

Microsoft Launches Modern.IE To Help Developers Test Their Web Apps For IE - iProject
http://techcrunch.com/2013/01/31/microsoft-launches-modern-ie-to-help-developers-test-their-web-apps-for-legacy-and-modern-versions-of-ie/

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pdknsk
_> Step 1 – Log-in with Facebook to activate your 3 month testing service._

Thanks. No.

~~~
niggler
What's with this trend of companies and startups requiring customers to sign
up with Facebook? Especially for developer and technical resources, for which
it seems there's a healthy level of dissociation from Facebook.

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acabal
What's worse is developer-level services that require Twitter to sign up, or
sometimes even Github. Not all developers (see: me) have a Twitter or Github
account.

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danielgrieve
The services are trying to provide you with easy access so you don't have that
barrier of creating "yet another account". Depending on the service they're
offering they'll pick a reasonable third-party that offers oAuth integration.

I'd say that GitHub auth for a service aimed at developers is a reasonable
assumption to make.

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kijin
The process of logging in with a third-party account takes about as much time
as filling out a name, email address and a password into a form. Since I can
even get my browser to auto-fill my name and email address and auto-generate a
random password, creating "yet another account" (a couple of clicks, no typing
at all) is actually less hassle for me than logging in with some other account
and then going through a scary-looking authorization prompt. In fact, apart
from Stack Overflow, I can't remember a single website where my identity is
tied to another account of mine.

~~~
orillian
And to make things worse a lot of time after you go through the
facebook/google/github login they still require you to pick a password for
their service, which means the login was purely to get you to link your
accounts to their services which just feels icky to me.

Sure support it as an option, but don't make it mandatory that you have a
account with social media service X.

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NiteCoder
I ran one of my problem child sites through it. Modern.IE seems more
interested in ensuring my pages add a bunch of crap for IE10 and Windows 8
rather than finding painful IE8 compatibility issues. This is pretty much just
a marketing site for IE10.

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ygra
The scan results are grouped into IE compatibility problems, potential cross-
browser issues and the last option you mention. I'm not sure the former two
categories qualify as marketing.

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elb0w
If they really want to help developers they should patch ie7/8 so people auto
update

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nextparadigms
And push IE10 to XP, which is still like 40% of PC's out there.

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yuhong
XP is going to end support in April 2014. I wonder how fast people are
upgrading.

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nextparadigms
I think it's a little sad that the most "modern" IE Microsoft can put out is
still like 2 years behind Chrome in HTML5 features. Chrome 10 had more HTML5
features 2 years ago than IE10 has today, and the Blackberry 10 browser is
actually even more ahead, and that's from a company that doesn't usually make
browsers:

<http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html>

<http://html5test.com/results/mobile.html>

~~~
anonymfus
>and the Blackberry 10 browser is actually even more ahead, and that's from a
company that doesn't usually make browsers

html5test.com does not test anything, it just checks that listed features are
available. Blackberry 10 uses WebKit and they just turned on more experimental
features than Chrome.

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jameswyse
> "The virtual machines testing platform is nearly finished. Once completed,
> you'll be able to easily test your site on Windows, Mac or Linux. Check back
> soon."

Very much looking forward to this!

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jameswyse
The VMs are now available!

<http://www.modern.ie/virtualization-tools>

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ericcholis
Total side notes, but I'm really enjoying this new design trend from Google
and Microsoft. Clean, simple, and to the point. Helps take that "corporate"
edge of Microsoft specifically.

Also I'm glad that, like Adobe, Microsoft is embracing more modern and
standard practices towards web development.

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taybenlor
Most important thing on modern.IE:

Get a free 3-month trial of Browser Stack sponsored by Microsoft. Normally you
get a 15minute trial.

Just go to the Virtual Tools page.

~~~
judofyr
More important on modern.IE:

> The virtual machines testing platform is nearly finished. Once completed,
> you'll be able to easily test your site on Windows, Mac or Linux. Check back
> soon.

Having an official VirtualBox (I assume?) image would be great.

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estel
These kind of already existed: [http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...](http://www.microsoft.com/en-
us/download/details.aspx?id=11575)

~~~
pdknsk
It's VHD (although relatively easy to make work with VirtualBox), but more
importantly exe files. I don't know it cabextract or unrar can handle this. In
either case, it needlessly unfriendly to non-Windows users.

~~~
xdissent
The IE6 image is a cab and the rest are rars. I tried to make it more
friendly: <http://xdissent.github.com/ievms/>

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crisnoble
I thought this looked okay, so I tried to get a report for hacker news:
[http://www.modern.ie/report#http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.co...](http://www.modern.ie/report#http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.com%2F)
Result: "We encountered an error with this URL."

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lucian1900
A site for modern Ireland that is not.

[edit] I just find it odd that MS puts so much stuff on Irish domains, just
because of the abbreviation. Surely they don't think they could possibly own
this tld.

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patja
I've always found IETester to be a great "good enough" lightweight testing
tool. No VM images to download/spin up separately or worry about expiration.

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dschiptsov
Why here? It is not even humorous.

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madaxe
Fantabulous. It's not a tool for developers, it's a tool for clients to
unreasonably bash developers over the head with and to market MS's substandard
browsers.

Already had one email going "URGENT!!!! COMPATIBILITY ISSUES WITH IE!!!!" on a
site that renders and works perfectly back to IE6.

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yuhong
IE9 and later are not seriously "substandard".

