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The problem he's missing is simple math. We're a small startup making apps for social networks, and about 7% of our customers use IE6. (I keep meaning to check
by mattmaroon 18y ago
The problem he's missing is simple math. We're a small startup making apps for social networks, and about 7% of our customers use IE6. (I keep meaning to check by revenue, I bet it's less then, since presumably a lot of them are using it at work where they can't just whip out their credit card.) Unfortunately, getting our great UI to work in IE6 takes up some percentage of our time. As time goes on, the percentage of users drops and the percentage of our time increases. I'm not sure if they've crossed paths yet, but if not, it's close.
Sure, if you have unlimited resources, develop for IE6, Opera, whatever else. But when you're on a budget, and you have to choose between making your app 20% better for 93% of your users, or making it work for the extra 7%, it's not a no-brainer.
- carlosrr 18y agoHe is not advocating that you get your great UI to work on IE6. He is advocating that you get a lame UI just for IE6 users.
- moe 18y agoWhich takes nearly as much, if not even more effort.
- intranation 18y agoIt really doesn't. I'm an experienced front-end coder, and I can tell you right now that the amount of extra work I put into IE6 support is really not prohibitively high. The bugs and issues in IE6 are well-known and well-documented, so it's a simple matter of professionalism to be aware of these things, and account for them, as you code.
- moe 18y agoDepends on what your frontend looks like. The average run-off-the-mill HTML site can ofcourse be made to work in all browsers with little effort. The real pain starts when you want to do interesting stuff. Advanced AJAX and javascript magic just doesn't work in IE6 without horrible overhead - partly due to the lack of sensible debugging tools.
- kaens 18y agoYou can do entirely different fronts for browsers with different capabilities.
- moe 18y agoWhich is hardly a worthwhile option for a reasonably complex website.
- intranation 18y agoOr... you could just use a Javascript framework that takes care of that abstraction for you. This is seriously not a hard problem.
- moe 18y agoWell, frameworks go a long way but they don't help with the pains in the CSS area. When supporting IE6 you're generally limiting yourself to the capabilities of that browser. And for any non-trivial site you will run into hard problems regularly, unless you're leaving HTML behind entirely (ExtJS, Flash).