Microsoft ask for Internet Explorer to be removed from Spoon Browser Sandbox | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft ask for Internet Explorer to be removed from Spoon Browser Sandbox

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58 pointsnecolas44 comments

IE usage recently dropped below Chrome usage on Mibbit (Including our widget which is deployed on various non-techy websites).

  Firefox 55.1%
  Chrome 20.7%
  IE 15.2%
  Other 4.4%
  Opera 3.0%
  Safari 1.6%

The time when you have to support IE, for many, is coming to an end.

On a related note, I got a phone call from Microsoft adCenter the other day, asking why I hadn't spent any money with them for a year (Different website I run which needs big ad spend).

I said "Last time I tried the interface in Chrome, it didn't work".

She replied "Ah. Chrome is Google and so it's not compatible".

MS never cease to amaze me.

> for many

Yes, for many sites with a technical audience. But for sites with an older, less technically sophisticated userbase, IE still has the vast majority over other browsers.

I hear what you're saying about the widget. But is that downloads? In which case: selection bias. What do the stats look like as far as impressions go on the non-techy sites?

Those stats combine main client (chat.mibbit.com) with our widget, split roughly 50/50. The widget is used on various websites, gaming, stock trading, dating, etc etc

Sure, it's still probably going to be slightly more tech, but I'm guessing there's quite a few other webapps who have similar demographic.

It also depends on how 'global' you are. IE usage varies wildly by country.

Here are stats for the University I work at. It's still not a representative sample but does show a different picture.

(Current Period):

  IE      35.01%
  Firefox 33.32%
  Safari  15.68%
  Chrome  14.56%

(Current Period - 1 Year):

  IE      40.61%
  Firefox 38.79%
  Safari  12.92%
  Chrome  4.93%

Pretty high Safari usage there. I'm guessing macs are extremely common at the University?

Probably more so than in the "real world".

FWIW, our usage stats on OSX break down to about 2/3 using Safari and 1/3 using Firefox.

You're not trying to say that academia is an imaginary world, are you?

No, but I think it's safe to say that it's off the mean in many areas.

What country? I suspect figures in Europe are very different from those in the US. European versions of Windows are now required to offer a selection of browsers at install time.

For a car site I run I get the following IE usage over the last couple of years (monthly visits in the 5K range):

apr 2007 71.8% oct 2007 74.5% apr 2008 72.0% oct 2008 67.1% apr 2009 67.6% oct 2009 65.6% apr 2010 58.5% oct 2010 61.2%

That's still a considerable majority of IE users.

Justin.tv is trending the same way, but more slowly - Chrome hasn't caught up with IE yet. Seems like it's just a matter of time now though:

  Firefox 36.16%
  IE 35.78%
  Chrome 19.35%
  Safari 6.08%
  Opera 1.85%
  Other <1%

Oh, so Google is to blame? No Microsoft, your adCenter is not compatible with your customer's browser.

Their attitude was especially surprising, since I'm actually trying to spend money with them.

"Surprising" is not how I would describe it. In fact, given their own Microsoft-centric view of the tech universe, it's nothing but expected. "Boneheaded", perhaps, would be more appropriate.

Or perhaps you are attributing company culture to an under educated call center worker?

Have you seen how poorly non-Microsoft browsers are supported by Microsoft's web tools?

Exchange is a pain. Hotmail, on its last (last I saw - no longer use it) big change took months (many) for the Firefox version to arrive at a comparable feature set as the IE version. If you are not running Windows, you will face an even worse browser compatibility. For a long time, any ASP.NET application built with the GUI tools on Visual Studio was pretty much guaranteed not to work properly on anything but IE.

No. I don't think the reaction of the call center worker is surprising in any measure. He could know non-Microsoft browsers were not supported and inferred the thing being from Google meant it would not be compatible.

BTW, would it be compatible with Firefox on Linux?

This is so incredibly shortsighted it hurts. Why on earth would you take away resources that help people work around your product's suckiness? Maybe they should just prohibit optimizing for their browser in general, then maybe people will finally stop using it alltogether once enough pages look totally destroyed because nobody can check against it...

Looks like someone accidentally let MSFT Legal out of the kennel again. That said Spoon looks pretty damn ropey from a legal perspective, there's very, very little information but I wonder if the developers of things like World of Goo know that they're software is being effectively given away or at least rented for free.

Snaky comments aside, I would guess that this has something to do with Windows/Internet-Explorer licenses. Its totally not cool, but let us give them the benefit of doubt until it turns out that they have malicious intentions.

[As an aside I wonder how many people actually use Spoon for doing cross-browser testing of their websites. IIRC Spoon Browsers cannot access websites in the local Intranet.]

I've used Spoon to test sites running on local web servers.

Their intentions don't have to be malicious. Even if Hanlon's Razor applies, the mere stupidity of this move is enough to decry it.

We can only hope that they are working on providing their own cloud-based service now that developers are going to have to find ways to easily and reliably test in IE6, IE7, IE8, and IE9.

Well, if it helps, you can change the mode in IE9 beta to have it run/render as if it were 6,7,8.

Actually, I don't recall 6 being included...

How faithful is that rendering? The IE7 emulation in IE8 is not an identical reproduction of how IE7 itself renders pages.

So we should probably be testing IE6, IE7, IE7 emulated under IE8, IE8, all of the other ones emulated in IE9 and IE9.

Ouch!

If I remember correctly you can force IE8 to render "on edge", basically avoiding the compatibility mode. I'm guessing you can do the same thing for IE9, dropping all these tests to just one for each browser.

I can't find the article now, but I remember reading that the IE7 mode in IE8 had a ton of little gotchas. They were pretty much all the type of things that weren't a big deal on their own, but cumulatively it mad testing for IE7 on IE8 totally worthless. I think the tests would be unreliable, plus the amount of minutia you would have to mentally track about what is emulated properly and what is not was huge. My feeling after reading this article was that the simplest route, unfortunately is to have virtual Machines with the different browsers on them.

Basically to provide 100% pixel perfect on IE(6,7,8,9) suupport:

IE versions can't be installed side-by-side (and the un/install process on Windows is very inefficient). So you have to have to have at least 4 VMs/boot partitions (at least 1 of which must be running XP), each loaded with a different version of IE. Each with a different version of debug tools.

And unless you force (strict mode) on IE8(& 9?), test IE8 in IE7 mode, IE8 Compatibility mode, and IE8 Strict mode....

Fortunately my employer dropped IE6 support 2 years ago. Plus, I find that usually just testing for IE7 in IE8's IE7 mode, and forcing IE8 to render pages in IE8 strict mode, is generally sufficient 95% of the time.

Till Spoon supports running on platforms other than Windows, this is somewhat a moot issue for many of us.

Seeing as people are talking about browser market share I thought I'd pull up the analytics for exim.org to see what it's like there:

Firefox: 54%

Chrome: 18%

IE: 13%

Opera: 6%

Safari: 5%

Of course, exim.org is a technical website so the figures are bound to be different to the average website.

My interpretation of this is that Microsoft realizes that developers are leaving their platform pretty rapidly. As more developers switch to OS X or Linux as their main development platform, the whole Windows ecosystem will suffer, not just web browser support for Microsoft's awful browsers.

Forcing developers to use Windows while IE still has enough clout might be one of their strategies to stem the loss of developers migrating to other systems.

Or perhaps I'm reading too much into it.

Think you probably are - last time I used spoon you still had to be using Windows; it just meant you could run IE6, 7 and 8 at the same time.

Oh, good point :-)

I thought the way spoon worked was similar to those services that give you snapshots of your site in different browsers.

Does anyone know of any alternatives for IE?

IE Collection is meant to be a good alternative - http://bit.ly/d992Bn

Here's where that url actually goes: http://finalbuilds.edskes.net/iecollection.htm

I've always been fond of IETester. http://www.my-debugbar.com/wiki/IETester/HomePage

I think there is a caveat with IETester: It seems to use the currently installed IE's javascript engine not matter what rendering engine it uses, so testing mileage may vary.

why on earth?

They must think this will allow them to sell 20 more Windows licenses a year...

Yeah, people are going to get more Windows licenses, but they won't necessarily be buying them. If that's their aim it may backfire.

Maybe they are embarrassed about how shoddy they will look in a direct comparison with standard browsers.

Most likely they don't care, they are enforcing the licenses and that's it. There's probably a division in Microsoft that has to do these things and that's what they get paid for.

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