

Ask HN: Should my new website support IE 8 users? - bceagle

The conventional wisdom is if 10% of your users are on a particular browser, you should probably support that browser. The problem, however, is that if you build an HTML5/CSS3 Responsive website from scratch you inevitably end up spending a great deal of time putting in hacks just to get things working somewhat similar in IE 8 (which doesn't support a large number of the new standards coming out now). To give an example, I spent over 5 hours yesterday working on a silly image overlay issue because of the weird way that IE 8 handles z-index. If you have the resources, of course it makes sense to build in some type of support for such a large number of users, but if you at a small startup where there is very little time for anything shouldn't you focus on the 90%? I know BaseCamp is doing this with their latest version, but is it crazy to force the use of alternative browsers? Is the huge effort needed to make things easy for that 10% worth it?
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Khao
I think it all comes down to personal preferences and no you never HAVE TO
make stuff work for older, broken browsers. It is perfectly legitimate to ask
users to use a different browsers if they are on an old browser.

The best way to decide wether to spend time debugging or just screw it would
to be ask yourself a couple of questions.

How much of the user base will be using old browsers? Think if your user base
is mostly geeks / people at home or non-technichal / people using school or
work computers (with locked-down policies for downloading software)

Can you spend less time on older browsers and make it gracefully degrade
without losing functionality? If your website looks less beatiful on an older
browser but the functionality still works, you can put a warning stating that
the website will look better if the user changes browser, but that no
functionality is changed.

Can you postpone this debugging to later? Maybe you should focus on launching
your product first and once you're mostly satisfied with what you have, your
spend time debugging old browsers. This way, you can release quickly for the
majority of people that would use your service.

~~~
bceagle
Some great suggestions. I am thinking that I will postpone the debugging and
just put some sort of message for IE 8 and older browser users for now. Since
I am just starting out, it shouldn't be that big of a deal and I can figure
out a solution for the older browser people later. Thanks for the feedback.

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brudgers
If you don't want the users, ask them to switch browsers. If you want
mainstream computer users then support IE8 because it isn't going away any
time soon.

In my opinion, users will probably lead to more revenue than whatever you are
doing with z-index.

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deedubaya
Keep in mind that Windows XP users can't upgrade to IE9, they're stuck on IE8
or an alternative.

There are still a lot of Windows XP machines out there.

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rrreese
What it comes down to:

Is the cost of Supporting IE 8 greater then the revenue an extra X% of users
will generate.

Obviously this comes down to:

1) How much will it cost to support older browsers.

2) How many users do you have/what percentage use older browsers

3) Actual and expected monetization per user

Also bear in mind that users of different browsers may monetize at different
rates.

~~~
bceagle
Some good points and I guess the answer is that I have no idea because this is
a new product that doesn't have any current users or history to pull from.

Also, one thing I just realized. With your comment and similar ones it seems
like there is an assumption that users on IE 8 won't actually switch to
another browser in order to access the site. I wonder what types of incentives
would have to be in place to get someone to upgrade/change their browser.

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jasonparallel
If you do decide to support it, I have found these helpful
<http://css3pie.com/> <http://code.google.com/p/explorercanvas/>

~~~
bceagle
Very cool. I am definitely going to check out CSS3 Pie if I go down that
route. Thanks!

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debacle
Do you have any analytics? Standard demographics are ~20-30% IE>9 users.

If those users aren't in your target market, I wouldn't worry, but if they are
I wouldn't ignore them.

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molsongolden
One of our computers at work still has ie6. Maybe you should support 7 and 6
as well!

