

Not My Gorilla - nuclear_eclipse
http://daringfireball.net/linked/2008/12/07/not-my-gorilla

======
bk
If Microsoft had anything worth pirating, I'd pirate it, just to get even
close to paying myself a reasonable hourly rate for the time I've had to spend
debugging css for IE6.

~~~
blasdel
Flight Simulator is pretty nice, and has been for decades.

For a long time it was probably the only profitable Microsoft product that
wasn't Basic, Office, or Operating Systems.

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markessien
So he's saying that if your core audience is in Windows, and your product
works best in Windows, you should ignore the Linux people clamouring for a
port?

It goes both ways - you ignore them today, they'll ignore you tomorrow.

~~~
ph0rque
The only difference is, you can get Linux for free (in money) and lately, for
only a _slightly_ higher investment of time.

~~~
Zev
That's only if you want an OS that's not windows but acts like windows in most
manners of using. If you want something _different_ , it still takes more then
an hour or two to set up.

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randomwalker
"It’s easier for me to ignore IE because the DF audience predominantly uses
Safari, Firefox, and MobileSafari (roughly 53, 25, and 8 percent,
respectively, with IE coming in around 4 percent). I have no idea whether the
DF Paraphernalia store is even legible under IE, because I didn’t even bother
to check."

Perhaps if the site weren't broken in IE, half of his visitors would be from
that browser.

~~~
randomwalker
To the people who downmodded this, is it just that you hate IE a lot, or do
you have an actual reason why I'm wrong?

I wasn't being sarcastic -- don't you think he's turning away his IE visitors
by presenting a site that doesn't look right, and then turning around and
claiming that IE is 4%?

Even for sites with a highly technical audience, that number is hard to
believe.

~~~
whatusername
Really?

more than 1 in 25 people on a site like HN using IE6 would seem odd to me..
I'm not sure of anyone that would like this site and is still running ie6.

(on an assumption here that we're talking organic traffic - not SE results)

PG - want to give us the browser stats?

~~~
briancooley
I'm on IE6 right now because I'm at work, but I use Safari and Firefox at
home.

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ryan-allen
4% of his users are IE, let's say, he's running a multi million dollar
business. It'll cost him 5 million a year to keep IE working, and the business
from the 4% equates to 15 million. What would you do? Beat your chest and
scream "look at my website I'm awesome!".

Jamis had a legitimate point. DaringFireball is hijacking this to pound his
chest. Who _cares_. For some people and companies, supporting IE in some
incarnation is legitimate. For others, it's not. That's all very reasonable.

I for one am sick of these fallacious arguments masquerading as rational and
revolutionary thought. Peh. Who cares.

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jjudge
jamis has the right to support whatever he wants, it's his project that he
designed for his purposes. if windows developers need to tweak for windows,
they should fork capistrano. i guess jamis is saying, fork you! (ha)

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nuclear_eclipse
It would be really nice to get rid of the 800lb gorillas in my projects, but
that's not always my choice....

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cabalamat
Microsoft is an 800 lb gorilla, but one located in another part of town, or
even another country. If you do web development, and you're not using
.net/CLR/C#, then you're probably not developing or deploying on Windows.

What proportion of startups run Windows? It's a good deal lower than those
running Linux or OS X -- so much so that Microsoft have launched a "BizSpark"
service where startups can use their software without charge (see
[http://www.includipedia.com/blog/2008/11/05/microsoft-
bizspa...](http://www.includipedia.com/blog/2008/11/05/microsoft-bizspark-for-
startups.html) )

So if you want to develop with PHP, MySQL, Ruby, Rails, Django, etc, then you
should bear in mind that Windows support is probably not going to be as good
as Linux or OS X support.

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Frabjous-Dey
This isn't some badass act of defiance against The Establishment like Gruber
seems to want you to think, given his last paragraph: 4% of his viewers use
IE.

If that went up overnight to 40%, you know whose gorilla it would become.

~~~
allenbrunson
the point is, the likelihood of that happening is pretty close to zero. gruber
has aligned himself with the tech elite, and the early adopters.

suppose some new version of firefox was released that sucked, and broke
everybody's css layouts. gruber's crowd would almost certainly not adopt that
particular version. they value technical superiority above almost everything
else.

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brandonkm
So much for cross browser accessibility. At the end of the day its his site
and he can choose which browsers he wants to ignore, but I think even ignoring
that 4% who use IE is a big mistake.

And its not like 'daring fireball' would be all that difficult to make IE
render correctly anyways.

~~~
unalone
Daring Fireball does render almost correctly. And why should Gruber care? He
makes a living off of his web site alone as it is. Worrying about 4 percent
when you're writing for your own site and it's self-sufficient, when worrying
about that slim percentage means a lot of pain, isn't exactly a waste of time,
but: why bother?

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Tichy
4% of 6 billions is 240 millions.

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newt0311
"There are a lot of people who’d be a lot happier if they stopped worrying
about other people’s 800 pound gorillas."

I wonder how this sentiment would apply to linux DEs. Consider the design
decisions which would be made if the designers of gnome and kde thought about
what would make them most productive instead of thinking about what will get
people to switch from windows to linux. Perhaps, we will get a lot less
dumbing-down of interfaces and an end to blind adherence to the standard
windows UI and finally see some genuine innovation in this field again.

This is not to say that all DEs are stuck in a cycle of continuously copying
windows. FVWM (my wm of choice) splits completely. Similarly, from an eye-
candy perspective, beryl and compiz bring new things to the table. Still,
beryl and compiz are relatively small projects and the vast majority of coding
effort goes into make nice GUIs for systems configuration and things like
emulating MS Office with OOo.

~~~
bkor
Can't speak for KDE, but your statement regarding GNOME is totally incorrect.
We follow our own UI guidelines, we do NOT blindly follow the Windows
guidelines. The focus is on our thoughts on usability, not on being different.
Further, people work on whatever they want.

~~~
unalone
However, Gnome takes a large part of its interface layout directly from
Windows. The taskbar and the window layout always seemed to be direct copies
of that system. Instead of crating something new and more functional, Gnome
and KDE (though I haven't tried 4) seem to just lift Windows' ideas wholesale
at times, and merge them with the Linux ideas of app and system management.

~~~
bkor
For one, GNOME is usually compared with Mac OS X. I find your comparison with
Windows pretty funny. Secondly, look at the gnome-shell discussion on
planet.gnome.org. Further, just because Windows has things looking like GNOME
doesn't mean one copied from the other. Especially not that GNOME copied from
Windows. Click e.g. on the clock in GNOME. IIRC that is now in Vista.

