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It's not your imagination. For Heap, it would be a bit unwise to ignore IE < 9 still since they're limiting themselves from the start. A lot of new projects o

by eksith 14y ago

It's not your imagination. For Heap, it would be a bit unwise to ignore IE < 9 still since they're limiting themselves from the start. A lot of new projects on the front page lately don't work on IE9 either. I lost count of the number of shiny new things (usually involving HTML5) that just show a plain black (/white/gray/blue etc...) screen on IE9 and I'd need to fire up Firefox or Chrome just to look at it. To be fair, not all of these are catering to IE based browsers (and I dread to think how some of these would look on a Nokia mobile... or, heaven forbid, a BlackBerry), but they're effectively ignoring a very, very, very large percentage of users worldwide -- of not just IE -- to be first out of the gate. BlackBerry in particular is still very popular in Latin America and Southeast Asia. That foot in the door is all important, I suppose, since the buzz will help sustain at least an initial signup for whatever it is. The web applications in particular are exactly that. Because they're applications they're crafted to a very select set of platforms since they're executed. For better or for worse, a lot of new projects are already going in the direction of the browser as the OS. I presume backwards compatibility will be tacked on later and maybe removed as those browsers fall further behind.

Hovertruck 14y ago
I can speak to this a little bit, actually. Chartbeat has never supported IE, which as you say sounds like cutting off a major part of your market. Even moreso when you consider our customers which include pretty much every major publisher in the US. However what we've learned is that if your product provides enough value, people have no problem installing Chrome or Firefox or whatever. To this day we receive pretty much no requests for IE support at all, which enabled us to build a product with heavy HTML5 (mostly canvas) and CSS3 usage.
- eksith 14y ago
  That's very true. We don't have the same complaint about programs specifically built on one family of operating systems not working on another. That also speaks to how much we depend on the browser these days to act as an OS in a way, particularly for full featured applications that depend on (relatively) new technology.
- ianstormtaylor 14y ago
  +1 to this. Also people need to realize that client-side library support is different from what the product's website itself supports. Chartbeat, and every analytics provider I know of supports IE for their tracking library.

by eksith 14y ago

Hovertruck 14y ago

I can speak to this a little bit, actually. Chartbeat has never supported IE, which as you say sounds like cutting off a major part of your market. Even moreso when you consider our customers which include pretty much every major publisher in the US. However what we've learned is that if your product provides enough value, people have no problem installing Chrome or Firefox or whatever. To this day we receive pretty much no requests for IE support at all, which enabled us to build a product with heavy HTML5 (mostly canvas) and CSS3 usage.

eksith 14y ago
That's very true. We don't have the same complaint about programs specifically built on one family of operating systems not working on another. That also speaks to how much we depend on the browser these days to act as an OS in a way, particularly for full featured applications that depend on (relatively) new technology.
ianstormtaylor 14y ago
+1 to this. Also people need to realize that client-side library support is different from what the product's website itself supports. Chartbeat, and every analytics provider I know of supports IE for their tracking library.