Hacker News Reader

Comment by FuzzyDunlop | Hacker News Reader

So, if Microsoft renamed IE10 to something entirely different, and packaged it as a standalone browser, would a site like Paydirt support it then? It seems to work fine, so why not?

This, and comments like "The site happening to work" seem to have an underlying prejudice about IE. "It was IE, so it must be fucked some way or another."

The old versions are, but try running the site on Chrome 1, or Firefox 3.6 (I believe a lot of old Ubuntu LTS releases have that). They'll be exactly the same.

This should not become a trend.

View on HN

>The old versions are, but try running the site on Chrome 1, or Firefox 3.6 (I believe a lot of old Ubuntu LTS releases have that). They'll be exactly the same.

You're forgetting quite how bad IE was. Having worked for a place that had to support many ancient browsers, getting IE8 working was three times as much work as FF3.2.

I hear the IE team have turned over a new leaf and are supporting all the standards, but I heard that about IE7 too.

Yea IE8 do not even support XHTML and DOM2, which are 10 years old now!

> This, and comments like "The site happening to work" seem to have an underlying prejudice about IE. "It was IE, so it must be fucked some way or another."

If it's my comment you're referring to, I said it "happens" to work in IE because if we are to believe the team, they didn't try to make it work in IE. It just does, by coincidence, for now.

Support is a commitment, and committing to IE will mean work down the road that these people have decided not to do, because it is not valuable to them. This attitude of "Oh, it works in IE right now so they must just be pedantic asses" is short-sighted.

It just does, by coincidence, for now

So you're saying its just a fluke that IE9+ supports the same standards as Firefox and Chrome? Amazing luck that.

Historically speaking, yes, but perhaps intentional in the present day. Who's to say, and better yet, who's going to spend scarce developer resources on proving it one way or the other? Unless you're doing corporate, that is.

who's going to spend scarce developer resources on proving it

This was the argument many had a decade ago about IE6. Lots of people designed for IE6 first and didn't spend time on alternative browsers. They were lucky that IE6 continued to be popular for so many years, but in the end it has caused a lot of problems. These days the markets move a lot quicker, so failing to support IE9 today may prove an expensive decision in a year or two.

This attitude of "Oh, it works in IE right now so they must just be pedantic asses" is short-sighted.

Ignoring IE 9 and 10 just for laughs and giggles is short-sighted, lazy and downright pathetic. Wouldn't want to be a customer/employee of such a company.

Then again, this is just a marketing ploy, albeit a very short-sighted one. Doesn't really impress either way.

If we leave versions older than 9 out of the equation, however, then how drastic and different is the support really going to be?

And when we consider versions 9 and 10 exclusively, then we know they're more standards compliant browsers. Thus they don't work by coincidence, they work because they follow the standard. And because of that, it's not for now, it's from now on.

As an addendum, any startup or business that wants to pull this trick automatically loses a potential customer. I'm not putting any of my money towards a company that will turn the customer's choice of browser against them.

- "support is a commitment"

Hey that's a nice quote! You could practically sell anything with a line like that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com