With IE, a testing environment costs my company about $300 per developer.
I.e., miniscule relative to the cost of actually having a developer.
I.e., miniscule relative to the cost of actually having a developer.
It's annoying that supporting IE costs one Windows license. It's painful that it's so far from standards compliance.
http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...
Also you have to re-download the image every 3 months, and get it set up again. I can't just toss a virtualbox image on my personal Ubuntu machine and test in IE6-8. I need a Windows computer to test my personal sites (which are barely worth development time.)
"may or may not work in other hosting environments."
&
"simply shutdown the VPC image and discard the changes you’ve made from undo disks to reset the image back to its initial state. By doing either of these methods, you can technically have a base image which never expires although you will never be able to permanently save any changes on these images for longer than 90 days."
... so it seems pretty positive, really.
Which, as someone who'd like to see more Free operating systems and less proprietary ones, is a bit of a shame! :P
I.e. they cost nothing but your time...
- the website was a nightmare to use (maybe it has improved)
- it was impossible to work out what you could and couldn't do - I suggest just use it and ignore details.
- you incur a time debt three years later sorting out OS/Office installs.
If you are funded, MSDN and proper licenses might make more sense.
I've been reading a lot of these kinds of articles from the IE team lately ("Our browser is better now, why does everyone still hate us?"). And I have to admit, IE9 is a huge leap forward in terms of standards compliance and general non-wonkiness.
But until they really focus on making the development and testing processes better, I'm still going to groan about having to support it.
If you want to support IE, owning a copy of Windows is not optional.
Oh look at that, one of those platforms being Microsoft Windows you've already paid for the license you need for testing FF and Chrome.
I've dedicated the last 2.5 years of my life to auto-detecting differences between browsers and have tested thousands of sites across a variety of fields. I was kinda surprised at the number of rendering issues I've come across with Firefox and Chrome in various combinations of versions and OS. I've even seen some pretty substantial rendering differences between Win XP and Win 7 in Firefox.
Anyway, your experience could be totally different. I've just come across a lot devs that have adopted this hivemind mentality around Firefox & Chrome and as a result, they stop testing thoroughly with them. Without thorough testing you can't know if you have problems, so it's really hard to conclude anything because the key data are missing. There's a gap between perception and reality.
Also, in my mind, there is a huge difference between "this font doesn't render pixel-perfect in this os/browser combo", and "the javascript broke". One causes much more customer support cost than the other.
You still need to test them in all supported OS.
I keep having font and layout issues across all OS, especially with customers that require pixel perfect layouts.
The comments about the developer tools and the wonky VM setup still stand.
Also, they say money is fungible, but it rubs me the wrong way to be paying MS for the privilege of testing my site on their browser.
If there are differences between IE and (Chrome|Firefox|Opera), then it will require additional developer time. Just testing for those differences will require additional developer time.
I don't want to demonize IE. Supporting any browser requires testing. IE has been especially reluctant to adopt web developer trends and needs to work hard to regain developers' trust. Supporting it isn't just the cost of a testing environment.