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I think the reason nobody seems to care about IE today isn't that it is a terrible browser, as in the past, but that it doesn't run on Mac OS or GNU/Linux. Ther

by glesica 12y ago

I think the reason nobody seems to care about IE today isn't that it is a terrible browser, as in the past, but that it doesn't run on Mac OS or GNU/Linux. There are certainly people doing development on Windows, but more (at least of people who would use features like this) doing so on other platforms. Until IE is cross-platform, many developers will continue to ignore it because they have no reasonable way of using it and getting to know it.

adventured 12y ago
Do you have stats to back up the premise that more developers (or those that would use features like this) are on non-Windows platforms? Windows still has roughly 90% of the total desktop + laptop market. I find it hard to believe it doesn't still have a majority of such developers. GNU/Linux is ~2% of the market.
- fractalb 12y ago
  I don't think 90% percent people are using IE
  - adventured 12y ago
    Nobody was implying it does. The parent referred to Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux and developers using those platforms, with the premise being that IE needs to be cross-platform because so many more developers are using non-Windows platforms.
  - iherbig 12y ago
    Which was not at all what adventured was saying. They were responding to glesica's assertion that the reason nobody cares about IE is that it isn't cross-platform. To counter this assertion, adventured said that 90% of the desktop/laptop market uses Windows, so it seems unreasonable that the majority of people would not have access to IE as a reason for not using it. Adventured was not suggesting that 90% of people are using IE; they were suggesting the exact opposite and asking why that is, because glesica's reasoning seems intuitively flawed.
- jp555 12y ago
  I think it's important to consider that desktops and laptops now make up a minority of personal computers on the internet. Including smartphones and tablets MS OS share is closer to 15%.
  - adventured 12y ago
    Which is why I specifically said desktop + laptop. The parent was clearly referring to developer work occurring on Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux. I'm willing to wager the radical majority of developer work occurs not on a smartphone, but on a desktop or laptop. Whether we're talking coding, design or otherwise. Even the work for smartphone software occurs almost entirely off of a smartphone (with the phone mostly used for testing).
- integraton 12y ago
  Total market share is not useful in this context, since contributions to innovation are not evenly distributed among the global set of computer systems.
  - adventured 12y ago
    The parent is talking about developers, and especially those that might use the features in question. What I'm seeking to clarify from the parent, is the data to support the premise that Windows, despite having upwards of 90% of the market share of the environment being discussed, somehow has a small share of developers compared to eg GNU/Linux (which has 2% of said market share among users). I'm skeptical of that extreme ratio falling so much between usage share and developer share, that it supports the parents position that IE's big problem is that it needs to be cross-platform.
- blawa 12y ago
  Very few people know this. People in my all Windows firm believe that OSX is everywhere because everyone in coffee shops is using it and same on TV, and I tell them its only them lol
  - drinchev 12y ago
    I hope I don't put oil in the fire, but OS X is more close to any Linux ( since it's unix based ) than Windows is going to be, which makes a great difference for any developer. I can benefit all available *nix tools in it's native state ( not run by cygwin ). I doubt there is statistics for this, but in my mind OS X is the most popular OS that people are doing web-development on. Although I like what Microsoft are doing lately with TypeScript and many more additions to open source community, it is really hard for me to imagine a switch.
    - Amezarak 12y ago
      > I can benefit all available nix tools in it's native state ( not run by cygwin ) Like you say, it's incredibly difficult to pull any solid numbers for this - Github isn't even close to representative, web server hosting is skewed by domain parking, pretty much any statistic you can come up with to support any side, at least that I can think of, is going to have major problems. But Windows-based developers have an entirely different workflow that completely obviates the need for Linux tools. Sometimes the workflow is different enough so you genuinely don't need it - the average ASP.NET developer probably doesn't have any need for them. Sometimes the developer just doesn't know any better - and you see that kind on all systems. Sometimes they've developed a PowerShell proficiency or something that lets them use analogous tools in an analogous ways. But this just isn't an argument. It's effectively saying, "well, if you do web development like I do, you need *nix." Well, of course! :) For most of them, it would be equally unimaginable to switch. I think there's very few like me, who have actively done and enjoyed both professionally. There are, of course, exceptions: I think we can all agree that almost all ASP.NET developers are on Windows and almost all Ruby developers are on OS X or maybe Linux. Most of the amateurs are certainly on Windows - I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I just mean the people just starting out and putting together very simple, possibly static webpages, or playing around with whatever their CMS has set up for them. Then you have all the enterprisey web development, likely mostly internal sites, with somewhat less of a skew, but still probably majority Windows. For the professional, public-facing sort of stuff, I expect its a lot closer to 50/50. Of course, just like you say, it's very hard to demonstrate anything and anecdote-by-anecdote and gut-feeling doesn't really say much.
- ams6110 12y ago
  The subject article is about scrolling on mobile though. Almost nobody uses IE on mobile devices.
  - adventured 12y ago
    The parent's comment is about developers and the platforms they work on (which is why the parent didn't refer to Android or iOS, but rather Win/Mac/Linux). This is the point issue: "but that it doesn't run on Mac OS or GNU/Linux" The parent is arguing that IE needs to be cross platform for Mac OS and GNU/Linux. I'm curious if there is data to support that as IE's biggest issue.
  - Maarten88 12y ago
    And that includes the author of the article. The blogpost does not render correctly on IE 11: part of the content is obscured by an overlay with links and social buttons.
- Super_Jambo 12y ago
  It would be very interesting to see the stats for OS taken from say github user agent here. I'm guessing OSX and Linux are somewhat better represented than in general. But then getting clear stats on development machine for smartphone apps in general seems pretty tough.
  - adventured 12y ago
    The parent comment made me curious about it. How far the numbers slide toward Mac / Linux when it comes to developers vs general usage (I think they obviously slide quite a bit, but how much). I can't seem to find very sound, up to date numbers on what platforms developers work on. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac and Linux each have four times the developer share that they do of general usage share on those same platforms (desktop / laptop).
- Amezarak 12y ago
  Yeah. I have no doubt that developers are a much larger proportion of Linux users (approaching 100%) than they are of Windows users. I suspect that may also be true for OS X users. But there's simply a huge, huge number of Windows users and consequently, a huge, huge number of Windows-based developers. Not necessarily bound up in the Microsoft ecosystem (.NET and the like), but developing on Windows. But HNers, who are bound up with a tight-knit community that consists mostly of open source software, Github etc., quite naturally assume that they are representative. (Sidenote: Git and Github also have minority version-control market share. I would not be surprised if the biggest version control out there was no version control at all.) In reality, I would be shocked if Linux/OS X-primary developers constituted more than one-third of total developers. Unfortunately, accurate statistics are hard to come by.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  >GNU/Linux is ~2% of the market. but Android/Linux is ~50%, and Windows/IE on a phone is 2%.
  - adventured 12y ago
    I don't know where the confusion is coming from in this thread. I'm not sure if I should keep clarifying or not at this point. The parent is talking about developers, and arguing that IE's biggest problem is that it's not cross-platform, and that it needs to be on Mac OS and GNU/Linux because far more developers use those now vs Windows. My question is: is that true, that IE's biggest problem is the need to be on Mac OS and Linux (emphasis that we're not talking about iOS and Android); and is it true that far more developers (and particularly those relevant to this) are on non-Windows platforms now vs on Windows.
- glesica 12y ago
  Not scientific, but I don't think I've ever been to a "tech" event and seen more than 25% Windows machines (granted, I'm not a .NET developer). Windows has 90% of the market, but what percentage of the developer (especially web developer) market does it have? And within that market, what percentage of the Windows users are working on what amount of legacy apps or apps that can't use new browser features because they must support older versions of IE ( like "enterprise" stuff)? Those are the important numbers.
  - pjmlp 12y ago
    Try a games developer event instead, even some Macs will be running Windows.
    - glesica 12y ago
      But there again, games developers aren't going to care about an cool new IE feature either unless they're building games that run exclusively or primarily on IE, which I suspect is a very small market. It's not that "nobody runs Windows", it's that "relatively few people who would find snazzy new IE features useful" run Windows.
- dasil003 12y ago
  I am not going to speculate on this because Windows developers are invisible to me, but I wlll say 90% market share probably does not map too well to the actual humans. Just think of the number of blue screens of death you see on public displays in all walks of life. Millions upon millions of Windows units are being sold not just for corporate workstations but for all manner of utility systems that don't even represent a single human. I can't really think of a better proxy though, given the weird parallel worlds that Windows and Open Source developers inhabit.
Flip-per 12y ago
I wonder whether anybody would install IE on Mac OS or GNU/Linux if it would be available. I do not think so.
- barsonme 12y ago
  I would. I installed IE7 thought wine. Partly because masochism, partly because if I could make my website look good in IE7 running through wine then it would look good on any browser.
- endemic 12y ago
  I would, if only for testing. I regularly cycle browsers to gain familiarity with them.
- mhd 12y ago
  Once upon a time, IE was the best browser available on Mac -- mostly due to being actually quite good. If that quality would return, I can see some people switching. Maybe not the "rockstar Ruby/Go developers", but a lot of the people who just need their $1k facebook machines. As for Linux, well, I don't think you'll go far there with proprietary programs. But let's assume a .NET like open source initiative. I'd give IE the application a pretty small market share then, but see no problem at all with programs using the rendering engine, i.e. a common "libIE" dependency. (And, of course, if it actually is the same engine as on Windows, testing alone would guarantee a lot of installations)
  - seanp2k2 12y ago
    .net cross-platform is called Mono: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platforms/osx/ http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platfo...
  - robin_reala 12y ago
    IE on Mac was a completely different beast to IE on Windows; it had separate rendering[1] and Javascript engines. There was an IE for Unix[2] which shared the Trident engine, but it never got significant traction. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX
taeric 12y ago
Majority of my family uses either Safari or IE. I would hazard this is not atypical. Any developer that is ignoring those is actually fairly anti-customer. Pretty much period. Couching this in difficulties on the developers part is not a long term viable complaint.
- RyanMcGreal 12y ago
  You can design to work on IE without designing to optimize for IE. As long as IE remains a single-platform browser, its standards extensions will remain a mostly-ignored niche.
  - glesica 12y ago
    This is really what I was trying to get at. I used to work for a company that made a web app that needed to run on Windows and IE (it was very "enterprise"). The developers were virtually 100% Mac and Linux users. I don't think there was a single developer who actually used IE for anything other than testing features before code was merged. We definitely were not going to use IE-specific features, no matter how cool they were, because almost no one could actually run IE except in a crappy VM.
- woodman 12y ago
  > Couching this in difficulties on the developers part is not a long term viable complaint. Maybe if IE was the only browser available on Windows, but it isn't. "Developers, developers, developers, developers." - Steve Ballmer
- arnorhs 12y ago
  Just because they're your family, doesn't make them typical users. http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/ Chrome is more widely used than IE.
  - taeric 12y ago
    Chrome may be more widely used, but you are still ignoring at least a fifth of the market.
jakobegger 12y ago
I'm almost certain that's the reason why Apple ported Safari to Windows. I doubt that they were actually trying to take market share from IE or Firefox, I think they just wanted to give Windows-based web developers an easy way to test their websites in WebKit. Now that Webkit is all but ubiquitous, Safari on Windows is no longer necessary.
- natmaster 12y ago
  Chrome differs substantially from Safari in rendering though.
- valuegram 12y ago
  Safari still uses WebKit, but Chrome has been using a WebKit fork called Blink since version 28.
  - integraton 12y ago
    The person you are responding to doesn't say anything about Chrome. WebKit can be built on Windows and Linux and there are browsers that use WebKit that support Windows and Linux.
    - yebyen 12y ago
      It might be relevant to the assertion that WebKit is ubiquitous though, since the most popular browser using WebKit on Windows is Chrome, if say Safari on Windows gets less support because "there are other WebKit browsers," that it's not even the same WebKit in Chrome, but actually a fork.
      - deleted 12y ago
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    - valuegram 12y ago
      It's possible the person didn't say anything about Chrome, or since all of the direct responses reference Chrome, it's also possible the parent comment was edited.
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untog 12y ago
The reason nobody cares about IE today is that it has a far lower market share. On desktop far more people are using Chrome, and it's nowhere to be seen on mobile, given that it's tied to the Windows Phone platform, which is usually a rounding error in usage numbers. I don't think Mac OS/Linux has a huge impact here. And as for the inability to test IE, try modern.ie - free Windows VMs with different IE versions. It's not that difficult.
- glesica 12y ago
  > It's not that difficult. I know that testing on IE is possible, but there's more to it than that. If I'm just going to test my stuff on IE every now and then to make sure it works, I'm not going to focus on, or experiment with cool new features the IE teams adds, because the only time I use the browser is when I boot up my IE testing VM. If IE ran natively on Mac and/or Linux, for instance, I would spend a lot more time actually using it, not just clicking around my app to make sure it isn't broken before a release.
- stupidcar 12y ago
  Depends where you get your stats. According to Net Market Share, IE is still the majority desktop browser, with just under 60% usage: http://www.netmarketshare.com/ http://www.netmarketshare.com/
  - chaz72 12y ago
    It's about 99% of "people who have no idea how to install a new browser", so that kind of skews those numbers.
    - delecti 12y ago
      It certainly skews the cause of those numbers, but not the end result, which is that a huge number of people still use IE.
  - integraton 12y ago
    > Depends where you get your stats It's usually advisable for people get them from analytics tools on their own sites rather than looking at global stats. For example, IE stats from my Google Analytics account covering multiple different industries, company sizes, and types of sites and applications range from 6.78% to 13.19%, and I've seen similar numbers on every project I've worked on for at least 4 or 5 years.
lectrick 12y ago
I don't know about other people, but as an early web developer who worked in an all-Microsoft shop, learning about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish literally caused me nausea and I quit my job and became an open source developer very soon after and never looked back. There was something so entirely... wrong about that approach. And the browser that was involved with it. And the company that even conceived of it. I still harbor plenty of anti-MS anger as a result (well that, and having to do IE compatibility for many years!) (I admit that also reading the books "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Hackers & Painters" influenced me a lot!)
- vdnkh 12y ago
  >Literally caused me nausea This is off topic but seriously? You actually felt like you were going to vomit due to a business tactic?
  - idm 12y ago
    They didn't say it figuratively caused them nausea, so...
    - bryondowd 12y ago
      Didn't you know? In the 21st century, the word 'literally' means figuratively. If he meant to mean literally, he would have said... well, I honestly don't know how to indicate that something is to be interpreted literally rather than figuratively now. What a world.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
    Ideology's a hell of a drug.
  - lectrick 12y ago
    I am a really opinionated/principled developer who cares deeply about my work. I quit my last job because I could tell my boss had perverse incentives that he wouldn't admit to. I knew the codebase needed a refactor desperately and he insisted I work on something else (because he was leaving and didn't want to rock the boat). I can't work under those conditions. Turns out I was right... After I left, he announced he was leaving... right after his RSU's vested.
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StillBored 12y ago
Worse yet, the latest versions of IE don't even work on all the "supported" versions of windows. Its no wonder that its lost a lot of market share. Microsoft has basically told its users "upgrade to the latest windows, or use another browser". Its a really dumb move, because the percentage of people who upgrade windows to get a newer IE is probably close to 0%. Worse yet, it encourages people to use a competitors product, so when they do eventually upgrade its likely those users will install chrome/firefox/etc and continue to use it.
wdr1 12y ago
Until IE is cross-platform again.
Apofis 12y ago
MS provides a free IE Testing virtual machines that have all IE versions available. There are definitely ways for Linux/MacOS devs to test IE in their environment so that's not true all. Although, I've gotten so sick of IE quirks that at this point, I test against Firefox/Chrome and just assume that the newer IE's will work.

by glesica 12y ago

adventured 12y ago

Do you have stats to back up the premise that more developers (or those that would use features like this) are on non-Windows platforms? Windows still has roughly 90% of the total desktop + laptop market. I find it hard to believe it doesn't still have a majority of such developers. GNU/Linux is ~2% of the market.

fractalb 12y ago
I don't think 90% percent people are using IE
- adventured 12y ago
  Nobody was implying it does. The parent referred to Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux and developers using those platforms, with the premise being that IE needs to be cross-platform because so many more developers are using non-Windows platforms.
- iherbig 12y ago
  Which was not at all what adventured was saying. They were responding to glesica's assertion that the reason nobody cares about IE is that it isn't cross-platform. To counter this assertion, adventured said that 90% of the desktop/laptop market uses Windows, so it seems unreasonable that the majority of people would not have access to IE as a reason for not using it. Adventured was not suggesting that 90% of people are using IE; they were suggesting the exact opposite and asking why that is, because glesica's reasoning seems intuitively flawed.
jp555 12y ago
I think it's important to consider that desktops and laptops now make up a minority of personal computers on the internet. Including smartphones and tablets MS OS share is closer to 15%.
- adventured 12y ago
  Which is why I specifically said desktop + laptop. The parent was clearly referring to developer work occurring on Windows, Mac, GNU/Linux. I'm willing to wager the radical majority of developer work occurs not on a smartphone, but on a desktop or laptop. Whether we're talking coding, design or otherwise. Even the work for smartphone software occurs almost entirely off of a smartphone (with the phone mostly used for testing).
integraton 12y ago
Total market share is not useful in this context, since contributions to innovation are not evenly distributed among the global set of computer systems.
- adventured 12y ago
  The parent is talking about developers, and especially those that might use the features in question. What I'm seeking to clarify from the parent, is the data to support the premise that Windows, despite having upwards of 90% of the market share of the environment being discussed, somehow has a small share of developers compared to eg GNU/Linux (which has 2% of said market share among users). I'm skeptical of that extreme ratio falling so much between usage share and developer share, that it supports the parents position that IE's big problem is that it needs to be cross-platform.
blawa 12y ago
Very few people know this. People in my all Windows firm believe that OSX is everywhere because everyone in coffee shops is using it and same on TV, and I tell them its only them lol
- drinchev 12y ago
  I hope I don't put oil in the fire, but OS X is more close to any Linux ( since it's unix based ) than Windows is going to be, which makes a great difference for any developer. I can benefit all available *nix tools in it's native state ( not run by cygwin ). I doubt there is statistics for this, but in my mind OS X is the most popular OS that people are doing web-development on. Although I like what Microsoft are doing lately with TypeScript and many more additions to open source community, it is really hard for me to imagine a switch.
  - Amezarak 12y ago
    > I can benefit all available nix tools in it's native state ( not run by cygwin ) Like you say, it's incredibly difficult to pull any solid numbers for this - Github isn't even close to representative, web server hosting is skewed by domain parking, pretty much any statistic you can come up with to support any side, at least that I can think of, is going to have major problems. But Windows-based developers have an entirely different workflow that completely obviates the need for Linux tools. Sometimes the workflow is different enough so you genuinely don't need it - the average ASP.NET developer probably doesn't have any need for them. Sometimes the developer just doesn't know any better - and you see that kind on all systems. Sometimes they've developed a PowerShell proficiency or something that lets them use analogous tools in an analogous ways. But this just isn't an argument. It's effectively saying, "well, if you do web development like I do, you need *nix." Well, of course! :) For most of them, it would be equally unimaginable to switch. I think there's very few like me, who have actively done and enjoyed both professionally. There are, of course, exceptions: I think we can all agree that almost all ASP.NET developers are on Windows and almost all Ruby developers are on OS X or maybe Linux. Most of the amateurs are certainly on Windows - I don't mean that in a disparaging way, I just mean the people just starting out and putting together very simple, possibly static webpages, or playing around with whatever their CMS has set up for them. Then you have all the enterprisey web development, likely mostly internal sites, with somewhat less of a skew, but still probably majority Windows. For the professional, public-facing sort of stuff, I expect its a lot closer to 50/50. Of course, just like you say, it's very hard to demonstrate anything and anecdote-by-anecdote and gut-feeling doesn't really say much.
ams6110 12y ago
The subject article is about scrolling on mobile though. Almost nobody uses IE on mobile devices.
- adventured 12y ago
  The parent's comment is about developers and the platforms they work on (which is why the parent didn't refer to Android or iOS, but rather Win/Mac/Linux). This is the point issue: "but that it doesn't run on Mac OS or GNU/Linux" The parent is arguing that IE needs to be cross platform for Mac OS and GNU/Linux. I'm curious if there is data to support that as IE's biggest issue.
- Maarten88 12y ago
  And that includes the author of the article. The blogpost does not render correctly on IE 11: part of the content is obscured by an overlay with links and social buttons.
Super_Jambo 12y ago
It would be very interesting to see the stats for OS taken from say github user agent here. I'm guessing OSX and Linux are somewhat better represented than in general. But then getting clear stats on development machine for smartphone apps in general seems pretty tough.
- adventured 12y ago
  The parent comment made me curious about it. How far the numbers slide toward Mac / Linux when it comes to developers vs general usage (I think they obviously slide quite a bit, but how much). I can't seem to find very sound, up to date numbers on what platforms developers work on. I wouldn't be surprised if Mac and Linux each have four times the developer share that they do of general usage share on those same platforms (desktop / laptop).
Amezarak 12y ago
Yeah. I have no doubt that developers are a much larger proportion of Linux users (approaching 100%) than they are of Windows users. I suspect that may also be true for OS X users. But there's simply a huge, huge number of Windows users and consequently, a huge, huge number of Windows-based developers. Not necessarily bound up in the Microsoft ecosystem (.NET and the like), but developing on Windows. But HNers, who are bound up with a tight-knit community that consists mostly of open source software, Github etc., quite naturally assume that they are representative. (Sidenote: Git and Github also have minority version-control market share. I would not be surprised if the biggest version control out there was no version control at all.) In reality, I would be shocked if Linux/OS X-primary developers constituted more than one-third of total developers. Unfortunately, accurate statistics are hard to come by.
rasz_pl 12y ago
>GNU/Linux is ~2% of the market. but Android/Linux is ~50%, and Windows/IE on a phone is 2%.
- adventured 12y ago
  I don't know where the confusion is coming from in this thread. I'm not sure if I should keep clarifying or not at this point. The parent is talking about developers, and arguing that IE's biggest problem is that it's not cross-platform, and that it needs to be on Mac OS and GNU/Linux because far more developers use those now vs Windows. My question is: is that true, that IE's biggest problem is the need to be on Mac OS and Linux (emphasis that we're not talking about iOS and Android); and is it true that far more developers (and particularly those relevant to this) are on non-Windows platforms now vs on Windows.
glesica 12y ago
Not scientific, but I don't think I've ever been to a "tech" event and seen more than 25% Windows machines (granted, I'm not a .NET developer). Windows has 90% of the market, but what percentage of the developer (especially web developer) market does it have? And within that market, what percentage of the Windows users are working on what amount of legacy apps or apps that can't use new browser features because they must support older versions of IE ( like "enterprise" stuff)? Those are the important numbers.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Try a games developer event instead, even some Macs will be running Windows.
  - glesica 12y ago
    But there again, games developers aren't going to care about an cool new IE feature either unless they're building games that run exclusively or primarily on IE, which I suspect is a very small market. It's not that "nobody runs Windows", it's that "relatively few people who would find snazzy new IE features useful" run Windows.
dasil003 12y ago
I am not going to speculate on this because Windows developers are invisible to me, but I wlll say 90% market share probably does not map too well to the actual humans. Just think of the number of blue screens of death you see on public displays in all walks of life. Millions upon millions of Windows units are being sold not just for corporate workstations but for all manner of utility systems that don't even represent a single human. I can't really think of a better proxy though, given the weird parallel worlds that Windows and Open Source developers inhabit.

Flip-per 12y ago

I wonder whether anybody would install IE on Mac OS or GNU/Linux if it would be available. I do not think so.

barsonme 12y ago
I would. I installed IE7 thought wine. Partly because masochism, partly because if I could make my website look good in IE7 running through wine then it would look good on any browser.
endemic 12y ago
I would, if only for testing. I regularly cycle browsers to gain familiarity with them.
mhd 12y ago
Once upon a time, IE was the best browser available on Mac -- mostly due to being actually quite good. If that quality would return, I can see some people switching. Maybe not the "rockstar Ruby/Go developers", but a lot of the people who just need their $1k facebook machines. As for Linux, well, I don't think you'll go far there with proprietary programs. But let's assume a .NET like open source initiative. I'd give IE the application a pretty small market share then, but see no problem at all with programs using the rendering engine, i.e. a common "libIE" dependency. (And, of course, if it actually is the same engine as on Windows, testing alone would guarantee a lot of installations)
- seanp2k2 12y ago
  .net cross-platform is called Mono: http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platforms/osx/ http://www.mono-project.com/docs/about-mono/supported-platfo...
- robin_reala 12y ago
  IE on Mac was a completely different beast to IE on Windows; it had separate rendering[1] and Javascript engines. There was an IE for Unix[2] which shared the Trident engine, but it never got significant traction. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasman_%28layout_engine%29 [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer_for_UNIX

taeric 12y ago

Majority of my family uses either Safari or IE. I would hazard this is not atypical. Any developer that is ignoring those is actually fairly anti-customer. Pretty much period. Couching this in difficulties on the developers part is not a long term viable complaint.

RyanMcGreal 12y ago
You can design to work on IE without designing to optimize for IE. As long as IE remains a single-platform browser, its standards extensions will remain a mostly-ignored niche.
- glesica 12y ago
  This is really what I was trying to get at. I used to work for a company that made a web app that needed to run on Windows and IE (it was very "enterprise"). The developers were virtually 100% Mac and Linux users. I don't think there was a single developer who actually used IE for anything other than testing features before code was merged. We definitely were not going to use IE-specific features, no matter how cool they were, because almost no one could actually run IE except in a crappy VM.
woodman 12y ago
> Couching this in difficulties on the developers part is not a long term viable complaint. Maybe if IE was the only browser available on Windows, but it isn't. "Developers, developers, developers, developers." - Steve Ballmer
arnorhs 12y ago
Just because they're your family, doesn't make them typical users. http://gs.statcounter.com/ http://gs.statcounter.com/ Chrome is more widely used than IE.
- taeric 12y ago
  Chrome may be more widely used, but you are still ignoring at least a fifth of the market.

jakobegger 12y ago

I'm almost certain that's the reason why Apple ported Safari to Windows. I doubt that they were actually trying to take market share from IE or Firefox, I think they just wanted to give Windows-based web developers an easy way to test their websites in WebKit. Now that Webkit is all but ubiquitous, Safari on Windows is no longer necessary.

natmaster 12y ago
Chrome differs substantially from Safari in rendering though.
valuegram 12y ago
Safari still uses WebKit, but Chrome has been using a WebKit fork called Blink since version 28.
- integraton 12y ago
  The person you are responding to doesn't say anything about Chrome. WebKit can be built on Windows and Linux and there are browsers that use WebKit that support Windows and Linux.
  - yebyen 12y ago
    It might be relevant to the assertion that WebKit is ubiquitous though, since the most popular browser using WebKit on Windows is Chrome, if say Safari on Windows gets less support because "there are other WebKit browsers," that it's not even the same WebKit in Chrome, but actually a fork.
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  - valuegram 12y ago
    It's possible the person didn't say anything about Chrome, or since all of the direct responses reference Chrome, it's also possible the parent comment was edited.

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untog 12y ago

The reason nobody cares about IE today is that it has a far lower market share. On desktop far more people are using Chrome, and it's nowhere to be seen on mobile, given that it's tied to the Windows Phone platform, which is usually a rounding error in usage numbers. I don't think Mac OS/Linux has a huge impact here. And as for the inability to test IE, try modern.ie - free Windows VMs with different IE versions. It's not that difficult.

glesica 12y ago
> It's not that difficult. I know that testing on IE is possible, but there's more to it than that. If I'm just going to test my stuff on IE every now and then to make sure it works, I'm not going to focus on, or experiment with cool new features the IE teams adds, because the only time I use the browser is when I boot up my IE testing VM. If IE ran natively on Mac and/or Linux, for instance, I would spend a lot more time actually using it, not just clicking around my app to make sure it isn't broken before a release.
stupidcar 12y ago
Depends where you get your stats. According to Net Market Share, IE is still the majority desktop browser, with just under 60% usage: http://www.netmarketshare.com/ http://www.netmarketshare.com/
- chaz72 12y ago
  It's about 99% of "people who have no idea how to install a new browser", so that kind of skews those numbers.
  - delecti 12y ago
    It certainly skews the cause of those numbers, but not the end result, which is that a huge number of people still use IE.
- integraton 12y ago
  > Depends where you get your stats It's usually advisable for people get them from analytics tools on their own sites rather than looking at global stats. For example, IE stats from my Google Analytics account covering multiple different industries, company sizes, and types of sites and applications range from 6.78% to 13.19%, and I've seen similar numbers on every project I've worked on for at least 4 or 5 years.

lectrick 12y ago

I don't know about other people, but as an early web developer who worked in an all-Microsoft shop, learning about http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish literally caused me nausea and I quit my job and became an open source developer very soon after and never looked back. There was something so entirely... wrong about that approach. And the browser that was involved with it. And the company that even conceived of it. I still harbor plenty of anti-MS anger as a result (well that, and having to do IE compatibility for many years!) (I admit that also reading the books "The Cathedral and the Bazaar" and "Hackers & Painters" influenced me a lot!)

vdnkh 12y ago
>Literally caused me nausea This is off topic but seriously? You actually felt like you were going to vomit due to a business tactic?
- idm 12y ago
  They didn't say it figuratively caused them nausea, so...
  - bryondowd 12y ago
    Didn't you know? In the 21st century, the word 'literally' means figuratively. If he meant to mean literally, he would have said... well, I honestly don't know how to indicate that something is to be interpreted literally rather than figuratively now. What a world.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 12y ago
  Ideology's a hell of a drug.
- lectrick 12y ago
  I am a really opinionated/principled developer who cares deeply about my work. I quit my last job because I could tell my boss had perverse incentives that he wouldn't admit to. I knew the codebase needed a refactor desperately and he insisted I work on something else (because he was leaving and didn't want to rock the boat). I can't work under those conditions. Turns out I was right... After I left, he announced he was leaving... right after his RSU's vested.

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StillBored 12y ago

Worse yet, the latest versions of IE don't even work on all the "supported" versions of windows. Its no wonder that its lost a lot of market share. Microsoft has basically told its users "upgrade to the latest windows, or use another browser". Its a really dumb move, because the percentage of people who upgrade windows to get a newer IE is probably close to 0%. Worse yet, it encourages people to use a competitors product, so when they do eventually upgrade its likely those users will install chrome/firefox/etc and continue to use it.

wdr1 12y ago

Until IE is cross-platform again.

Apofis 12y ago

MS provides a free IE Testing virtual machines that have all IE versions available. There are definitely ways for Linux/MacOS devs to test IE in their environment so that's not true all. Although, I've gotten so sick of IE quirks that at this point, I test against Firefox/Chrome and just assume that the newer IE's will work.