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Comment by dpearson | Hacker News Reader

The problem is, IE 9 and 10 are not everywhere. I know for certain that my school (and, I'd be willing to wager, many businesses) only deploys IE 7 and 8. IE 6 still isn't dead, despite Microsoft publicly encouraging migration. Until Microsoft gets IE 9 and 10 adoption up, supporting Internet Explorer is tricky.

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The problem really is that they are lumping ALL IE users into one "incompatible bucket" irregardless of the version and features supported.

There's no need to get religious here, just support the browsers that have the features your web app needs.

You're talking about feature testing and progressive enhancement. Adopting that strategy doesn't mean that you no longer have to test every browser, it just means that you don't support a common level of functionality across browsers. Indeed, you'll still end up testing all the browsers all of the time, just with different expectations.

These guys have been burned by IE to the point where they don't want to test it period. Feature testing doesn't get them there, but blacklisting does.

> These guys have been burned by IE to the point where they don't want to test it period.

Alternate Character Interpretation: they want some hits from HN because "look at us, we don't support IE!!!".

Suffice it to say that Microsoft has a lot to answer for in this department.

Irrelevant. Is not like that site works perfectly on initial release of chrome

Hmm, how many people are on the initial release of chrome? Apples and oranges.

Well fine, then Paydirt should say "We require (and test on) IE9 or higher" and not feel bad if they have to throw IE 6/7/8 overboard. It's not any trickier than saying you support the most recent two Firefox releases and don't test on 3.6.

  > Until Microsoft gets IE 9 and 10 adoption up

I'm not sure that's something Microsoft can do. See for example the amount of XP deployments out there. Tell people that it's unsupported, no security updates, whatever. Enterprise customers and home customers who are terrified of change will not do it.

Part of me wishes MS forced updates like these. Sure it would probably break a few ancient mission critical ActiveX apps, and my god the outcry would be immense and furious, but it would be better for everyone in the long run. Better for software developers who can stop coding around the foibles of ancient versions of software, better for Microsoft who can devote resources to the newest things, and better for the internet at large not being subject to Microsoft's old shitty browsers.

It's kind of like ripping off a band aid that gets stickier as time goes by. Pull the damn thing off already and get it over with.

> Part of me wishes MS forced updates like these. > Sure it would probably break a few ancient > mission critical ActiveX apps, and > my god the outcry would be immense and furious, > but it would be better for everyone in the long run

YOU tell the famous doctors in hospitals you're going to break the medical-imaging app they use that depends on IE6. I'M not telling them that. Seriously. It's not as simple as ripping off a band-aid.

I never said it was simple. In fact, it'll be anything but. On top of that, what the hell is a life-critical app doing connected to the internet and pulling down windows updates anyways?

What I would do optimally is put down a drop dead date, say two years in the future. "On this date, any computers connected to Windows Update directly will be updated to IE10. This is not optional".

Vendors then have two years to get their poop in a group. If they still don't get it done, customers can complain to the vendors. What are they going to do, migrate to Linux?

Cool. Interesting.

How does that relate to user agent sniffing vs. feature detection? Just asking, because I don't think your point and the 'Yeah, I get that guy's attitude' opinion are based on the same idea of what is necessary and what is bullshit/a marketing gag among geeks/a practice from the times when GeoCities was big.

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