I think startups fighting to support < IE9 is a done decision (don't do it). Start worrying about mobile and tablet platforms instead. 'cause the future, it's knocking.
I'm not crazy about getting an iPad myself, but I'm starting to feel cornered into spending hundreds of $$ on one just to keep those early adopters happy. I think this is where the real browser/device compatibility discussion is, not around IE.
However, the browser idiosyncracies drive me nuts, and we spent considerable time not just updating all our graphics but also redoing way too many different parts of our HTML, CSS and JavaScript in order to get the high-res images to display properly and to have the correct version of each image download efficiently on both Retina and lower resolution displays.
Not all of this is Apple's fault. Some of it comes from limitations in the current HTML and CSS specs, which would apply to high-res displays on Android devices as well. But some of it seems to be entirely due to choices in how iOS Safari does things, and the problems aren't limited to high-res images.
I'm still not entirely happy with many of the solutions we are using. I think we have a practical workaround for most of the issues, but often the results behind the scenes are just nasty and hacky. And as you say, it has been vastly more work than supporting IE9, which required approximately zero extra effort.
What is it about the iPad 1 & 2 that is giving you so many more problems compared to the iPad 3?
I found I was spending way more time on IE bugs with Web app I recently did (~1000 users/month) than any other browser by far.
iPads and iPhones also have great support for CSS3 transforms (3D included with hardware acceleration), but some of the other "common" CSS3 and HTML5 technologies do bog down on the slower processor. Your average desktop may not have a dedicated video card and a browser with hardware acceleration, which creates a smaller intersection of features that will work with no brains on iPads and (generic) desktops.
The list, of course, goes on, and it will continue to grow with time. As with the well known deficiencies of IE (floating, clearing, zindex bugs, etc) however, the iPad caveats and corner cases are becoming more of a known quantity. As with IE, just takes a bit more planning.
Like the retina display, which does seem to require some dev love to look decent, according to statements on this very site.
The main problem with what you've mentioned is the size issue. So for startups that are dire in need of building fast and getting things right but not looking stunningly beautiful - this is an option.
The people with too much money to know what to do with it, can then build things in a crazy way with agencies for the logo, different agency for web design and then a 3rd agency for build etc.
For example, the iOS Simulator runs in an x86 environment. There's no way to throttle it to run at hardware spec speeds, never mind that the Safari in Simulator is quite possibly running different code than the Safari that ships on the devices themselves.
My larger point is that the hassle isn't supporting X version of a browser anymore, it's supporting X version of a browser on various hardware devices. Web-dev hell isn't going to be the fault of IE anymore, it's going to be the fault of mobile platforms with differing browsers, screen-sizes, and use patterns.
Why would someone bother contacting you when it appears that your site is broken? In other words, the call to action doesn't display technical competence - indeed it implies a level of technical incompetence which probably is not justified.
"We're really sorry, but Paydirt isn't playing nice with your browser" doesn't inspire confidence in the product - it doesn't suggest a high level of customer service, either. Would I really want to trust something as critical as invoicing to this company?
Furthermore, not supporting IE doesn't scale well. At 10,000 users 1.6% is $1600 a month in revenue. At 100,000 it's nearly $200,000 a year in potential revenue - all for what is mostly a one time expense.
Finally, where does this leave room for expanding services such as letting my customer's see their project in real time?
I don't see a business case for it. I'm not saying that there isn't one - just that it hasn't be made.
Personally, if my app were making 12 MILLION DOLLARS a year I'd either a) not care about that $200k a year or b) I'd then have the resources to do something about it
If I were these guys I'd support Spanish and French long before I'd bother chasing that 1.6%, but no one is being critical of them not doing that.
If you are selling a game, I get it. It makes sense.
But this is B2B sales and you're asking me to trust you with client information and my sales data.
Just because I'm looking to replace Quicken or Quickbooks, doesn't mean I hate Microsoft, nor does it mean that I want my mom to jump through hoops every Thursday when she does my invoicing.
Not supporting IE9 (and probably 8) falsely segments your potential market.
You are blocking IE - I know because I changed my user agent on my firefox browser and you blocked me, and that is not cool!
You don't even offer an option to let me try anyway!
Use feature detection if you must, ignore IE completely in testing if you wish, but do not actively block it or you are just as bad as those who only support IE.
1. Your reputation suffers when users encounter issues while using the browser that you don't support.
2. The support cost of "letting users try anyway" is non-zero, and probably significant.
However, they sometimes offer a "try anyway"-link and sometimes not. The times that I can not easily "try anyway" makes me dislike Google much more than the times that I "try anyway" and it ends up broken in funky ways.
Bottom line; Yes, your reputation suffers when users encounter issues. Your reputation also suffers when users encounter the big blocking issue of not being welcome at all.
What I'll have to say about it probably won't be positive.
Properly detect IE without false-positives. <!--[if IE]> And inform IE-users a clear and simple explaination that IE is obsolete. And there's options for easy solutions to update to better browser. Links to the usual browser choices.
That means that by not supporting IE you don't get 70% of the market. Early adopters come and go, but "hockey stick" growth like the one Pinterest got? that comes from the mainstream market that uses IE and doesn't knows what Firefox is, and thinks that by Chrome you mean actual chrome...
But as I said IE is going down, and when it hits 50% in 2 years or less that will be the time to stop supporting IE.
> Originally, we feared that we'd receive a torrent of angry emails from avid IE users. In reality we've received exactly zero requests for IE support,
More generally, the "market share" depends very much on what you consider to be "the market". If your target audience are big companies stuck into MS support contracts then yes, IE market share is huge. If your target audience are mostly individuals with some basic knowledge on computers, they are almost certainly already using a sensible browser.
Just like IE users don't bother to find out which browser is the best they don't bother to email some unknown no-name startup they stumbled upon because the page didn't load.
And again I'm talking about a different and much bigger market than early adopters.
Writing from Brazil here : still over 70% of the visitors, on average, to most sites I monitor are using some version of IE.
So claiming a "feature" like that down here would be like rejecting 70% customers on a popular mall because they're not wearing red shoes(or some other arbitrary reason).
It is more like choosing not to serve vegan options at a dinner. Sure, it might piss people off but they could always suck it up and just eat the bacon.
I consider anything older than IE8 to be legacy.
On the other hand, if I put out a product that is aimed at the enterprise market then I will support older stuff. Enterprise moves at a different pace.
Story time: I once found myself working in the banking industry only to discover they used .NET 2.0. This on 2011. They also had a bunch of Win2000 machines. My job was to make a system that ran on all.
Pulled it off, but it opened my eyes to how big business works.
But we live in the real world and my wish isn't likely to come true. We do, after all, still have to think of the poor users who are either ignorant of the alternatives, still using IE due to inertia, or couldn't even upgrade to a version of IE that worked nicely (that is, if it existed)if they wanted to due to being stuck with their version of Windows Vista Home Office Extended Premium Plus which can't be upgraded to the new Windows 7 Midgrade Basic Premium Exclusive Edition Service Pack 10million which is the minimum version of Windows that'd run such a browser for less than the cost of sacrificing their first born child. Internet Explorer 9 was a noticeable improvement by far but not good enough still. Version 10 looks even more promising. Too bad they make it so that only the smallest fraction of Windows users can upgrade to them.
I also have a Pentium III that's running Windows 7 and IE9 now (and will be able to upgrade to IE10), and if that can upgrade to IE9, it's utterly and completely disingenuous to claim that the "smallest fraction" of Windows users can upgrade to it. Instead of being rational, you come off as a sneering cheerleader and, y'know, that can entirely be your bag if you want to pick it up and run with it, but it'd help if you at least used your mouth for talking instead of parts down below.
Don't get me wrong, I see the benefits and if dropping it makes sense (hint: it doesn't make sense when you quote average IE6 figures, check your own analytics and justify losing that many users), but quite frankly if you can't handle IE9 then I have no confidence in your product.
That's kind of a strange sentiment, especially considering IE6 is basically extinct in the wild (unless you are targeting users of pirated copies of Windows in China)...
Also, I think many people these days have better things to do with their lives than f--k around hacking in circles in CSS to get things working for IE6...
Incorrect, at least in the UK. If you believe the general stats that are pushed (hint: don't) then that would be the case, but we test on a client-by-client basis for many large sites and there are still a decent number of people using IE6, enough to justify a few thousand on making a site IE6-capable.
> Also, I think many people these days have better things to do with their lives than f--k around hacking in circles in CSS to get things working for IE6...
I can't wait for IE6 to die, but for most of our clients 2% of users would easily pay off any cost for us to handle IE6. For now, we follow the Yahoo baseline (http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/) at minimum and make sure that our sites work in IE6.
IE compatibility has been a pain in the ass for pretty much every web developer everywhere up until very recently.
What it may mean is that you don't have very many customers. If you were mainstream, you'd have more IE users... just like the rest of the Internet.
It's okay not to be mainstream... but, if time tracking is a competitive and profitable space, your competitors may be happy to share this blog post with their prospective users.
If all your IE visitors are seeing is a landing page and a message saying "sorry, we're too lazy to support for your browser", then of course they'll turn around and never come back. If they were to let IE users through, that number would most likely jump up - significantly.
I know a couple of hardcore IT guys and programmers that are really happy with IE9, and hate Firefox and Chrome with a passion. It happens!
Why? This is a sub-optimal approach. The same machine with the same OS and the same version of the same browser can render very different looks just because they user has different settings.
How do you know that your user even has a visual display? Does it matter to you if they have a portrait or landscape display?
> future versions of IE will probably be standards compliant
Are you saying that all your code is standards compliant and you're not using any browser-specific extensions?
And features need to be justified. Planscope (http://planscope.io) gets less than 2% of all traffic from IE (chart: http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2205912/iestats.png), and for actual accounts there's only been one person with IE - and that was a client that one of my customers invited in. 5 minutes later, Chrome Frame was added and everyone was happy.
I've also recently built a social network for amateur gardeners. The average age was probably 50. Did I ensure IE was fully supported? You bet.
For the header block where you have elements spread apart from each other the better solution is to add position: relative in the div id="header" and then absolute position the elements within the header (i.e. div id="logo" and on the ul for the navigation; float the li(s) though).
Using floats, margins and clears to position the MAJORITY of your elements will prove to be frustrating once you test in IE (6,7 & sometimes 8).
Anyway, if you have been working with html&css for more than 1 or 2 years it should not be hard to at least degrade gracefully on ie8+.
Personally I don't even think it is a choice, ie is still 30% of world average, supporting it is a must.
There is also the demographic for their product, which is the more-likely reason for low IE rates. I wouldn't be surprised if the big Mac-OS screen shot on the home page turns off Windows users as well.
I applied for a job recently that wanted me to take a test that required IE and windows. I passed on the job because that test was a fail.
By shirking the cost of providing even some level of support for IE, you're ditching the benefits afforded to the part-time copywriter who needs to stay at her desk and work her lunch hour during the office job she keeps to make ends meet. You're ditching the benefits afforded to the business owner on the road whose laptop won't join the hotel wifi and has to use the hotel's "business center" to issue the invoice needed to meet his mortgage payment. You're ditching the benefit of a happy customer evangelising the product to a colleague, and wanting to give them a quick demo by logging in on whichever laptop is currently hooked up to the meeting-room projector.
The times when a user doesn't have control over their environment are the times when they need a product to come through for them the most. Especially when that product is their means of getting paid.
Not being able to offer "amazing things with canvas" to IE (or any browser) is okay. Not offering support to be able to log in and perform a set of basic key tasks from any browser whatsoever is, to my mind, throwing away one of the biggest benefits the web can offer as a platform.
As you grow and (hopefully) become more successful you may start running into friction from IE users who want to use your service but can't.
Once you've saturated the market of other browser users, how will you continue to grow?
When you get there I think you might regret not investing in IE support today.
What about your application is SO compelling and SO difficult to support in IE that you can afford to ignore that entire market segment?
IE "bugs" are rarely obscure. Most "bugs" are actually as-intended behavior, which is documented on MSDN. Do your homework.
> Sensible browsers can do amazing things (canvas, SVG animations, CSS3, web-sockets, blazingly fast JS), and limiting usage to these lets Paydirt take full advantage of these new technologies.
As was mentioned earlier, graceful degradation renders this point moot. Web pages do not need to look and function the same in every browser.
> Originally, we feared that we'd receive a torrent of angry emails from avid IE users. In reality we've received exactly zero requests for IE support, angry or otherwise.
Ignorance begets ignorance. The lion's share of people that use IE aren't technically savvy. They're people like parents, uncles or even grandparents. Why expect them to know how to send complaints when they barely know how to use a web browser?
> We work harder when we're happier, and skipping the dirty work of IE makes us very happy.
Clearly you were never working hard to begin with. Supporting IE is much easier than Internet FUD makes it appear.
> Who knows – future versions of IE will probably be standards compliant, super fast and reasonably secure.
You mean like IE 9? A little-known fact is that IE 4-6 were the most innovative browsers of their time. `innerHTML`? IE; event listeners (`*tachEvent`)? IE; editable text content (`innerText`)? IE. Those are some pretty important additions from a platform that seems to get no respect.
Cut the browser elitism and get a clue.
As a developer I sympathise, but as a user I don't. I can understand not supporting IE 6 and 7, but not supporting 8 and 9 is not a feature, it's a lack of feature. It's saying that you aren't prepared to work with me the way I want to work.
It may be the right choice, but don't sell as that it's not.
The baseline compatibility should be "functional but not necessarily beautiful".
Not wasting time getting pixel-perfection in IE is wise. Blocking IE is retarded.
The fact that you haven't even considered using Chrome Frame says a lot about your dev skills. Or, you know, lack of.
function cj() {
try {
return new a.ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
} catch (b) {
}
}
For example, I don't know what your company DOES do, but I know you have devoted time and energy to taking a pissing-match stance against a browser.
This is not new, for many years there are many sites that block IE or serve IE users special pages that say "let me help you get a better browser in a highly-condescending, smug, and self-righteous way". You are not inventing anything by putting in this browser blocking.
Anyway, not my problem really.
We have a product that is enterprise only, if we didn't support IE 7 or 8, we'd have no business left. This is a few years out of date to be news, the guy's done well to get his free advertising.
I haven't heard of paydirtapp before, but now I'm stuck with the impression that they are silly. Trying (and succeeding) to get publicity by being silly.
I should make a post about banning users on iOS 3.x, or perhaps all Opera users?
I don't believe their statistics, but their target market is much more likely to have multiple browsers and is probably willing to jump into a different browser if IE isn't supported.
But I think it is a dumb move to block IE9+. There is no good reason for it. They didn't give one in their blog post, and I have yet to run into a situation where if I am using web standards that I had many issues with IE9. Nothing I've had to hack around enough that I would want to block it. Seems like either an anti-Microsoft for the sake of being anti-Microsoft or just front-end devs not worth their salt (cause a front-end dev worth their salt wouldn't use user-agent detection to block IE in the first place, they'd use feature detection at least.)
I can understand not supporting legacy IE. Not supporting modern IE doesn't make sense. It seems a lot like nerd rage misdirected.
I wish more sites would nudge users to upgrade to a "modern" browser, including IE9. Microsoft is silently pushing IE10 to most IE9 users, so within a year only around 10% of users will be on a non-HTML5 browser. Assuming IE10 or latest Chrome and Firefox will be a giant step.
What I would do is that I'd give users with old browsers a plain version of the site. E.g. No transitions, animations, etc.
Supporting Internet explorer is a pain in the back, but a good developer and designer will do his best to provide availability. That's what I learned so far in the past 6 months.
Tweet from dbushell // David Bushell hipster apple developers @paydirtapp block IE. Every sentence in this article I reply with "You're Doing It Wrong." paydirtapp.com/blog/we-dont-s…
F o l l o w e d
*An option few have, so don't be ignorant and categorically mimic our approach.
FTFY.