
Dropped IE support for Instapaper           - atestu
http://www.marco.org/82950480
======
oneplusone
I have done extensive front-end coding on a variety of projects and have come
to a single conclusion: professional programmers don't get CSS. CSS is not
"rational" like a regular programming language. Often the way CSS properties
interact with each otehr has to be learned through trial and error. For
example, if you set a object to display as a block and float it to the left it
is not actually a block element any more, it is an inline-block. Doesn't
matter if firebug tells you it is a block level element. This causes lots of
pain and misery when it comes to understanding CSS.

However, once you do understand CSS browser discrepancies really become a
minor annoyance at most. You code pixel perfection in one browser, and ensure
all the other browsers don't go too far off course. The only exception is IE6,
and for that you can use something like <http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/> to
"upgrade" it.

There is really only one feature I wish Microsoft would add. The CSS property
Opacity should apply to form fields as well.

------
kirse
I despise websites that do this because I have to use IE7 at work. This is
probably the second fastest way for me to banish your website from memory
besides being spam.

Everyone on here talks about making the sign-up process as easy as possible,
and requiring someone to download and install an entirely new application is
about as complex and uninviting as one can get. Us "technical" people are
still people, and the more you annoy me with the signup process the less
likely I am to complete it. Even starting up a new browser and copying your
URL is a nuisance.

Secondly, I've never really had a Safari/FF->IE7 bug that didn't take about 30
minutes of Googling or simply making a sneaky workaround. There might be some
cursing in between but it simply has to get done otherwise it's ignoring a big
audience.

Edit to Clarify: I am in full support of dropping IE6 as most of you have
noted, seeing as how the user base has dropped and the majority of people with
IE6 have been "auto-updated" to IE7.

~~~
noblethrasher
Yes, but it's not usually one bug. A bug here and a bug there and pretty soon
you're talking about real money. IE7 isn't so bad but I'm seriously
contemplating dropping support for IE6 very soon.

~~~
feverishaaron
I estimate that supporting IE6 has added more than 30% of the interface
development costs to the complex projects I have worked on that use a
combination of sophisticated CSS and JS to get the job done. This is a HUGE
cost for start-ups and for clients to swallow, once the true cost is explained
to them.

Just supporting the way various sub-versions of IE6 inconsistently handle
cookies is a nightmare, and in many cases lead to unsolvable issues. This
costed a client of mine real $$$$ to discover, and less than 20% of their
audience used IE6. Less than 15 people actually complained about the issue.

IE 7 isn't quite as bad, but it still adds a measure of time to front-end
development efforts. I would estimate it in the range of 10-20%, depending on
how complex the interface is.

On two recent projects, we dropped IE6 support, with virtually no push-back
from a general-use audience. IE6 is almost 8 years old. Most people don't keep
their cars that long, and can understand that an old crusty browser is not
going to perform as well.

The only place where I would be hesitant to drop IE6 support is on marketing
sites (where you need to entice someone to a call-to-action within the first
30sec-1min) and on e-commerce sites, where every dollar counts.

~~~
jasonkester
30% cost to support 70% of your userbase seems like a win to me.

This is only an issue for developers who target Firefox initially. That's the
wrong way to go about web development. Run IE7 on your dev box and build
everything against it. That's what your users will have, so that should be
your first priority. Step two is making it work for FF.

The added benefit to that approach is that you'll find less cross platform
issues. Going from IE -> Firefox is a lot easier than the other way around.

~~~
fdb
Are you kidding? Developing for a crappy browser first is the perfect recipe
for an unmaintainable mess of code, since you will be relying on hacks to get
IE to do render correctly, then adding hacks _again_ for every browser that
does the right thing.

First develop for a standards-compliant browser, then add (conditional) hacks
to support IE. The other way around is just silly.

~~~
feverishaaron
I think we posted this at almost the exact same time. Awesome.

------
cschep
I love this. If everyone did this, then Microsoft would lose the power to do
whatever it wanted. Standards compliance would not be optional for them
anymore. I hope this is a trend that continues.

~~~
known
67.44% use IE [http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qp...](http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-
share.aspx?qprid=0)

~~~
sh1mmer
But not on his site.

------
amix
I would not recommend this if you want your product to hit the average user -
IE has the biggest market share (still :(). But of course, for Instpaper it's
perfectly right to do so since the market is power-users and they mostly us FF
(as the author notes).

~~~
dcurtis
For those who are curious, here's the browser makeup of Hacker News traffic to
all of my articles that have been on the front page here:

[http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/Browsers_-
_Google_Analyt...](http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/Browsers_-
_Google_Analytics-20090302-201943.jpg)

~~~
ciscoriordan
Does iPhone's Safari get categorized under Safari in that chart? If yes, you
might want to separate it.

~~~
nuclear_eclipse
Google Analytics doesn't let you separate iPhone from Mac Safari, unless you
specifically choose to look at Browser/OS pairs, in which case you get
"Firefox / Linux", "Firefox / Windows", ... "Safari / Macintosh", "Safari /
iPhone", etc.

------
SystemOut
You guys are missing the point. This guy is doing this by himself. It's hard
to be good at both server backend AND well versed at front-end work to be able
to work around IE6/7 problems quickly. And he's making the right call if his
browser demographics are correct (which I'm assuming they are). You have to
determine what to allocate resources to on a daily basis in this business.
There's always more work and not enough people to go around.

I'm pretty close to pulling the trigger on dropping IE6 support on the sites I
run. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask our users to upgrade to a better
browser. And believe me, my company is NOT targeting the corporate user at
all. :) The amount of time I spend fixing IE6 issues is just insane. I could
be doing so much more that helps other users and if I can get them to upgrade
to a better browser in the first place then so much the better.

I will close with this: It wouldn't suck as much to fix issues on IE6/7 if it
just had decent development tools such as Firebug, Tamper Data, and Web
Developer.

------
jhy
That all makes good sense for an app built by a single developer and a
specific demographic. He's cutting 10% of his potential market and probably
saving 80% of front-end dev time. Seems like a good tradeoff.

~~~
jwilliams
I don't know - his examples were rounded corners, a float that he fixed and an
unrelated-to-IE font issue. Are they worth cutting of 10% of your users?

Quite often it's worthwhile maintaining a bare-bones version of your site. For
more than just compatability - there is also accessibility, printing, slow
connections, etc, etc. Surely it's a better user experience to just downgrade
them to that?

------
MarcoArment
Thanks for all of the discussion, everyone. To help clarify my argument, I've
published Instapaper's browser usage stats from February as reported by Google
Analytics:

<http://www.marco.org/83217369>

Internet Explorer was used for 3.63% of visits to the site during the month
before I made this change.

------
rm999
This article seems like an excuse to criticize IE. _"Instapaper is severely
degraded in this browser"_ is fine. _"... because IE does not support basic
web standards"_ comes off as catty.

I understand the frustration that IE isn't fully compatible, but as engineers
it's not our job to change the world to suit our own needs; we shouldn't be
converting users to a different architecture or web browser.

IMO, 10% is a lot of users - perhaps, silently degrading the experience is
better than potentially offending people that have to use IE for whatever
reason. When I _have_ to use IE, the last thing I want is an application or
webpage rubbing it in my face.

~~~
nostrademons
Perhaps I'm just bitter because I've been doing mostly IE compatibility stuff
at work lately, but "because IE does not support basic web standards" does not
seem all that inaccurate to me.

~~~
rm999
Of course it's true, but why would joe six pack user care? It's not user
friendly.

~~~
Hexstream
If you adopt a strategy where you need to spend less time supporting IE
idiocy, you'll have more time to spend working on making your site more user-
friendly.

------
noblethrasher
The ironic thing is that Internet Explorer + HTML Applications (HTAs) is a
much, _much_ better desktop platform than a web browser. In fact, it’s
probably one of the best client side platforms for Windows. You can extend it
with any ActiveX control (including the .NET framework) and code it with
almost any language (including, apparently, Haskell -
<http://www.haskell.org/haskellscript/>). Some time ago I decided to start
building all of my organization’s internal apps using HTAs + jQuery. It’s the
bees knees (for Windows). It still accounts for most of my profanity usage
when having to build actual websites.

------
avocade
This is what every sane web designer should do. I made this decision many
years ago for a web based task manager I built with Ruby on Rails
(43actions.com), and have never looked back.

Sure I got _a lot_ of negative comments for it (and still do), but in this
particular case I definitely put my own sanity way ahead of the larger (but
dwindling) market share.

Sorry to now be a bit inflammatory (this single question is one that boils my
blood every time), but put simply IE sucks ass! IT SUCKS ASS! I _HATE_ IE.
MICROSOFT HAS _ZERO TASTE_ (thanks Steve Jobs for that very early insight).
Ok, enough said. Sorry.

------
dant
I'm not surprise this is happening, I expect that it will happen more in
future. Windows and IE may have only lost a few percentage points of market
share over the past few years, but those few percentage points represent a
generation of technology enthusiasts who will, I suspect, have a big impact on
the way the internet evolves.

When someone who doesn't run Windows or IE builds a site for their peers who
predominately don't run Windows or IE either, then finds that they have to
jump through some hoops to support IE, is it any wonder they decide to pass?

------
sam_in_nyc
I'm under the impression that this site doesn't do all that much. Ok... you
store URLs, then mark them as "read" and "unread." Not necessarily a good or
bad thing.. I'm sure it's incredibly useful. That's not my point.

My point is, how can a 2 page website drop support for a whole browser? Just
seems like laziness to me.

~~~
brk
I think he did a pretty good job explaining why he made the choice to drop
support for IE in TFA.

~~~
sam_in_nyc
I read: author wanted to make his website pretty, but IE was making it hard,
especially since he was developing on a Mac which made it harder to test, so
author dropped support for IE. Author then explains less than 10% of his users
use IE, anyway, so it doesn't really matter. Sparks browser war.

While I admit, IE really blows, and I hate developing for it, it's really not
_that_ bad. It's manageable if you test on it often, which author failed to
do. Is it hard to make a 9 cell table to get rounded corners? Or how about
learning "hasLayout" which fixes virtually every IE6+ css rendering bug?

~~~
sprsquish
I think Marco's point was that he's created this site as a fun side project.
Supporting IE isn't fun. The vast majority of the site's users aren't IE users
so he wont get a lot of flack from its users.

I agree that developing for IE isn't the worst thing ever, but it's certainly
not fun. I have to side with Marco on this, if I were to build a site just for
fun, I'd probably never look at it in IE.

~~~
sam_in_nyc
Agreed. To each their own. I'd personally rather have more people be able to
use it :)

------
lazyant
So this is a one-man project that offers it for free and someone has the balls
to complain because it doesn't support (for valid reasons or whatever) his
particular (broken) browser?

If it's so important to "business types" to support IE here's an idea: make
them pay a fee so it covers the extra development costs (this is not
outrageous in general; there are open source projects that cost money for the
Windows version).

This is not a government site or an Amazon that has to please everybody. I bet
none of the people complaining have ever suffered trying to code around the IE
compatibility problems.

------
josefresco
And somewhere in a quiet village half-way across the world, some kid is
launching an app/website/thingy that will welcome these shunned IE users.

I think I'd rather be him.

------
zmimon
This comes off as petty to me, and a bit stupid.

Maybe only 3.7% of his users are IE users _because_ they get a whole lot of
attitude when they visit his site? Or because a lot of IE users either don't
have the choice (corporate) or the desire or the skill (grandma) to upgrade
their web browsers. Perhaps CEOs of major corporations visit his site every
day curious about whether they might deploy his service across their whole
company (ok, fantasy), and then leave because he says he doesn't want to
support them. Perhaps his business could be 20 times bigger if he wasn't so
obsessed with this issue. Perhaps that isn't the case now but it might be down
the track.

There are lots of great frameworks out there that nearly completely remove the
cross platform issues in coding for browsers these days for all but the most
unusual requirements. This is not the issue it once was.

------
vaksel
It seems like most of IE is installed on corporate machines. Now answer me
this, what kind of IT Administrator doesn't realize the advantages to
installing firefox?

~~~
JacobAldridge
_"You don't get fired buying IBM"_

Keeping / installing IE is the default option for most corporates. Change is
difficult. IT Admins struggle for respect in many cases, and know that
fighting over IE or FF means wasting ammunition they need on more important
projects.

~~~
emilis_info
Well...

Keeping Firefox/Safari is the default option for most web developers. Change
is difficult. Web developers struggle to make a living in many cases and know
that fighting for pixel-perfect view in IE means wasting ammunition they need
on more important projects.

... couldn't hold myself. Sorry :-)

------
earl
Love it. Please oh please oh please oh please let more web devs do this.

------
pj
The web is a public good and as such, we should have /one/ standards compliant
browser that works on any device that can access it. Fund it with taxes, just
like roads, bridges, and the new electric grid Obama is going to buy us...

Microsoft should just stop working on IE and concentrate on the OS. We don't
need Opera, Chrome, Safari, IE, Firefox, etc... They're /all/ free. Take the
best of them all and build /one/.

~~~
dualogy
I don't like this, but yeah, go ahead, do it. Only, kill them by being better,
not by governmental decree.

~~~
dualogy
But that was trolling anyway, wasn't it...

~~~
pj
Not trolling. I'm 100% serious.

