
It’s Time To Stop Blaming Internet Explorer - vinothshankaran
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/07/12/its-time-to-stop-blaming-internet-explorer/
======
EnderMB
The biggest issue holding back Web Development isn't Internet Explorer. It's
incompetent developers.

I agree entirely with this post. Sure, coding a site to work in IE6 is a pain
in the ass, especially when working with JavaScript-powered elements on a site
that need to work in every browser. I've always followed the Yahoo graded
browser support (<http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/>) baseline
when building new sites and have even moved it over to personal projects.

I would chalk it up to experience with older browsers, but I've worked with
students fresh out of university that have had to pick up projects that have
IE6 as a requirement, and they've coped just fine. Many of the developers that
are so up-in-arms over cross-browser support are largely new developers or
aren't that good at their job. They'll only be versed in what their favourite
blogs will preach, they'll use any jQuery plugin or JS polyfill they think
sounds good to make their site better, they've never used the profiler within
Firebug and never check the size of their web pages. I spend a lot of time on
/r/web_design on Reddit and it is not uncommon to see users posting "great
websites" that use Modernizr to "make their sites cross-browser" and weigh in
around the 5-10MB mark for something as simple as a basic home page. A large
number of front-end developers probably wouldn't last a month at your average
agency or development team for a large website.

We all want IE6 and to an extent IE7 to die a horrible death, and Microsoft
have clearly done their best to try and get people off a dead platform and
onto a new OS. However, we're not talking about rocket science, we're talking
about rejigging some code or learning the nuances of each browser your users
use. Quoting the latest StatCounter figures (or whatever backs up your
argument) to provide an argument for ditching old browsers will have battle-
hardened developers laugh in your face, because they aren't your users!

If you're making an application then you have a case for not supporting legacy
browsers, but if you're complaining that setting up your crappy WordPress-
powered site is too hard in IE6 then either shut up or find alternative
employment.

~~~
georgemcbay
"The biggest issue holding back Web Development isn't Internet Explorer. It's
incompetent developers."

IMO the biggest issue holding back web development is that the technology at
the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications
and now we have hacks upon hacks to have a stateless protocol meant for
document display to act as a full application environment.

Don't get me wrong, I stand in awe at the amazing things some people are able
to build on this shaky foundation and I don't discount how incredible it is
that the web even exists at all with buy in from all the major corporations
(Google, MS, Apple, etc) who otherwise want to rip each others throats out...
But at the end of the day, ignoring all of the context of history, if the web
didn't exist and I asked someone to come up with a way to develop rich,
secure, network-bound apps and he went to work on it for some years and the
wire protocol he came up with for it was anything like
HTTP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I'd think he was a complete moron.

~~~
pjmlp
> IMO the biggest issue holding back web development is that the technology at
> the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real
> applications and now we have hacks upon hacks to have a stateless protocol
> meant for document display to act as a full application environment.

That is what the OS and desktop is for.

~~~
maigret
I used to think that, but honestly the desktop lost in 2005 with the rise of
Ajax. There's probably no way back. And HTML5 is even doing markup elegant.

~~~
pjmlp
> There's probably no way back.

Yes there is, native applications in mobile devices.

~~~
maigret
If anything, I see the same pattern on mobile as on desktop: \- Native is the
only way at the beginning \- Multiple platforms appear \- Devs begin to see
the cost of developing x times the same app \- Browsers get more powerful and
easier to program, native functions are made available on the browser.

Have you seen Boot to Gecko? I've seen that in real on a phone, that looked
_real good_. Don't know how the day to day use is, but is not mature yet and
will probably gain capabilities. I see lots of potential in that kind of
technology.

------
valisystem
IE lags advanced features with years late. This is hurting web developement. I
don't understand how anyone can find this perfectly normal, or even acceptable
from a major vendor like microsoft, the company supposed to bring technology
into every people's house.

~~~
randomdata
I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm curious to know why, exactly, it does
hurt web development? I believe more people use modern Gecko/WebKit than there
are iPhones, yet we'll happily make an entire application that is limited to
the just the iPhone device and not think twice.

Is this a case of taking statistics too far? To hear that only 50% of the
people with web browsers can use your application doesn't sound great, never
mind that 50% in real numbers is far greater than 100% of iPhones (or
whatever, insert your own example here).

~~~
pooriaazimi
To make money through a website you (typically) need to put disgusting ads on
it (apart from actually making the site and service). To make money in the app
store, you create the app (and service) and sell it. I like the latter a whole
lot more than the idea of putting banners and ads on my website. I get your
point, and agree with it to a certain extent; i just wanted to point out that
mobile development (iOS, and to a lesser extent Android) and web apps are not
necessarily very similar from a business perspective[1] and that sometimes it
makes sense to target 1 million iOS users instead of 60 million web users.

[1]: Of course, you can sell subscription on web too. It's just that far more
people are willing to purchase a $5 Instapaper app on the app store _(or
upgrade their account for $1/month to search within their saved articles
through in-app purchase, that literally requires two click (and entering your
password)_ , than there are people who would give you their credit card number
to purchase your web service.

~~~
randomdata
Some good points. However, I made a follow up post
(<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4233820>) that sticks to just the web
browser domain, negating any gains that may come from alternative business
models. Even when mobile web usage is relatively small, business are still
generally putting in a lot of effort to build mobile-specific pages.

------
einhverfr
I agree with a lot the author's views. The fact is that as long as you cater
to problems of the past, you are stuck with them. If you start giving people a
compelling reason to upgrade, many will.

In the LedgerSMB project we made a decision back in 2006 to only support
browsers with features that made our lives easier. Because of our i18n
framework, we decided to drop all support for all browsers that didn't support
button elements per the standard. Yes, at the heigh of IE6, we dropped support
for IE6. However, we could do this because would tell businesses "if you want
to use LedgerSMB, install Firefox." This wouldn't have worked for the general
public, but for the general public we probably wouldn't have done i18n much at
all. But anyway we chose buttons because according to the standard, what you
display and what is submitted are only loosely coupled, which makes i18n
easier (just translate the inner string and leave the value constant).

IE6 handled buttons horribly. When you clicked on a button element of type
submit it would send the value of _all_ buttons on the form. Worse, it
submitted the wrong information (innerHTML instead of value). This made it
impossible on the server side to see which buttons were actually clicked. Too
bad. Then IE7 came out and it was better. We thought at first we could support
it. But we were wrong. IE7 still sent innerHTML instead of value.

We had to wait until IE8 to support IE again.

I think that this is what the author is getting at when he laments people
blaming circumstances they can't control. We looked at it and we asked "what
choices do we have? What should we do?" We then decided that we wouldn't be
hurt too badly at the time by dropping IE and that turned out to be a good
bet. In the end it really _is_ about choices and how we think about them. An
e-commerce site may have different choices available than we did. But you make
your choices and you do the best you can.

~~~
masklinn
Yep.

Technically for your precise case you could probably have rigged a JS shim to
fix IE's behavior, something along the lines of:

* On click of an input[@type=submit] or a button

* Disable all other input[@type=submit] or button

* On form submit, setTimeout(re-enable buttons) then un-register self

The fact that it also sends retarded stuff would probably be harder to fix,
but not much.

Though I can easily understand that being considered "not worth it", it's a
hack (as most shims are), and unless you had a big customer base clamoring for
IE support there wasn't much value in it.

~~~
einhverfr
We probably could have but we'd rather be tackling bigger issues regarding the
software. LedgerSMB still has a ways to go to compete head-to-head with
mainstream solutions and we'd rather spend our time going that direction if
our current users are ok with being asked to use a different or newer browser.

------
padolsey
> Yes, complaining is useful to get people to listen. Microsoft is listening,
> so continuing to complain doesn’t do anything except perpetuate an attitude
> that I would rather not have in Web development.

That makes no sense. He says that complaining made MS listen but then he says
to stop complaining because it creates a bad atmosphere...

~~~
rurounijones
It makes perfect sense providing you:

1\. Believe that the complaining was to effect change

2\. Believe that that change has been effected due to Microsoft's actions in
trying to kill off IE6.

(This seems to be the position he is taking based on my reading)

If you agree with the above then further complaining serves no purpose except
to vent your frustrations which is his main point.

Of course if you do not agree with the above then that is fine, but saying
"makes no sense" is a tadge harsh.

------
halayli
Here's what I can extract: IE9 is damn good because.

Yup that's all.

~~~
hessenwolf
I have to use IE in work. Damn, it's crap.

~~~
alanmeaney
get a new job! (joke)

------
masto
It's great that Microsoft has (for whatever reason, it doesn't matter) taken
up the banner of standards compliance, modernization, etc. It doesn't change
the fact that IE9 is still a pain in the ass for real-world developers making
the current generation of applications. I'm not talking about web sites, I
mean the full-featured applications we engineers claim can be done in modern
"HTML5" browsers without plugins. When the business people say "ok, we want
one", one of the first discussions everyone has is which browsers have to be
supported. That's really code for "how much extra do you want to spend to make
it look right in Internet Explorer"?

You can make blanket statements that anyone who has trouble with IE9 is
incompetent, but I know from working with them that we have an amazing
frontend team who are building a great "desktop quality" application. And the
numbers in the bug database tell the story: 37 IE9-specific issues reported,
only one or two for other browsers. These aren't issues of baseline support or
graceful degradation, they're basic behavior and layout problems. Some
examples:

IE9: When editing the xxx field it overlaps the chart icon IE9: Data points
not displayed when hovering the mouse over the locus points in chart IE9: xxx
dropdown is obscured by above pane and also overlaps start date IE9: Clicking
on Logout link spawns Session Time Out modal even though session has not
expired

Can smart developers fix these kinds of problems? Sure, they can and do. The
question is whether it's worth adding 15-20% more work to a project to support
IE9. Is it time to stop blaming Internet Explorer? Not at all: it's time to
start properly accounting for the effort it takes to support Internet Explorer
so that businesses can weigh the true cost against market share when making
the "minimum browser" decision.

------
dexterchief
I believe IE 6+, are perfect. The are functioning exactly as designed to
prevent web apps from competing with Microsoft's bread and butter desktop
apps. They do that by forcing developers to choose between writing non-
standard stuff that ties them to Microsoft or increasing my development costs
by supporting their weirdness + the standards.

To me this article misses the point, things like progressive enhancement is
part of the extra cost/complexity that I have to absorb when I don't choose
Microsoft. Every time I have to do ANYTHING beyond following the recent
standards to the letter, Microsoft has succeeded with their strategy of
forcing me to choose them or raising my cost to compete with them.

Yes there are a bunch of techniques that can help once you choose to absorb
the cost, but how I am a crappy developer or a whiner for not cheerfully
accepting the burden?

------
UnoriginalGuy
We've seen IE 6 usage drop to below 2%; and that is with almost all of our
customers being business users too. We don't deal with governments or the
military however so your mileage might vary.

The iPad has a higher usage on our properties in every measurable way.

A lot of web developers I've known who complain constantly about IE7 and newer
are also still developing for quirks mode for some ungodly reason. While IE7
definitely isn't perfect, when you use it in strict mode it seems at least as
consistent as Firefox or Chrome are.

It seems the call of "IE sucks!" has almost become so ingrained that people
can rarely justify the opinion (ditto with "Vista sucks," "Windows is
insecure," "Macs cannot get viruses," etc). Frankly once an opinion reaches
critical mass in the technology world certain individuals just start parroting
it without any thought or consideration as to WHY it was true in the first
place.

------
Beltiras
IE9: slightly less shitty than it's predecessors.

Ye, I'm totally sold.

------
jiggy2011
I'm curious as to what is in it for Microsoft to maintain their own
rendering/JS engine these days. It would seem simpler for them just to build
IE on top of webkit/V8 like everyone else.

------
mcmillion
"Internet Explorer 9, on the other hand, is a damn good browser."

No. It's not.

------
DaNmarner
There's a difference between "blaming IE" and "stopping innovation". We blame
IE because we don't want to get into the same situation again, not because we
don't innovate.

The author doesn't seem to understand this distinction. Therefore he
contradicts himself as in:

'It’s not actually old browsers that are holding back the web...“old
browsers”, just represent constraints to the problems that we have to solve. '

Yes, constraints can inspire innovation, but removing them inspires even more!

------
jabiko
> The only reason it doesn’t have all of the features as Chrome and Firefox is
> because they rebuilt the thing from scratch so that adding more features in
> the future would be easier. Let me say that again: they rebuilt the browser
> from scratch.

Is there any source for this? I doubt that IE9 was build from scratch.

~~~
mmcnickle
"With IE9, we rewrote our layout engine from scratch." -- Jason Weber, lead
program manager for IE performance [1]

"Microsoft debuted the new browser at a launch event at South by Southwest
(SXSW) in Austin, Texas. Dean Hachamovitch, the corporate vice president of
Internet Explorer, told the story of how Microsoft built IE9 from scratch."
[2]

[1]<http://www.geekwire.com/2011/geeks-guide-to-ie9/>

[2][http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/after-40-million-downloads-
mi...](http://mashable.com/2011/03/14/after-40-million-downloads-microsoft-
launches-internet-explorer-9/)

------
alanmeaney
I wrote a blog post related to this last week.

'In work why two browsers are better than one'

<http://fundsacademy.com/blog/>

------
rsanchez1
Well, at least they were balanced enough to let Nicholas post a response.

He posted something similar on his own blog (actually most of it is the same
with some editorializing), and I have to agree. All the whining about Internet
Explorer is really getting old. As Nicholas said, there has been enough
whining. Microsoft has already listened, Microsoft has already made an effort
to get people off IE 6-8 and onto IE 9, and Microsoft is pushing IE 10 hard
with Windows 8. Beyond that, do we really need more whining? If it's users of
old browsers you have a problem with, either suck it up and support them, or
just don't support them and either make them see the hard way that they need
to upgrade their browser, or see them go to a different web site and save
yourself some work and/or whining.

~~~
randomdata
I expect much of the remaining whining comes from the disparity between
stakeholders wanting to support everyone, and their developers wanting to let
the IE holdouts suffer the consequences.

------
gitarr
As long as Microsoft will not implement the same features, in a similar time
frame and in a compatible way as the other browser vendors they should be
blamed and shamed.

The article says IE9 is a damn good browser without qualifying why they think
that it is, I respectfully disagree.

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
You have no sympathy for the fact that they've done the right thing in
rebuilding the browser from the ground up to prevent future problems which has
been what's slowing them up?

From an engineering perspective this is absolutely the right thing to have
done, something technologists would have encouraged them to do at the time in
the long term interest of the product. It has short term draw backs (some
constraints on functionality in the current version) but was the best decision
for the product and, given that IE as the default browser on Windows will
always have a significant market share for the web in general, for the web in
general.

Sure, say that it's not as good as Firefox and Chrome right now but "blamed
and shamed"? It feels to me as if you're coming pretty close to beating up on
someone for doing the right thing.

~~~
andybak
They are behind the other vendors as a result of decisions they made in the
past. They make my job more difficult daily and make the web worse for
millions of people.

The decision not to provide an upgrade path beyond IE8 on XP has been a
particular road-block in getting people onto better rendering engines.

Of course I'm glad they are improving but ideally I'd rather they got out of
the browser game entirely.

~~~
josteink
Your job is being made more difficult by using non-final HTML draft-
specifications in production web-sites and relying on them to work in all
browsers before the spec is finalized.

That is your choice. You made that problem yourself.

~~~
andybak
That's just silly. Since the changes wrought by WHATWG to the standardisation
process it's become obvious we can start using a lot of this stuff in parallel
with the progress to a final published spec. Are you seriously saying that
nothing in the specs is meant to be implemented until 2013 or whenever the
final date is?

~~~
Tyrannosaurs
I wouldn't go that far but if you use stuff that's in draft you need to accept
that adoption of that standard may be patchy and / or inconsistent.

------
89a
The only time to stop blaming IE is when we start ignoring IE

------
Toshio
Stop blaming the main culprit for blocking technological progress over the
last decade? I say those who forget history are doomed to repeat it. Never
forget IE6 nazism.

~~~
BobPalmer
Godwin's law[1] in the first few comments? Really? I have to agree that this
unrelenting and irrational hatred is getting downright silly.

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

------
givan
This is a microsoft advertorial, don't bother.

~~~
rsanchez1
Really, so anything that doesn't criticize Microsoft is a Microsoft advert?
Then does that make most of the tech blogosphere one giant Apple advert?

~~~
sliverstorm
_anything that doesn't criticize Microsoft is a Microsoft advert?_

That's about the sum of it

