
Bootstrapped startup saves over $100K by dropping IE - canistr
http://techcrunch.com/2012/04/01/bootstrapped-startup-saves-over-100k-by-dropping-ie/
======
asr
This is one of those times I wish HN wasn't so strict about the title of the
submission matching the title of the article--this title is extremely
misleading. (As a guest post, I'm guessing the author didn't get to write the
title, so I'm not blaming him). 4ormat didn't "drop" IE, they never supported
it. As a result, their calculation of how much they "saved" appears to be
based on some back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much more expensive it
would have been to develop for IE over a period of years.

tl;dr: if you build a tool which solves a significant and recurring pain point
for creative professionals, you can get away with not supporting IE.

The article does not provide much insight into building a consumer-facing
application--this is the equivalent of a company using an intranet app which
is IE6-specific.

~~~
tylerrooney
Yes, the 100K is based on a back-of-the-envelope, but for a startup with zero
revenue every development and design hour we can spare helps us focus on the
real task at hand: figuring out our market fit and making a great product.

This is less about supporting this browser or that browser and more about
making sound business decisions and putting our users’ needs first. We’d like
to think they would rather see requested features over support for a browser
they don’t use.

~~~
lucisferre
Honestly, it wouldn't surprise me if the value was higher.

------
XLcommerce
Choosing not to develop for IE makes perfect sense if you're building an app.
Here's my own little anecdote:

In the last 4 months or so I've written around 10k loc for a JS app. and
probably 3x that many lines of combines CSS and HTML. Number of hours
troubleshooting differences between Firefox and Chrome? I'd say about 8. So
one developer day's worth of work to sort out some minor issues with vendor
prefixed css. I've gotten to the point now that I routinely go days without
testing in FF, and when I do fire it up.... everything just works.

My estimate that supporting ie6+ would have put my progress back by about 2
months. On top of that is the ongoing technical debt of continuing to support
IE.

I don't want to say goodbye to potential IE customers and that's where
Chromeframe comes into play. Chrome frame is AMAZING. Takes about 60s to
install. Allows you to create your own install procedure i.e Your_Site ->
Install_Chromeframe -> Your_Site. Doesn't require a browser restart and no
admin rights needed. Wow.

Of course if you're just building a regular website then sure suck up the few
hours it takes to make it work in IE and bill 2x for the trouble.

------
adamkiss
What is this? There was no real argument, no mentioned technologies, that were
the ice-breaker.

Sure, in IE6, even the PNGs weren't working properly, but, talking layout,
IE7+ is mostly a question of 5-10 additional rules (on small scale websites)
and IE8 actually works without any (mostly), save for a css3 features like
border-radius, etc.

As for the design, having less visual effects and no rounded corners doesn't
have to be a problem – most of the designs work without it rather well (not to
mention 4ormat's design doesn't use plasticity, gradients and shadows that
much)

This article would gain much more credibility if it mentioned at least one or
two technological obstacles that take you more than 30 minutes to sort out.

~~~
mratzloff
I don't think anyone cares about the design. They're talking about JavaScript
implementations, which differ between browsers.

~~~
adamkiss
Okay, then it's the javascript. But what javascript (running jQuery+UI)
providing async script loading and few UI elements, can cost $100.000 to debug
on IE8+, for instance?

I'm not saying there [on the 4ormat] isn't technical solution that could be
this expensive to debug on IE, but none is visible on 4ormat page and nothing
less obvious is mentioned in the article, thus diminishing article's
credibility;

You know, instead of something awesome like 'we implemented geolocation,
offline aps and 20-years-too-soon-UI, so we ditched IE', they are doing 'Hurr
Durr bad IE can cost up to totally out of my ass pulled $100.000'.

------
gouranga
I signed up to say this:

This is the lowest quality article I have ever read for a product which
virtually no-one knows (except the minute techcrunch ecosystem and out of
pocket VCs) trying to trash a product which is actually used at least 5 orders
of magnitude more often by 5 orders of magnitude more people.

Trashing IE was fun once, but the world has grown up in the last couple of
years.

Also, that's a theoretical 100k saved now until the Windows tablet market and
Windows v.next peak grows (which it will as it always does) at which point
it'll cost 200k to sort it out. I worked at a Microsoft monoculture org for a
number of years and that's what happened when other browsers had to be
supported (Firefox, Chrome, Safari). Save now, pay later.

Welcome to the 2012 version of an IE6 only web site...

~~~
ccozan
Sorry, did you actually checked the website? Your argument regarding Windows
tablet market seems really shallow. They already optimize it for iOS devices
and Android which is like 90% of the market. I agree, the market is webkit all
over, which sounds like a monoculture. But, there is no windows tablet yet and
for design professionals ( which the website targets ) this is IMHO not the
target. So, no early optimization. I am not going to comment on "actually used
at least 5 orders of magnitude more often by 5 orders of magnitude more
people" because this seems to be disconnected from reality.

~~~
gouranga
It isn't disconnected from reality. Consider China alone - IE is still king
there as it is in the majority of large organisations (who still like to have
control over their users with AD/Group Policy).

I'm not saying preemptively design for it, but if you preemptively exclude its
predecessors and your path will be frought with many less turds to not step in
i.e:

In 2 years: "Oh shit we did it all in Webkit and Gecko features - The growing
20% of Windows tablet market doesn't support it - we're going to have to
rewrite or ship an app both of which are costly".

~~~
rsynnott
> "Oh shit we did it all in Webkit and Gecko features - The growing 20% of
> Windows tablet market doesn't support it - we're going to have to rewrite or
> ship an app both of which are costly".

If Windows tablets take off (and that still seems like rather a big if), you'd
hope they have a vaguely compatible browser.

~~~
Isofarro
Vaguely compatible doesn't help if the site is deliberately locking out
browsers that look like the current crop of Internet Explorer browsers.

Doesn't look like that they are User-Agent sniffing, so that means that maybe
they are detecting features. That's kinda the right way of doing it - except
for their failure to adhere to progressive enhancement best practices.

But feature detection isn't "No Internet Explorer support here" approach. So
the story seems at odds with the actual behaviour of their site.

Now what happens when an Internet Explorer - either on the desktop or tablet,
or phone, passes the feature detection in place on this site? You don't get
the "Go Away!" message, but instead you get an insufficiently tested
experience which exposes the lack of attention on quality - that's something
that's going to turn away an audience geared to wanting to see quality.

If you are going to publicly stop supporting an entire browser range, make
sure your developers don't leave obvious gaps in that non-support. Maybe
here's one place where User-Agent sniffing actually complements the actual
requirement.

------
ramanujam
Leaving aside the misleading title, i am not sure how the $100k number was
arrived at. Developer hours? cutting off one dedicated developer who fixed IE
issues?

If you are catering to creative professionals, who are going to be using huge
apple monitors and macs (66% of the site's users are on a mac), ignoring IE
isn't going to be a big deal. Even many of those ~4.5% of IE visitors might be
on IE9 /10 which are pretty decent browsers. I am not here to support IE, i
hate it like every other developer who builds stuff for the web. Also,
compete.com tells their approximate UVs for February was around 13k. Ignoring
a small number of users here is not going to have a huge impact. If your are
site/app with millions of users, then it will be a big deal.

PS: If you are building a hipster social network or a video post processing
tool, ignoring IE is going to save you significant time but if you are
catering to e-commerce/finance or any other common demographic even thinking
about ignoring IE isn't wise at this point.

------
mkmcdonald
These "developers" would have saved company X a fair bit of money by actually
researching IE. Microsoft has graciously provided a massive amount of
documentation covering most Internet Explorer variants and their quirks (via
MSDN)[0].

One of the main problems in web development today is the creation of browser-
specific code; "IE6" in particular is a scapegoat for poor code. I found that
once I studied MSDN and wrote no browser-specific code that IE 8 became
elementary to support. IE 7 soon followed. IE 6 & 5.5 were close behind.

For CSS, the key is understanding that every page does not need to look the
same. Furthermore, reading MSDN's CSS compatibility grid[1] provides more
insight.

For JavaScript, the key is simplification. Using DOM 0 events over fancy DOM 3
events yields big gains. Avoiding selector engines will also yield gains.

I'm getting very tired of incompetent web developers and their browser
elitism. Do your homework.

[0]: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ms533050(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/ms533050\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

[1]: [http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc351024(v=vs.85).as...](http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-
us/library/cc351024\(v=vs.85\).aspx)

~~~
mattbriggs
Its not browser elitism when you have 4 browsers that work and 1 that doesn't.
If you are doing trivial ui work, it is not hard to support IE. If you are
doing anything close to innovative or competitive with what is out there, it
is a huge pain.

~~~
mkmcdonald
s/browsers/platforms/. Don't lump all browser versions into one pile.

I can grasp what you're referring to. Bleeding-edge features are tough to
support in large part because of Internet Explorer's slow release cycle.

However, the decision has still been made to jump onto a runaway train. All
users should be treated the same. Choose an approach that doesn't pick
favorites.

------
jmspring
I think the argument of what browser(s) you do/don't support really depend
upon your site's focus.

I'm pretty sure if Gruber/daringfireball.net dropped all IE support, his
traffic decline would be close to 0.

On the other hand, if codeguru.com did the same, their traffic would probably
drop off close to 75+%.

If your budget is tight or skills limited, focus on your target market first
and make that experience the best you can. Though, that pretty much applies
for browser support as well as many other things.

~~~
pwaring
Absolutely. I work for a 'start-up' in the insurance sector, where everyone
uses IE (the only non-IE entries in the access logs are myself on the
development sites). If we ignored IE (and I'd love to, given the number of
headaches over the years) we wouldn't have any customers.

We could get away with not supporting Chrome and Firefox though as I doubt
anyone would notice.

------
nikic
> Recruitment secret weapon. It warms our hearts to see the look of
> incredulous joy on the face of a job candidate when we assure them “You
> heard right, we really don’t support IE.”

I can imagine that look _so_ well...

~~~
flomo
I know that look myself. But most experienced web coders know how to whip IE
into submission, so I'm very skeptical about the 30-100% figure. (I usually
guesstimate it at around 20% for a normal website.)

65% of their traffic is from Mac users, so this sounds like a good decision
given their audience.

~~~
trustfundbaby
Nah ... that's about right, I've been doing html/css for almost 9 years and
hard core javascript/ui stuff for another 4 or so.

Almost without fail, fixing stuff for IE takes as long as it does to just
build the feature in the first place (so 4 hours to do a layout then another 3
or 4 to get it working properly in IE), with CSS/html layout that number has
dropped as IE6 has been phased out, but I find that its actually moved over
into doing js stuff in IE8 and 7.

~~~
gscott
The solution may be to design your site and test in Internet Explorer before
even looking at it in any other browser. It might be faster for you to resolve
the quirks in FireFox & Chrome then IE. Reversing your process might speed up
your development time by 20%.

~~~
Isofarro
No, that introduces the same type of bias, just from the opposite direction.
The key is to keep a broad range of browsers quickly on hand to regularly
check _while_ you develop.

There's no reason not to have multiple browsers quickly available - modern
computers have sufficient processing power to run multiple applications
simultaneously these days.

------
tomelders
There seems to be a common sentiment that experienced devs can tame IE, thus
it's not really an issue.

Speaking as someone who can tame IE, I can categorically state that I don't
want to. I'd much rather have that time back so I could do something much more
fun.

------
brudgers
_"not a single person has ever contacted us requesting support for Internet
Explorer."_

While that may be considered evidence of potential customers switching
browsers just to use 4ormat.com, it may also be considered evidence that
potential customers using IE are very much put off by being told to use
another browser.

Just running the numbers on a back of envelop:

The company was founded in 2008.

Not supporting IE has saved $25,000 per year.

12 months x $7 per month = $84 per user.

330 lost users = $25,000 +/- per year

10,000 responses to the call for action * 4% using I.E. = 400 visitors who are
much more unlikely to use 4ormat.com because the call to action doesn't work.
Their negative experience is much more likely to lead to negative network
effects than positive ones.

Even worse the lost revenue scales as the customer base grows, but the work to
support IE is roughly fixed and is relatively modest.

$25,000 is 4% of $625,000 a year. Above that, the company is losing money (on
the back of an envelop). With four founders, one would expect that
4ormat.com's revenue is projected to exceed that or has already.

~~~
XLcommerce
Supporting IE means taking on board a technical debt that will follow you for
the life of the project. There are lots of things that can be accomplished in
ie6 but then you need to consider performance. If you're building an app that
means a lot of JS and possibly DOM manipulation... which is dog slow in
ie.6,7,8

Now factor in support costs. I can picture it now:

Customer: Uhhh your app sucks it's so slow.

Support: Hmm looks like you're using IE6. We've worked really hard to make our
app function in every browser, however if you'd like the best possible
experience then please upgrade.

Customer: What's a browser?

The best solution is to use chrome frame. The installation can be made
seamless and if your app is worth using then your customers wont mind the
extra 60s it takes to install.

~~~
brudgers
Leaving aside the appropriateness of lumping IE6 with IE8 and 9, the support
costs are already in the $100,000 number.

Slow speed of execution in IE might well be considered a vast improvement
compared to the current state of affairs in regard to the potential customer's
standpoint - i.e. IE not working at all.

Again, "change your browser" is a poor way to convince the customer that
4ormat.com is worth using given that the customer has already responded to the
call to action.

Indeed, one might argue that there's no excuse for failing to inform the
potential customer that IE is not supported before the call to action is
clicked - obviously 4ormat.com is capable of testing for browser versions.

~~~
XLcommerce
Seems win-win to simply use chromeframe. Given this is a web app which
presumably customers are already invested in using (since they're paying for
it), requiring a 60s one-time install seems like the best course of action for
everyone involved.

 _Slow speed of execution in IE might well be considered a vast improvement
compared to the current state of affairs_

Unfortunately the general public doesn't think like that. To the average Joe
your site is slow therefore it sucks.

------
ericlevine
I dislike developing for IE as much as the next guy, but does selectively
supporting browsers, even when reasonable IE versions exist, bring us back to
the "best viewed in Internet Explorer" days? Is this a step back for web
standards?

~~~
mkmcdonald
It sure does. Developers seem content to keep moving the goalposts and
treating "inferior" users as slime.

~~~
grabastic
You seem to be taking this rather personally.

------
ntkachov
Honestly, I drop support for IE <=8 for most of my sites. IE9 is pretty good
and aside from a few glitches and IE specific stuff (usually 1 small hack
around per problem). IE doesn't pose as much of a problem as, say, Android
browser or Mobile Safari which will do things like ignore overflow:auto.

I can't imagine supporting IE 9+ would take that much money. But then again, I
don't run a startup.

~~~
artichokeheart
IE8 is pretty good and aside from a few glitches and IE specific stuff

IE7 is pretty good and aside from a few glitches and IE specific stuff

IE6 is pretty good and aside from a few glitches and IE specific stuff

Isn't that the point

~~~
SEMW
...No, not really. The extra development work required to support IE9 on top
of other browsers is vastly smaller than that for IE6.

It's a cost-benefit analysis. Messing about with words by stretching the what
you can reasonably describe as "few glitches and IE specific stuff" to try and
draw a false equivalence doesn't change the actual analysis.

------
JonoW
Given that tHN is full of developers, I'm pretty disapointed that so many ppl
are lumping all the IE's together as a single product.

I totally see that IE6 & 7 are not worth the dev effort, IE8 is probably
border-line, but IE9 is a good browser and people seem to be vastly
exagerating how much work goes into getting IE9 to look and work like other
browsers (i.e. not very much).

So not supporting IE9 seems a bit lazy to me, and I have to say, a little
"religous" (they seemed to have ruled out IE10 already without doing any
research into why). Also find it strange that they actively block it rather
than just warn people about it being unsupported.

However, I will cut them slack because the target market are creatives, and
it's an admin site rather than a consumer level site, so probably few IE users
here. But others here seem to be extending this idea to the public web, which
seems like a mistake...

~~~
Roboprog
Sure, you couldn't get away with this on an ecommerce site such as for a bank
or store. But I bet you could for many things such as games or social sites.

People know there's something uncool about IE, even if they don't know why.
And it can be replaced in 5 minutes.

------
dools
I can sympathise with this. We _only_ support Firefox for our CMS editing
interface, and then, only test in the latest version.

This is a somewhat more extreme version of the OPs decision but we also
started work on Decal when the only browser with a JavaScript debugger was
Firefox[1].

The interesting thing is we've _deploying_ Decal ourselves for quite a while
and only now just starting to try and open it up as a platform for other
designers.

We have never had a client object to having to use Firefox to manage their
content, however in running people through our "Decal 4 minute challenge"[2]
we've found a huge amount of resistance amongst designers themselves.

This leaves us in a tricky predicament: we want designers to sell the system
to their clients who, in our experience, don't care about using Firefox to
manage their content, but in order to engage/on-board those designers in the
first place we have to get past that initial hurdle (as it turns out, 4
minutes is way too long and we're refining that on-boarding process down to a
target of about 30 seconds).

[1] <http://www.decalcms.com/page/Support/#whyFirefox>

[2] <http://www.decalcms.com/page/4_minute_challenge>

------
AznHisoka
Not a big deal these days.. most things behave the same in IE8/IE9 as they do
in Chome, Firefox and Safari. It's only IE7 that's a headache and that's <1%
of traffic for most techie-oriented sites. If they were doing this 5 years,
it'll be worthy of a headline...

~~~
benaston
>> most things behave the same in IE8/IE9 as they do in Chome, Firefox and
Safari

Having recently developed an HTML5 single page web app, I can assure you that
this statement is utterly false.

------
DHowett
Wait, what does it matter that they were bootstrapped? The title could just as
well be "startup that took investments and venture capital saved boatloads of
money ...". The fact that they paid out-of-pocket seems immaterial to the
article?

------
feralchimp
"To date, almost three years after launching 4ormat, not a single person has
ever contacted us requesting support for Internet Explorer."

 _yeesh_

~~~
mratzloff
Of course they didn't. They just left.

------
iamleppert
As a web developer who deals with IE issues everyday, I can testify that this
is worth it for those who can get away with it. If you are a startup that
targets anyone creative or "new" end users, or if you have a significant web
application, I'd highly consider it.

There are people who say that an experienced web developer can work around IE
issues -- and they can. The problem is, the juice just isn't worth the
squeeze. Let me explain. The cost to make your application support IE is
enormous. And I'm not just talking about the cost to make it work and feature
complete in the browser. I'm talking about the cost that you could be working
on other products or features that drive the business -- the stuff that really
matters and delights users.

Beyond preventing you from focusing on what matters, there's also a
significant amount of technical debt that has to be inherited with every IE
hack you add to your code base, and in some cases supporting IE can mean
saying no to certain product features that otherwise could have been possible.
This means that IE is actively inflicting damage to other browsers and is in
effect lowering all your users -- even if they have a good browser -- on to a
least common denominator experience.

IE also hurts your customer service and support personnel. Troubleshooting IE
specific issues and quirks is painful, random and at times non-deterministic.
You'll likely be consulting arcane MSDN articles published in the early to mid
2000's, and in general frustrating customers and developers alike. It can
affect your entire organization, keeping everyone busy working around the
issues -- from your front line customer service people, to product managers
and developers. It's simply amazing what damage the browser can and does do to
a web company.

I also agree that IE, in any version thus far widely available, is an
albatross. In Microsoft's defense, I haven't used IE10 for development
purposes nor do I target it (that's because almost no one uses it and access
to the browser is hard to get outside of developer previews). But even IE9 is
simply too little, too late. And in too little I mean it still doesn't get all
of CSS3 right (I still have to create hacks around various issues and have
only marginally more confidence compared to IE8). Not to mention the fact that
users must be on Vista or Win7 means many Windows users will be stuck on IE8
for years, making it even more irrelevant. By the time IE9 has finally reached
critical mass, the other browsers will likely be light years ahead (Chrome
major version 30 by then??). This issue with upgrade path and slow speed of
innovation is cause for great concern with developing anything on IE.

Developer tools in the IE browsers are also less than stellar. Microsoft has
invested large amounts of effort and time into its Visual Studio line of tools
and it shows. They are generally high quality and provide an excellent
developer experience for working and debugging code. In stark contrast, IE
Developer Toolbar, F9 Developer Tools, and Microsoft Script Debugger seem like
after thoughts. The experience is subpar in almost every category compared to
working with Firebug in Firefox, built-in Firefox debugging tools, and the
amazing WebKit inspector and remote debugger. In addition, the tools and usage
of them is fragmented across the different IE versions (a different
combination of tools is needed per version to debug issues and inspect the
DOM). As far as I know, remote debugging isn't widely available for IE, in any
version.

Why has this happened? I largely feel that Microsoft's lack of focus on the
browser and web standards over the past 10 years, and instead it's focus on
Visual Studio and .NET have led them to a serious game of catch up. The
browsers themselves are inadequate, the developer tools are not high quality,
and the upgrade speed and innovation path takes years. Add all this together
and it's a recipe for continued issue and pain with IE - in any version.
Incremental improvements may be made, but they are just that. There will
always be a game of catchup to be played, along with a new bag of hacks to
implement and associated organization pain.

So if you can, do it! Drop IE! Your developers, employees and customers will
thank you!

~~~
yuhong
Note that Visual Web Developer can be used as a script debugger for IE.

------
prodigal_erik
I can't tell whether this is web or only photo hosting, but I have to wonder
whether this prevents their customers from showing full web authoring
competence by publishing portfolios that demonstrably work in every browser.

~~~
tylerrooney
The sites generated by 4ormat support IE so our user's customers can
definitely see their work in every browser. It's the app itself which you
can't use in IE which is the overwhelming majority of our development.

------
jakejake
In case anybody who is not running windows wants to see what their site looks
like in IE, I fired up parallels out of curiosity:

<http://i44.tinypic.com/54vewk.jpg>

------
mhartl
For sites with a technical audience, IE is pretty much expendable nowadays.
For example, looking at the analytics for railstutorial.org shows that more
than 96% of visitors use something other than IE.

------
joedev
Can't believe I just wasted a few minutes reading that article. I went to find
out how to save over $100k and learned nothing other than what I already knew:
older versions of IE cause issues.

------
ilaksh
Please tell me this is not an April Fool's

~~~
83457
I assumed so

------
noarchy
Normally I'm not worried about IE7/6. The only time it is an issue is when a
corporate client (who else is stuck using those browsers, these days? not
many) complains that their new, cutting-edge social media app doesn't render
properly in their antiquated browser.

------
digamber_kamat
We have done this for many of our projects and saved a lot of money and time.
And actually it had only a marginal effect on our site statistics compared to
the efforts we had to put into testing and developing for IE.

------
yuhong
So what about IE10? It is still missing WebGL, but do you use that?

~~~
tylerrooney
Nope. Not even IE10. If they pop Webkit rendering into IE maybe we'd consider
it.

There also just aren't that many users showing up to our site using IE. That
graph in the article is straight from Google Analytics for our main landing
page.

~~~
justincormack
IE 10 is a high quality standards compliant browser. Webkit rendering is not
the web. You should support it. And Opera. And IE9 unless you absolutely
require features it does not support.

~~~
tomjen3
Has there ever been a business case for supporting Opera?

~~~
DanBC
You need a business case to write standards compliant accessible code that is
browser agnostic?

WWW - as envisioned by Berners Lee - is getting worse.

> _Berners-Lee identifies universality as one of Web’s key principles,
> providing people with the freedom to link to anything, regardless of
> hardware, software, or Internet connection._

~~~
mattbriggs
I would say that the responsibility on the developer for that vision to occur
is to write standards compliant code. Working around bugs or quirks in a
specific browser I think falls into the realm of business case.

~~~
Isofarro
"Works in WebKit" isn't necessarily equated to "write standards compliant
code". For organisations that manage to develop a website that requires a
$100,000 outlay to work in Internet Explorer, that can't possibly be a web
standards compliant code base they are starting from.

------
korginator
What's interesting is that 40% of the users were on Safari (Mac) and 65% users
were on a Mac. This automatically precludes IE on this very large percentage
of total users.

------
readme
All I can say is great news. I hope this catches on with other startups.

------
thisismyname
Interesting... Wonder how much they lost...

------
Destroyer68
IE sucks, I don't blame them. Helping us push to the future.

------
Craiggybear
I wouldn't go out of my way to support it either.

If it happens to work in IE, then fine. If not, tough Rocco's.

------
monsterix
Kind of brings you close to this thought on Microsoft's position to Firefox:

<http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-Mozilla>

