
Why IE9 is a Web Designer’s Nightmare - rodh257
http://sixrevisions.com/web_design/why-ie9-is-a-web-designers-nightmare/
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forgotAgain
A very forceful title that is unfortunately backed up by very little in the
article content.

The article made one valid observation: the historically extended update cycle
for Internet Explorer could be a problem when combined with the incomplete
implementations of CSS3 and HTML5.

~~~
cooldeal
Anything bad in the title or comments about Microsoft or IE results in
automatic upvotes regardless of content.

~~~
bediger
Do you have a reason for that observation? I agree with it, but I don't have a
good reason. People of pro-microsoft opinion often cite the relatively tiny
numbers of Mac, Linux, etc users all the time, especially when giving
rationale for staying on Windows, or giving a reason for why Windows attracts
the most malware.

But you can't have it both ways: if there's only a tiny minority of non-
Windows people, they won't have the juice to generally influence Microsoft-
related article's ratings. It you want to have it both ways (Windows dominates
to the exclusion of everything else AND those pesky Linux/Mac/whatever users
are everywhere, upvoting critical articles), you've got a world view with a
very basic contradiction at its core.

So: are there more Mac/Linux/Minix/LoseThos users, or do even the Windows
users generally dislike Microsoft?

~~~
jstedfast
Just because there are far more Windows users than Linux users (not that that
has ANYTHING to do with this, lots of Windows users use Firefox for example)
doesn't mean the minority group won't be able to massively upvote something
out of control. It's not like everyone votes, only a small minority vote - and
guess who are more likely to vote? People who feel strongly (for or against).
So if there are more haters than there are people who care to fight the
haters, guess who "wins" the vote?

~~~
bediger
I suppose that I'm assuming some kind of proprotionality in upvoting or
downvoting, maybe even two varieties of proportionality.

First, I'm assuming that Windows-users are represented proportionally with the
general population in the Hacker News population.

Second, I'm assuming that Windows-users and Linux-users would be equally
inclined to up- or down-vote any given story. That is, the proportion of
voters (your "small minority" that votes) is the same in Windows-users
population and Linux-users population.

Your point about Haters vs Haters-fighters is well taken.

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CJefferson
I stopped reading this as soon as I got to the "negative point" that Microsoft
thanked JQuery for supporting IE9.

Libraries such as JQuery of course have to support major versions of all
browsers. In particular in this case much of the work was disabling
workarounds required in earlier versions of IE!

~~~
barnaby
Mozilla actually run the unit tests of most major libraries as part of their
regular test suite to make sure that the Internet will by-and-large still work
on any new release. So I think the author has a valid point here, new browsers
shouldn't break existing libraries this badly.

~~~
jstedfast
Perhaps, but as the parent post had stated: the changes to JQuery were to get
rid of workarounds for past versions of IE. If Microsoft kept bug-for-bug
compatible with older versions of IE, they'd be lambasted for that. Now you're
lambasting them for actually fixing things. Rock, meet hard place.

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quotemstr
This article is trash. In one breath, the writer lambasts IE9 for supporting a
compatibility mode (while not mentioning that other browsers also have a
quirks mode) --- and then goes on to criticize the decision not to support XP,
the most insecure operating system on earth. The article is a classic example
of what results when you start with a conclusion and work back to the
evidence.

~~~
shin_lao
Windows XP is certainly not the most insecure operating system on Earth.

~~~
robin_reala
…still in mainstream use.

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bron
I am not a fan of IE (6 in particular) but all these bashing of the latest IE
9 seems to not have valid arguments. Modern browsers by whose standards?

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wbond
If you disable JS in all browsers, IE9, Firefox, Chrome and Opera render the
page the same. This leads me to believe the web designer is writing brittle
javascript somewhere. If you look at the JS, is uses conditional comments
based on the version of JS, so I would probably start looking there.

In the end I don't think we can expect to push the web development field and
browsers forward without dropping old cruft. From using IE9, it seems they've
made a big jump with this version. Unfortunately some old code may no longer
work the same, and for that there is the X-UA-Compatible meta tag.

~~~
barnaby
Let me answer this as someone who writes non-brittle Javascript code on a 1
year old web app (e.g. I have more unit tests per LOC in my Javascript than
most of the Java code that's in the underlying app. AND I run my test suite on
all major browsers regularly).

Even if you write solid code, using good architecture, and thorough testing
you will find that if it passes on FF then there's a 98% chance it also passes
on Chrome and Opera... but maybe a 60% chance that it passes on IE8 (requiring
HOURS of work to investigate and fix), and there's some abysmally low rate of
success on IE9 from having run these tests against the Beta earlier (we don't
plan to announce IE9 support for a while).

So while you are correct old cruft will have to go, brand new solid code
shouldn't have to go as well... and that's unfortunately the consequence of
IE9. :'-(

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sukuriant
There has been a notable amount of hate on IE9's lack of XP support, so I
thought I'd ask. Has anyone happened to read ~why~ IE 9 isn't supported in
Windows XP? People continue to be angry that it's not, but has anyone actually
checked why it's not supported?

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jstedfast
Don't quote me on this, but I thought it was because IE9 made heavy use of
Direct2D from DirectX10 or 11 or some such which XP doesn't have access to.

Firefox 4 uses the same Direct2D stuff but has a software fallback. It could
be argued that IE9 should also have a software fallback, but they don't.

~~~
zaatar
IE9 does indeed have software fallback. You can toggle the setting from
inetcpl.cpl -> advanced to disable hardware acceleration if you wish.

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DjDarkman
The single paragraph that's actually worth reading from this article:

> I quickly downloaded it and began the installation process. That went well.
> I then performed the obligatory Microsoft reboot — it’s 2011 and the
> software still needs a computer restart, but whatever, I’ll live — and then
> I opened up the browser.

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zaatar
If someone has a TLDR version of this article, sharing that is much
appreciated. I tried reading this twice, but I am failing to understand the
author's point(s) ... What exactly are the problems with IE9?

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rumpelstiltskin
Anyone know a good IE 9 emulator?

~~~
ck2
I run XP on my machines, so here's what I did:

I downloaded the free (and legal) Microsoft Windows 7 enterprise trial ISO:

[http://wb.dlservice.microsoft.com/dl/download/release/Win7/3...](http://wb.dlservice.microsoft.com/dl/download/release/Win7/3/b/a/3bac7d87-8ad2-4b7a-87b3-def36aee35fa/7600.16385.090713-1255_x86fre_enterprise_en-
us_EVAL_Eval_Enterprise-GRMCENEVAL_EN_DVD.iso)

I installed the free VMWare Player (actually I already had it but needed to
update to support Windows 7 more natively)

[http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMware-
player-...](http://download3.vmware.com/software/vmplayer/VMware-
player-2.5.5-328052.exe) ( or
<http://www.vmware.com/download/player/download.html> )

I used one of the free vmx generator tools to make an image ready for Windows
7 and set the ISO as the CD drive

<http://www.easyvmx.com/supersimple.shtml>

Installed in less than 30 minutes (including VMWare stuff) and then I can test
in a pure Windows 7 default environment.

The great thing about the Enterprise trial is it lasts for 60 days, then you
can "rearm" (google it) for a couple more times, but even when it's expired,
you can use it for an hour before auto-shutdown which is plenty of time to
test pages.

