
We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature - doctororange
https://paydirtapp.com/blog/we-dont-support-ie/
======
mixonic
Aw man. As a bootstrapping web business guy, I can say I've had way more
problems with supporting iPads and iPhones than IE. IE costs me $0 to support,
and I don't even bother (nobody asks!). Supporting hip and popular Apple
browsers can run me a grand in a fast minute. Pleasing early adopters without
working really well on the iPad3 is a tough sell.

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.

~~~
dclowd9901
I'm confused why you believe you need hardware for testing? iOS simulator
should be plenty sufficient in any standard dev environment...

~~~
vibrunazo
Buying a mac to run the simulator on is much more expensive than buying an
ipad.

~~~
WiseWeasel
You can get a refurbished Mac Mini for around the same cost as a new iPad.

------
ars
There is not supporting IE, and there is blocking IE.

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.

~~~
nardi
Completely disagree. There are two very major problems with this idea:

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.

~~~
maggit
As a counterexample, let's consider Google's blocking of Opera. Google
routinely blocks Opera when rolling out new stuff. I kind of get it, because
of your point 1.

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.

~~~
scott_w
I think there are some differences here:

Google are trying to keep existing users happy with the "try anyway" link.
This is a new business, and they have decided they don't want to support IE.

At worst, this annoys die-hard IE users, but they're not your customers
anyway.

The danger of adding a try anyway link is that people will click it, then
still call and complain that your site doesn't work _even if you place a huge
disclaimer telling them IE is unsupported_.

Finally, your website may do things that not only break in IE, but can cause
your users to lose data when it does break. Yes, standard backups, never
deleting data rules apply. But there is time spent either recovering, or
explaining to users why you won't recover data for them.

~~~
ticks
One thing to bear in mind is that Opera employs "web openers" who will lobby
and actively help Google to support the browser (so that "try me" link may not
be as superficial as it looks). That said, blocking IE is silly.

------
brudgers
> _"In reality we've received exactly zero requests for IE support, angry or
> otherwise."_

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.

~~~
toast76
1.6% is 1.6% no matter how big the number is...

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.

~~~
doctororange
Exactly. There are many ways to alienate potential users (missing languages,
missing features, etc). In the early stages we've learned the importance of
focussing on the biggest bottlenecks first.

------
tlianza
You may have mis-interpreted the fact that because 1.6% of your users have IE,
that means that you're in a space where those customers won't use IE.

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.

~~~
eslachance
I think it's more critical than just having less IE users in that space... The
thing is, 1.6% of total traffic does _not_ equal 1.6% browser usage.

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!

------
DanBC
> _I've spent literally hundreds of hours trying to get sites to render pixel-
> perfect across various versions of various browsers_

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?

~~~
steelaz
I can answer second one. 60 counts for -webkit, 58 counts for -moz, 17 counts
for -khtml.

------
cadooo
One thing I hate is websites that block me from trying to use a site based on
my browser. Give me a stern warning and let me use at my own risk. I'm not
defending IE this has happened just as much in firefox and chrome for me.

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.

------
drewmclellan
The web, like anything, has costs and benefits. A big benefit is that you and
develop and deploy an app once, centrally, and anyone can access it from
anywhere, on any sort of web device. The cost of that is that you can't
control how they're accessing it. To have the benefit, you have to accept the
cost.

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.

------
bdunn
I target a similar audience (freelancers). If anything, a feature would be
supporting IE, especially when your app does a lot with CSS3 and bleeding edge
HTML5 stuff.

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.

~~~
doctororange
Good feedback. Thanks bdunn.

------
prodigal_erik
My personal web projects always start with standard-conforming HTML with forms
and links. They're fully interoperable contributions to the world-wide web and
should be usable by every browser and robot written in the last sixteen years.
I call that a feature, and I'm disappointed that so many devs set their sights
lower.

~~~
chris_wot
That's nice. The problem is that Internet Explorer doesn't conform to these
standards. What do you do in this situation?

~~~
prodigal_erik
IE has a nasty habit of sniffing content or examining URLs and disregarding
the actual media type of a resource, but it hasn't come up much in practice,
and otherwise I haven't seen any showstopping problems in talking HTTP and
rendering semantic HTML. Its CSS and javascript are a mess, but those are
optional, and I'd be embarrassed to release anything that would become
completely unusable without them.

------
doctorwho
Ignoring almost 30% of the internet and calling it a "feature" doesn't make it
the right thing to do, or the smartest thing to do.

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?

------
vbtemp
I didn't support IE until, much to my chagrin, I discovered about 30% of my
hits were from IE. Fortunately, simply putting the !doctype meta-tag (or
whatever it is) fixed almost all my issues (at least for IE 8+)

~~~
doctororange
Very wise. This post is by no means a prescription for everybody. We're lucky
that our demographic tend to use stronger browsers. Actually, when I exclude
blog traffic the IE percentage drops further. :)

------
paul9290
If you are spending a lot of time fixing html/css issues in IE6, 7 or 8 it
maybe due to over using floats and clears. Especially for elements inside a
container block which are spread apart from each other like elements in a
header block (<div id="header"></div> or <header></header> if HTML5).

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).

~~~
mkmcdonald
This is interesting because I use a pseudo-grid system with plenty of floats
and clears. For some reason (research), it seems to look perfectly fine in IE
6+ and Quirks Mode.

------
mkmcdonald
> We don't spend hours debugging obscure IE bugs

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.

------
mrmagooey
I don't read articles espousing insular design practices, and I'm calling that
a feature.

------
seanx
Your blog doesn't support comments. Is that a feature too?

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.

------
JVIDEL
IE market share has been going down for years, but it's still more or less 70%

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.

~~~
rimantas
70%? This looks like worst case scenario to me. Here we have IE hovering about
25%: <http://www.ranking.lt/en/rankings/web-browsers-groups.html>

~~~
JVIDEL
Over THERE, also Chrome is the leading browser in Latin America, but how big
are those markets?

------
posabsolute
I never saw any app or website that would have a that low percentage of IE
usage.

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.

~~~
cageface
It really depends on the site though. I get almost zero IE traffic.

------
puppybeard
Graceful Degradation - look it up.

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.

------
brlewis
Ten years ago you were an elite web developer if your site worked well in
browsers other than IE. Today you're an elite web developer if you can make
your site work well even in IE.

~~~
craigvn
Getting the vast majority of sites working in IE9 is trivial (no changes
required). IE8 some changes, but not a major hassle. I don't support IE7 or
before. If you use a lot of HTML5 features it is hit or miss on all browsers.

~~~
doctororange
You're right. My recent encounters with IE9 have been pleasantly surprising
(and I bet IE10 will be quite competitive), but for us the numbers are so low
that, at least for now, a broad sweep feels OK.

------
gildas
Apparently, they don't really know what they're doing...

    
    
        function cj() {
            try {
                return new a.ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
            } catch (b) {
            }
        }
    

I guess this JS code is not for IE support...

------
josefonseca
This widely depends on your geographics.

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).

~~~
Deestan
They are not selling the product in Brazil.

~~~
tommorris
They are on the World Wide Web. If they aren't intending a world wide
customer-base, they are missing one of the major features of the web.

------
ydp
I don't really understand why this is newsworthy. If I made a website that had
almost exclusively IE usage and chose to only support IE, would that be a
feature? No, it'd just be an appropriate use of my development resources.

------
rmATinnovafy
I support whatever my client needs. They pay, I code. End of story.

~~~
shaggyfrog
I believe HN had a story linked a few months ago where supporting IE was
specified as a separate line item in the budget, forcing their clients to
really contemplate the costs (in both time & money) supporting such a broken
browser family. If that's what you mean, then kudos, as I think it's a great
learning moment for clients.

~~~
rmATinnovafy
Yes, I do mean that. I will support modern browsers, but legacy stuff is
additional (though not that much really).

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.

------
EnderMB
I get annoyed when people are too lazy/incompetent to support IE6, but
blocking IE altogether is beyond stupid.

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.

~~~
vbtemp
> I get annoyed when people are too lazy/incompetent to support IE6

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...

~~~
EnderMB
> 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)...

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.

------
dutchbrit
I don't want to be a dick, but PayDirt isn't all that complex. Don't see what
the big deal is here. Even if 1.63% of their traffic is IE... It's still 1.63%
of potential customers you're theorectically dismissing. I also find it rather
shocking that your IE traffic is so low. Are we talking about requests or
unique visitors? What group are you advertising at?

------
dsirijus
I agree with not supporting IE, but calling it a feature is just a
rationalization on not providing support for it, and a nice spin at it.

~~~
doctororange
True, it's really just a spin. It's a benefit for most of our users because we
can use the time more productively to improve the product and support in other
ways. In the zero sum game of the 24 hour day, an hour saved is an hour
earned.

------
gm
There is a lot of danger in defining yourself in terms of what you DON'T do.

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.

------
kristianp
There could be somewhat of a chicken-and-egg thing happening here with their
low IE take-up. On IE 9 the slideshow on the home-page doesn't work, it just
says "... loading fancy-pants slideshow ...". If I came across that as an IE
user, I wouldn't be signing up.

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.

~~~
middus
In fact, they don't want you to sign up if you are an IE user. You can't even.

------
davidjgraph
It's real simple, medium and large enterprises are on IE 7 and 8. Technical
end users are on Chrome and FF 80% of the time, the rest is a mix but it's
less than 10% IE 8 and below. This application is not targeting enterprises,
it's not a big deal.

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.

------
okamiueru
Can someone with a windows machine proxy this into IE and see if anything is
broken? I can't believe there is much overhead in making things look fine in
IE(>=9). Especially a straight-forward site such as theirs.

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?

------
LocalPCGuy
"trying to get sites to render pixel-perfect across various versions of
various browsers" - That is a big part of the problem. Now, I have designs I
have to get pixel-perfect, so I feel their pain, but when developing your own
app, you can opt to not go for pixel-perfection.

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.)

------
yuhong
Also see: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3784750>

------
computerslol
Users don't understand. Browsers are browsers, and for a vast majority of
users, IE came with their machine. You aren't going to provoke thought, you'll
just lose potential users.

I can understand not supporting legacy IE. Not supporting modern IE doesn't
make sense. It seems a lot like nerd rage misdirected.

------
gouranga
Another company I won't be dealing with...

------
Shenglong
Can someone at MSFT comment? How is the IE team composed? Is it a threat at
MSFT, to be placed on the IE team? "If you don't start performing, we're
sending you to work on IE"?

~~~
rmATinnovafy
I for one would love to work on the IE team.

------
melling
Actually, I think people aren't considering the fact that some of the people
using IE will download a supported browser.

<http://paydirtapp.com/ie>

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.

------
jamesflorentino
Sadly a lot of folks are still stuck with Internet explorer. I still make it
to a point to make my web app work at least in IE8 and above and make it
seamless as possible.

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.

------
FiddlerClamp
Interesting - I wonder how folks would have responded in the 1990s if someone
had stated "We don't support Macs, and we're calling that a feature."

~~~
Karunamon
I'm unclear as to how this is even remotely relevant. Mac compatibility has
been a pain in the ass for.. err...... who again?

IE compatibility has been a pain in the ass for pretty much every web
developer everywhere up until very recently.

~~~
FiddlerClamp
I'm thinking desktop apps - most companies would create PC-only versions of
software in the 1990s -- or PC-first.

------
paulirish
Regardless of paydirt's decision, IE's tw0-year release cycle isn't doing any
help to stem this sort of perception. IE10 will be awesome, but it has to ship
and MSFT has to transition all users of IE6-9 onto IE10 or another browser
that will stay current. If users stay abandoned in IE8, the greatness of IE10
doesn't count for much.

------
hankejh
Hmm -- never heard of them -- neither has Quantcast or Compete. Alexa knows
who they are -- says their users spend a whopping 86 seconds on the site.

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

------
newobj
Read the whole article and all these comments and I'm still waiting to hear
what makes this a quote unquote feature. Making a decision is not a feature,
otherwise Friday team lunch at Chipotle is also a feature.

------
reybango
Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine in IE
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3945353>

------
andys627
I like to stay on the horn for a few seconds when people do extra stupid
things while driving... that's kinda what you're doing to people using IE.
Good job

------
squarecat
We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature*

*An option few have, so don't be ignorant and categorically mimic our approach.

FTFY.

------
pknerd
yay! Something I did with my homepage <http://adnansiddiqi.com>. Try it on IE
:D

~~~
gildas
Do you know that your site works OK on IE9 when changing the UA?

Ironically, your site page does not include a doctype so it is interpreted in
quirksmode [1]...

[1] <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quirks_mode>

~~~
pknerd
Yes I do.

------
benihana
This would have been interesting news in 2007 when ~70% of the internet was
using IE and the versions that people used were hard to support. Now, it just
seems like silly bragging. I can understand silently not supporting IE because
of the features that aren't present, but shouting that you don't support IE in
2012 and calling it a feature just comes off as arrogant. My first reaction
is, "so what?"

~~~
nardi
You seem to be missing the point. That we have come so far in the browser wars
that IE can be unsupported as a valid business strategy is a pretty big deal.

------
billpatrianakos
Well done! I expect the contrarians to pour in screaming about not leaving
anyone out and elitism and corporate users and blah blah blah... But
seriously, fuck IE. if you don't have to support it then don't! More power to
you! My biggest wish as a developer is for some major site to stop supporting
IE. I do feel for the users but I feel it's a necessary evil to get the IE
team to either ditch or fix Trident or whatever engine they use nowadays.
There is no other browser that is more fragmented, unpredictable, or harder to
get anything rendered correctly in than IE. if just one major site stopped
supporting it then just maybe Microsoft would finally fix their broken
browser. We are forced to write far too many unnecessary lines of code just to
support a single browser when the rest of our front end code pretty much works
effortlessly in the other browsers.

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.

~~~
eropple
I have more trouble with Firefox than modern versions of IE.

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.

~~~
acqq
Is it rational to claim that if you upgraded a Pentium III computer to Windows
7 you aren't in "the smallest fraction" of users of old computers?

~~~
exue
The point is having a Pentium III Win 7 machine covers using a Pentium 4,
Athlon XP, and all those other old computers to install IE9 - covering the
biggest fraction of users through backward compatability.

~~~
eropple
Correct, thank you.

You can run Windows 7 on pretty much anything that will run Windows XP. "It
costs money to upgrade" may prevent you from doing so, but at this point,
after _a decade_ , it's not Microsoft's problem if you're not willing to spend
the money. They're not obligated, nor should they be obligated, to avoid using
their new stuff (Direct2D, for example) in order to continue to target XP
users.

~~~
yuhong
To be more precise, not everything, but yes generally most Win2000-era and
later hardware.

