5 ms·

It all depends on your end goals and your audience. I don't have #'s off the top of my head, but let's say IE8 accounted for 40% of browser usage across your vi

It all depends on your end goals and your audience. I don't have #'s off the top of my head, but let's say IE8 accounted for 40% of browser usage across your visitors. But IE8 is old. Are you willing to say to 40% of your potentially paying customers "Sorry, but your browser sucks. We're not supporting you."? If you are, great. No coddling necessary. But for other people, they may not be comfortable with the percentages yet, and I think that's perfectly understandable.

nbouscal 14y ago
You wouldn't say it like that, I hope. You would say, “Here's a link to a browser upgrade that will allow you to enjoy the best product we can offer you. It's completely free, and takes only a few minutes to install!” Also, IE8 accounts for less than 10% of browser usage worldwide now, so the odds of a company having it be 40% are rather slim, unless they specifically target enterprise in which case they dug their own grave and I have no sympathy for them.
- dave5104 14y ago
  Oh no, of course not. I'm just trying to make the point that some companies may not be comfortable with whatever IE8 is at right now. I think you can substitute "IE8" for any browser, and "40%" for whatever that browser's current market share is. Coincidentally, I work in the multi-family housing industry, and one of the industry titans requires IE to use their product--which everyone uses--so we have ~82% IE share on our own product (which is supplementary to the titan). Of that, IE8 stands at ~31% of our total site traffic, which is compelling enough for our company to need to support it. (IE9 is only ~39%, with IE6/7/10 making up the remaining 12%.) So until that industry titan changes their way, we're stuck in an IE rut.
  - nbouscal 14y ago
    That's a shitty situation to be in. Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to disrupt that industry titan, though.
    - nasmorn 14y ago
      Some businesses have deeper moats than front end dev speed.
      - dave5104 14y ago
        This is exactly right for multi-family housing. I can't see any sort of startup or disruption coming in anytime soon without taking years of hard work to reach 50% feature parity to meet what the industry expects are standard features. (Or maybe I've been working here too long to get past that notion.)
    - democracy 14y ago
      What exactly is shitty about it? Old browsers can still display text, images and hyperlinks. There are millions of use-cases perfectly covered by them.
      - nbouscal 14y ago
        For starters, users expect modern-looking websites. That includes users on old browsers, thanks to the amount of bending over backwards done in the web industry to provide those users with as much of the modern browsing experience as possible. If you serve up a page looking like the c2.com wiki to a non-technical user, they're not going to be too happy about it. Far more so than that, though, what's shitty about having to support IE 6-8 is the complete lack of consistency. Even if you aren't doing anything fancy, you have to spend a hell of a lot of dev time if you want things to look the same across browsers when they're included. Hours and hours of wasted time is pretty shitty, especially when the work involved is so aggravating and, from a creative point of view, utterly pointless. In effect, your question is like asking what would be shitty about developing apps for a 10-year-old Palm Pilot. There are millions of use-cases perfectly covered by those too, but that doesn't mean an iPhone app developer is going to want to spend time porting his apps to one.
        democracy 14y ago
        Even if the users expect "modern-looking" websites - it is not something that cannot be done with IE6. Secondly, you don't have to design 1:1 pixel-perfect copy of your website that looks the same on all browsers. The main thing - if your developers cannot degrade the website functionality - they are seriously doing something wrong - get more experienced You can as well design Flash site and call it "progress" and tell the rest of our users to go somewhere else. Now, how is it different from other "modern" technologies? Its W3C support? "but that doesn't mean an iPhone app developer is going to want to spend time porting his apps to one." If your customers still use Palm Pilot, then why would you design your site ONLY FOR IPHONE??????
- democracy 14y ago
  Are you really going to give them better experience (IE8 vs whatever latest chrome)? What is it going to be?
  - nbouscal 14y ago
    By not supporting old browsers with all of their inconsistencies, a team can save a significant amount of development time. That development time can then go directly towards new features, bug fixes, etc. It's not so much that the latest browsers can do so many new things (though in some cases it's that as well), it's that you can actually develop for them efficiently without diving into a rabbit hole of IE compatibility issues every time you add a feature to the site.
    - democracy 14y ago
      Of course, it is easier to support only 1 mature platform , 1 database, 1 application server, 1 library of whatever. However we don't have this luxury even on the backend, and you cannot seriously expect it to be different for browsers. And if you don't develop cross-platform because of lack of time this is fine. Please, don't cover it with insults about dumb CEOs and ignorant lame users - bad excuse for bad programming habits (not personal, just generalisation). Again, there is no technical reason not to give workable version of the website to all major browser users. It doesn't have to be a pixel-perfect copy. It just has to work.
      - nbouscal 14y ago
        I'm not asking to support one platform or one browser or one anything. I'm asking to support the standards. Industries have standards for a reason. I didn't insult anyone, CEOs or users, so your generalization is a very poor one. The technical reason for not giving a workable version to IE6 is that it can take as long to make a workable version for IE6 as for all other browsers combined. IE8 is not that bad, but it's similar in principle. If I have to spend 50% of my time on 10% of my users, I'm better off doing twice as much for the other 90%.

nbouscal 14y ago

You wouldn't say it like that, I hope. You would say, “Here's a link to a browser upgrade that will allow you to enjoy the best product we can offer you. It's completely free, and takes only a few minutes to install!” Also, IE8 accounts for less than 10% of browser usage worldwide now, so the odds of a company having it be 40% are rather slim, unless they specifically target enterprise in which case they dug their own grave and I have no sympathy for them.

dave5104 14y ago
Oh no, of course not. I'm just trying to make the point that some companies may not be comfortable with whatever IE8 is at right now. I think you can substitute "IE8" for any browser, and "40%" for whatever that browser's current market share is. Coincidentally, I work in the multi-family housing industry, and one of the industry titans requires IE to use their product--which everyone uses--so we have ~82% IE share on our own product (which is supplementary to the titan). Of that, IE8 stands at ~31% of our total site traffic, which is compelling enough for our company to need to support it. (IE9 is only ~39%, with IE6/7/10 making up the remaining 12%.) So until that industry titan changes their way, we're stuck in an IE rut.
- nbouscal 14y ago
  That's a shitty situation to be in. Sounds like a great opportunity for someone to disrupt that industry titan, though.
  - nasmorn 14y ago
    Some businesses have deeper moats than front end dev speed.
    - dave5104 14y ago
      This is exactly right for multi-family housing. I can't see any sort of startup or disruption coming in anytime soon without taking years of hard work to reach 50% feature parity to meet what the industry expects are standard features. (Or maybe I've been working here too long to get past that notion.)
  - democracy 14y ago
    What exactly is shitty about it? Old browsers can still display text, images and hyperlinks. There are millions of use-cases perfectly covered by them.
    - nbouscal 14y ago
      For starters, users expect modern-looking websites. That includes users on old browsers, thanks to the amount of bending over backwards done in the web industry to provide those users with as much of the modern browsing experience as possible. If you serve up a page looking like the c2.com wiki to a non-technical user, they're not going to be too happy about it. Far more so than that, though, what's shitty about having to support IE 6-8 is the complete lack of consistency. Even if you aren't doing anything fancy, you have to spend a hell of a lot of dev time if you want things to look the same across browsers when they're included. Hours and hours of wasted time is pretty shitty, especially when the work involved is so aggravating and, from a creative point of view, utterly pointless. In effect, your question is like asking what would be shitty about developing apps for a 10-year-old Palm Pilot. There are millions of use-cases perfectly covered by those too, but that doesn't mean an iPhone app developer is going to want to spend time porting his apps to one.
      - democracy 14y ago
        Even if the users expect "modern-looking" websites - it is not something that cannot be done with IE6. Secondly, you don't have to design 1:1 pixel-perfect copy of your website that looks the same on all browsers. The main thing - if your developers cannot degrade the website functionality - they are seriously doing something wrong - get more experienced You can as well design Flash site and call it "progress" and tell the rest of our users to go somewhere else. Now, how is it different from other "modern" technologies? Its W3C support? "but that doesn't mean an iPhone app developer is going to want to spend time porting his apps to one." If your customers still use Palm Pilot, then why would you design your site ONLY FOR IPHONE??????
democracy 14y ago
Are you really going to give them better experience (IE8 vs whatever latest chrome)? What is it going to be?
- nbouscal 14y ago
  By not supporting old browsers with all of their inconsistencies, a team can save a significant amount of development time. That development time can then go directly towards new features, bug fixes, etc. It's not so much that the latest browsers can do so many new things (though in some cases it's that as well), it's that you can actually develop for them efficiently without diving into a rabbit hole of IE compatibility issues every time you add a feature to the site.
  - democracy 14y ago
    Of course, it is easier to support only 1 mature platform , 1 database, 1 application server, 1 library of whatever. However we don't have this luxury even on the backend, and you cannot seriously expect it to be different for browsers. And if you don't develop cross-platform because of lack of time this is fine. Please, don't cover it with insults about dumb CEOs and ignorant lame users - bad excuse for bad programming habits (not personal, just generalisation). Again, there is no technical reason not to give workable version of the website to all major browser users. It doesn't have to be a pixel-perfect copy. It just has to work.
    - nbouscal 14y ago
      I'm not asking to support one platform or one browser or one anything. I'm asking to support the standards. Industries have standards for a reason. I didn't insult anyone, CEOs or users, so your generalization is a very poor one. The technical reason for not giving a workable version to IE6 is that it can take as long to make a workable version for IE6 as for all other browsers combined. IE8 is not that bad, but it's similar in principle. If I have to spend 50% of my time on 10% of my users, I'm better off doing twice as much for the other 90%.