * On click of an input[@type=submit] or a button * Disable all other input[@type=submit] or button * On form submit, setTimeout(re-enable buttons) then un-register self The fact that it also sends retarded stuff would probably be harder to fix, but not much. Though I can easily understand that being considered "not worth it", it's a hack (as most shims are), and unless you had a big customer base clamoring for IE support there wasn't much value in it.

alanmeaney 14y ago

I wrote a blog post related to this last week. 'In work why two browsers are better than one' http://fundsacademy.com/blog/ http://fundsacademy.com/blog/

EnderMB 14y ago

The biggest issue holding back Web Development isn't Internet Explorer. It's incompetent developers. I agree entirely with this post. Sure, coding a site to work in IE6 is a pain in the ass, especially when working with JavaScript-powered elements on a site that need to work in every browser. I've always followed the Yahoo graded browser support (http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/ http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/) baseline when building new sites and have even moved it over to personal projects. I would chalk it up to experience with older browsers, but I've worked with students fresh out of university that have had to pick up projects that have IE6 as a requirement, and they've coped just fine. Many of the developers that are so up-in-arms over cross-browser support are largely new developers or aren't that good at their job. They'll only be versed in what their favourite blogs will preach, they'll use any jQuery plugin or JS polyfill they think sounds good to make their site better, they've never used the profiler within Firebug and never check the size of their web pages. I spend a lot of time on /r/web_design on Reddit and it is not uncommon to see users posting "great websites" that use Modernizr to "make their sites cross-browser" and weigh in around the 5-10MB mark for something as simple as a basic home page. A large number of front-end developers probably wouldn't last a month at your average agency or development team for a large website. We all want IE6 and to an extent IE7 to die a horrible death, and Microsoft have clearly done their best to try and get people off a dead platform and onto a new OS. However, we're not talking about rocket science, we're talking about rejigging some code or learning the nuances of each browser your users use. Quoting the latest StatCounter figures (or whatever backs up your argument) to provide an argument for ditching old browsers will have battle-hardened developers laugh in your face, because they aren't your users! If you're making an application then you have a case for not supporting legacy browsers, but if you're complaining that setting up your crappy WordPress-powered site is too hard in IE6 then either shut up or find alternative employment.

lucian1900 14y ago
From my meagre experience, the biggest problem with IE6 and 7 (and to some extent 8) is incorrect layout. Beyond very simple pages, it becomes almost impossible to get the same page to look even remotely the same on both IE6 and modern browsers. One solution I've seen used is to disable styles entirely on IE6 (and suggest Chrome Frame) and deal with IE7/8 quirks only.

gitarr 14y ago

As long as Microsoft will not implement the same features, in a similar time frame and in a compatible way as the other browser vendors they should be blamed and shamed. The article says IE9 is a damn good browser without qualifying why they think that it is, I respectfully disagree.

ch0wn 14y ago
I agree. The speed at Chrome and Firefox are evolving is mind-boggling. There's WebGL, WebRTC, new Audio APIs, transitions, css filters and it feels like every other week there's something new that isn't just implemented but actually pushed out to the user. Microsoft is nowhere close to that.
- josteink 14y ago
  There's WebGL, WebRTC, new Audio APIs, transitions, css filters and it feels like every other week there's something new that isn't just implemented but actually pushed out to the user And all that before any of the features has been standardized and finalized. And now we hate MSIE for in the past doing what Chrome is doing now while at the same time we hate the current MSIE for being what we demanded MSIE to be in the past. Mindboggling indeed. Sounds like Chrome is the new MSIE to me.
Tyrannosaurs 14y ago
You have no sympathy for the fact that they've done the right thing in rebuilding the browser from the ground up to prevent future problems which has been what's slowing them up? From an engineering perspective this is absolutely the right thing to have done, something technologists would have encouraged them to do at the time in the long term interest of the product. It has short term draw backs (some constraints on functionality in the current version) but was the best decision for the product and, given that IE as the default browser on Windows will always have a significant market share for the web in general, for the web in general. Sure, say that it's not as good as Firefox and Chrome right now but "blamed and shamed"? It feels to me as if you're coming pretty close to beating up on someone for doing the right thing.

jiggy2011 14y ago

I'm curious as to what is in it for Microsoft to maintain their own rendering/JS engine these days. It would seem simpler for them just to build IE on top of webkit/V8 like everyone else.

jabiko 14y ago

> The only reason it doesn’t have all of the features as Chrome and Firefox is because they rebuilt the thing from scratch so that adding more features in the future would be easier. Let me say that again: they rebuilt the browser from scratch. Is there any source for this? I doubt that IE9 was build from scratch.

mmcnickle 14y ago
"With IE9, we rewrote our layout engine from scratch." -- Jason Weber, lead program manager for IE performance [1] "Microsoft debuted the new browser at a launch event at South by Southwest (SXSW) in Austin, Texas. Dean Hachamovitch, the corporate vice president of Internet Explorer, told the story of how Microsoft built IE9 from scratch." [2] [1]http://www.geekwire.com/2011/geeks-guide-to-ie9/ http://www.geekwire.com/2011/geeks-guide-to-ie9/ [2]http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/after-40-million-downloads-microsoft-launches-internet-explorer-9/ http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/after-40-million-downloads-mi...

UnoriginalGuy 14y ago

We've seen IE 6 usage drop to below 2%; and that is with almost all of our customers being business users too. We don't deal with governments or the military however so your mileage might vary. The iPad has a higher usage on our properties in every measurable way. A lot of web developers I've known who complain constantly about IE7 and newer are also still developing for quirks mode for some ungodly reason. While IE7 definitely isn't perfect, when you use it in strict mode it seems at least as consistent as Firefox or Chrome are. It seems the call of "IE sucks!" has almost become so ingrained that people can rarely justify the opinion (ditto with "Vista sucks," "Windows is insecure," "Macs cannot get viruses," etc). Frankly once an opinion reaches critical mass in the technology world certain individuals just start parroting it without any thought or consideration as to WHY it was true in the first place.

deleted 14y ago

[deleted]

Beltiras 14y ago

IE9: slightly less shitty than it's predecessors. Ye, I'm totally sold.

masto 14y ago

It's great that Microsoft has (for whatever reason, it doesn't matter) taken up the banner of standards compliance, modernization, etc. It doesn't change the fact that IE9 is still a pain in the ass for real-world developers making the current generation of applications. I'm not talking about web sites, I mean the full-featured applications we engineers claim can be done in modern "HTML5" browsers without plugins. When the business people say "ok, we want one", one of the first discussions everyone has is which browsers have to be supported. That's really code for "how much extra do you want to spend to make it look right in Internet Explorer"? You can make blanket statements that anyone who has trouble with IE9 is incompetent, but I know from working with them that we have an amazing frontend team who are building a great "desktop quality" application. And the numbers in the bug database tell the story: 37 IE9-specific issues reported, only one or two for other browsers. These aren't issues of baseline support or graceful degradation, they're basic behavior and layout problems. Some examples: IE9: When editing the xxx field it overlaps the chart icon IE9: Data points not displayed when hovering the mouse over the locus points in chart IE9: xxx dropdown is obscured by above pane and also overlaps start date IE9: Clicking on Logout link spawns Session Time Out modal even though session has not expired Can smart developers fix these kinds of problems? Sure, they can and do. The question is whether it's worth adding 15-20% more work to a project to support IE9. Is it time to stop blaming Internet Explorer? Not at all: it's time to start properly accounting for the effort it takes to support Internet Explorer so that businesses can weigh the true cost against market share when making the "minimum browser" decision.

DaNmarner 14y ago

There's a difference between "blaming IE" and "stopping innovation". We blame IE because we don't want to get into the same situation again, not because we don't innovate. The author doesn't seem to understand this distinction. Therefore he contradicts himself as in: 'It’s not actually old browsers that are holding back the web...“old browsers”, just represent constraints to the problems that we have to solve. ' Yes, constraints can inspire innovation, but removing them inspires even more!

mcmillion 14y ago

"Internet Explorer 9, on the other hand, is a damn good browser." No. It's not.

89a 14y ago

The only time to stop blaming IE is when we start ignoring IE

dexterchief 14y ago

I believe IE 6+, are perfect. The are functioning exactly as designed to prevent web apps from competing with Microsoft's bread and butter desktop apps. They do that by forcing developers to choose between writing non-standard stuff that ties them to Microsoft or increasing my development costs by supporting their weirdness + the standards. To me this article misses the point, things like progressive enhancement is part of the extra cost/complexity that I have to absorb when I don't choose Microsoft. Every time I have to do ANYTHING beyond following the recent standards to the letter, Microsoft has succeeded with their strategy of forcing me to choose them or raising my cost to compete with them. Yes there are a bunch of techniques that can help once you choose to absorb the cost, but how I am a crappy developer or a whiner for not cheerfully accepting the burden?