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C'mon, I understand this site is "Hacker News", but with IE having an installed base of 42+%, you can't down vote me for pointing out the truth... (Source: htt

C'mon, I understand this site is "Hacker News", but with IE having an installed base of 42+%, you can't down vote me for pointing out the truth... (Source: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

TweedHeads 17y ago
Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome are working together on HTML5. That's consensus. Pull that way if you want, progress goes the other way... ...with or without IE
- showerst 17y ago
  If Tesla, Lamborghini, and Ferrari start making all electric cars, but Ford doesn't, that's consensus right? Market share matters. Maybe for specialized hacker sites we can cater to only the good browsers, and graceful degradation is a must anyway, but it's a hard sell to build a successful mainstream site by eliminating 40% (or more) of users right off the bat.
  - deleted 17y ago
    [deleted]
  - TweedHeads 17y ago
    Some men move the world forward while others watch from the bleachers
  - calambrac 17y ago
    That's... such a wonderful comparison. Because we've never seen an apparently dominant American car company lose serious ground to competitors because it refused to pay attention to what consumers actually wanted, have we?
    - cglee 17y ago
      ...except in this case consumers couldn't care less about HTML5 or web standards.
      - calambrac 17y ago
        Consumers care about car internals at anything more than a superficial level? If HTML5 is actually important to improving the end-user experience, if browsers that implement it have a real, demonstrable advantage over those that don't, then it doesn't matter if the consumer cares about HTML5 or not. They'll still want the results that technology enables.
        cglee 17y ago
        Absolutely consumers care about the car's internals. Most people know a lot more about their cars than about web standards.
        calambrac 17y ago
        Right, the typical consumer can crank out exactly which relevant industry standards their car's internals adhere to. When consumers say they care about the internals of their cars, what they actually care about are things like power, fuel efficiency, torque, whatever. They have nothing more than a superficial understanding of how the actual mechanics of the vehicle translate into these qualities. Talking about V8 engines, etc, is, for the typical consumer, nothing more than marketing. HTML5 could certainly be a marketing device (5? That's one more than 4, it must be better!), especially if you showed end users cool things that web sites can do with HTML5 that they can't do with 4.
        cglee 17y ago
        I think that's where we disagree. I haven't come across any normal folk who even remotely cares about HTML version or javascript library, etc. I have however come across many people from various backgrounds talking about how different cars perform. edit: ultimately we'll probably need some numbers to back our claims. I've got way too many bugs to fix to do any significant digging. But I'm open to counterexamples if you can find some numbers.
jdowdell 17y ago
FAQ item... w3schools.com uses a self-selected sample, and most other surveys show IE still above 60% audience share. I agree with you, though, that it's weird to discriminate against such large audiences. jd/adobe

TweedHeads 17y ago

Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome are working together on HTML5. That's consensus. Pull that way if you want, progress goes the other way... ...with or without IE

showerst 17y ago
If Tesla, Lamborghini, and Ferrari start making all electric cars, but Ford doesn't, that's consensus right? Market share matters. Maybe for specialized hacker sites we can cater to only the good browsers, and graceful degradation is a must anyway, but it's a hard sell to build a successful mainstream site by eliminating 40% (or more) of users right off the bat.
- deleted 17y ago
  [deleted]
- TweedHeads 17y ago
  Some men move the world forward while others watch from the bleachers
- calambrac 17y ago
  That's... such a wonderful comparison. Because we've never seen an apparently dominant American car company lose serious ground to competitors because it refused to pay attention to what consumers actually wanted, have we?
  - cglee 17y ago
    ...except in this case consumers couldn't care less about HTML5 or web standards.
    - calambrac 17y ago
      Consumers care about car internals at anything more than a superficial level? If HTML5 is actually important to improving the end-user experience, if browsers that implement it have a real, demonstrable advantage over those that don't, then it doesn't matter if the consumer cares about HTML5 or not. They'll still want the results that technology enables.
      - cglee 17y ago
        Absolutely consumers care about the car's internals. Most people know a lot more about their cars than about web standards.
        calambrac 17y ago
        Right, the typical consumer can crank out exactly which relevant industry standards their car's internals adhere to. When consumers say they care about the internals of their cars, what they actually care about are things like power, fuel efficiency, torque, whatever. They have nothing more than a superficial understanding of how the actual mechanics of the vehicle translate into these qualities. Talking about V8 engines, etc, is, for the typical consumer, nothing more than marketing. HTML5 could certainly be a marketing device (5? That's one more than 4, it must be better!), especially if you showed end users cool things that web sites can do with HTML5 that they can't do with 4.
        cglee 17y ago
        I think that's where we disagree. I haven't come across any normal folk who even remotely cares about HTML version or javascript library, etc. I have however come across many people from various backgrounds talking about how different cars perform. edit: ultimately we'll probably need some numbers to back our claims. I've got way too many bugs to fix to do any significant digging. But I'm open to counterexamples if you can find some numbers.

jdowdell 17y ago

FAQ item... w3schools.com uses a self-selected sample, and most other surveys show IE still above 60% audience share. I agree with you, though, that it's weird to discriminate against such large audiences. jd/adobe