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Comment by Someone1234 | Hacker News Reader

If you need to support IE 10, 11, or Edge then Grid is broken. Microsoft's browsers follow an older spec than Chrome/Safari/Firefox. Microsoft are going to fix Grid in Edge 17, but no release date yet.

Unfortunately this is my life right now. When Chrome and Firefox dropped support for NPAPI a lot of enterprise customers intentionally moved their users back to IE 11. The loss of NPAPI has ironically increased IE 11's market-share, talk about unintended consequences...

I understand why they didn't but part of me wishes Microsoft had enabled NPAPI in Edge just so we'd at least get modern web standards even if NPAPI is bad and insecure. Instead IE 11's life is now another five years at minimal or until the last Java Applet, ActiveX control, or Flash page disappears.

https://caniuse.com/#feat=css-grid

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I've used grid with IE11. You need to add some extra prefixing noise to your css. The way you identify grid elements is different and it sucks to duplicate the layout information.

But it most definitely works.

It doesn't with IE10 though. And there's no way to fall back to flex or another column system.

Which means, if you need to support IE10, you need a whole parallel set of styles. There's no graceful degradation when it comes to overall site layout, unless you're willing to serve the single-column mobile version to older browsers.

what's wrong with giving older browsers a different experience?

One scenario I can think of is a non-IE user telling an IE user to go to a particular website and click the button that's at the top of the right sidebar. For the IE user, it might be a stacked layout where the sidebar actually appears under the main content. I would call this a nuisance more so than a major issue, but nevertheless it is something to consider.

you'd have the same issue between a desktop and mobile user. i don't see it as an issue at all.

I think the average computer user knows that websites often look different on computers vs. phones, so they might be confused when a website looks different than normal on a computer. Like I said, I would only call this a nuisance. Certainly not a big deal.

I think it depends of if you need trafic from those browser or not. Because if you do, you'll have to maintain several version, or increase your time on working on it to do gracefull degradation (which is of course a good way to do, but more expensive)

but that's kind of the beauty of css grid, the gracefull fallback is basically mobile view which you already put effort into.

The only two Windows version you can run into Microsoft supported versions of IE 10 any more are on Windows Server 2012 and Windows Embedded 8: https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/gp/microsoft-internet-ex...

Who in the world has that as a significant user base?

I thought that the current version of Edge (16) supports CSS grid fully. Your link even confirms that.

Yes I have EdgeHTML16 and my grid-based sites look good.

He talks about that in the video: https://youtu.be/7kVeCqQCxlk?t=1324

I love not having to care about whether websites I make work on broken or incapable browsers! :-)

So you like being lazy ... a technical challenge comes your way and you hope others fix it for you.

This is the hipster frontend engineer attitude. Not to be mistakened for real frontend engineers who create robust sites for paying customers. Enjoy your world and ill enjoy the enterprise dollars. I like coding. I dont complain about the challenge.

You seem to be making a lot of assumptions.

For all you know, they build websites or applications that don't have any need to run on older browsers, or at the very least, there are diminishing returns.

There's always an opportunity cost. While you're building support for older browsers, they could be adding valuable functionality to their software.

Which is more valuable depends on the situation.

> Not to be mistakened for real frontend engineers who create robust sites for paying customers.

Customers with old browsers? Eww! You keep them; I'm better off without customers. :-)

How do you feel about his advice to people in your position? He suggested that you start with a design for mobile that works on a wider screen. Then use grid to achieve responsive designs. He also suggests that responsive design comprehends browser and browser version (ie don’t always look the same across all browsers). Interested I your thoughts.

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