Ask HN: "Please don't use Internet Explorer" message | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: "Please don't use Internet Explorer" message

2 pointsrushabh4 comments

Hi, I am building a web app that does not run on Internet Explorer and I want to put up a sign on my home page to ask users to view via Firefox/Chrome/Safari.

Can any one think of nice, funny messages that convey the message without sounding patronizing?

Here is one for starters:

"This site works best in modern browsers like Firefox, Chrome or Safari - all of which are free. It seems that you are using Internet Explorer, though fine for most purposes, it does not support many advanced features supported by most modern browsers. This application needs these new features and hence we must ask you to have an extra bit of patience and come back from another browser!"

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Be concise and call for an action first, e.g.:

Please use a modern browser to view this website. We recommend Firefox, Chrome or Safari. These browsers support some of the advanced features used to build this website.

You need to be friendly and polite, but there is no need for a lot of boilerplate language to sugarcoat it. You could caption it with something like "Internet Explorer 6 is not supported".

That being said, why do you need to exclude older clients from your app? Javascript frameworks tend to make supporting a wider range of clients relatively effortless, by providing fallbacks.

I would only exclude users based on their browsers for backend applications targeted at a small group of tech-savvy users and if building something that degrades well isn't viable within the scope of your project. The latter also depends on what kind of project it is (if its a small hacking project or a demonstration of some HTML5 functionality I totally get not being bothered with supporting IE7).

In my own work I make sure everything works and doesn't look embarrassingly ugly in older browsers, while some minor presentation details (e.g. shadows) are only visible in bleeding edge clients.

Thanks for the tips!

At the moment I am focusing on getting the features right and it gets annoying for me to test every feature in IE (I use a mac) - Maybe I should check out some cross-browser UI testing tools.

Implying that the individual's browser is not modern might sound offensive. Lots of people aren't allowed to control which browser or which version they use at work.

I would rephrase it as a feature thing to make it more objective. "You appear to be running IE6 which doesn't support X, so you'll miss out on feature Y of this site. To experience Y, please either upgrade your browser or try Chrome/Firefox or Safari" might be a bit more useful to the user.

When you say "Internet Explorer", do you really mean "IE6"?

If not, which features does your web app require that IE7/8/9 don't support?

I run both Chrome 10 and IE8 in parallel on my system, and I can't think of any web apps I've used that don't run on IE8.

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