Microsoft Launches Modern.IE To Help Developers Test Their Web Apps For IE | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft Launches Modern.IE To Help Developers Test Their Web Apps For IE

techcrunch.com

55 pointsiProject45 comments

> Step 1 – Log-in with Facebook to activate your 3 month testing service.

Thanks. No.

What's with this trend of companies and startups requiring customers to sign up with Facebook? Especially for developer and technical resources, for which it seems there's a healthy level of dissociation from Facebook.

The sad thing is, if you implemented OpenID you can painlessly enable sign in to your site through Google, Yahoo, the StackExchange network and a myriad of independent openid providers, but no, we're going with Facebook guys.

The problem with OpenID is that nobody (read: regular people) knows how to use it. It never had the mainstream pick up of Facebook and Twitter logins.

Google/Yahoo/StackExchange/Flikr sign in with OpenID works exactly the same way that Facebook login works (to the user.) Your site presents a button, the user clicks it, and if it's the first time they get a popup asking to grant access, then they're logged in. Those four domains are pretty far reaching in terms of casual and technical users but now you can also provide a third option for even more technical users to use a custom OpenID, for virtually no additional cost in development.

What's worse is developer-level services that require Twitter to sign up, or sometimes even Github. Not all developers (see: me) have a Twitter or Github account.

Not all developers have a Facebook account. And the ones that do don't necessarily want their professional activity tied to it.

Twitter has no official policy barring the same person from having multiple accounts (though Github does, for free accounts; thanks to niggler for the correction) --- so, if you want to keep your use of the service from being tied to your other online activity, you can just create a throwaway account. Facebook does; creating "throwaways" potentially puts your use of both Facebook and the other service at risk.

More seriously, neither is known for, say, tracking logged-in user activity on other sites (the way Facebook is known to do with "like" buttons).

Github does (read the terms of service) but I can't recall when they enforced it:

"One person or legal entity may not maintain more than one free account."

https://help.github.com/articles/github-terms-of-service Section A7

The services are trying to provide you with easy access so you don't have that barrier of creating "yet another account". Depending on the service they're offering they'll pick a reasonable third-party that offers oAuth integration.

I'd say that GitHub auth for a service aimed at developers is a reasonable assumption to make.

The process of logging in with a third-party account takes about as much time as filling out a name, email address and a password into a form. Since I can even get my browser to auto-fill my name and email address and auto-generate a random password, creating "yet another account" (a couple of clicks, no typing at all) is actually less hassle for me than logging in with some other account and then going through a scary-looking authorization prompt. In fact, apart from Stack Overflow, I can't remember a single website where my identity is tied to another account of mine.

And to make things worse a lot of time after you go through the facebook/google/github login they still require you to pick a password for their service, which means the login was purely to get you to link your accounts to their services which just feels icky to me.

Sure support it as an option, but don't make it mandatory that you have a account with social media service X.

"I'd say that GitHub auth for a service aimed at developers is a reasonable assumption to make."

As long as its optional. I'm hosting my own Git repositories on servers I own, hosted in centers with fat pipes. I know devs working on sensitive stuff which shall never make it to any public / cloud / whatever. There are also developers who are not at all into the "open source" thinggy.

It's good if they conveniently allow GitHub for those who are using GitHub as long as they also offer other ways to login (say OpenID [even if it has its flaws] or good old email/password or whatever).

What is the benefit for developers anyway? They get a bit more subscribers this way? But don't they lose like almost all control over those accounts to Facebook?

It's purely to make it annoying to repeatedly sign up for three month trials. If you'd like to pay BrowserStack money for their service, they will gladly take it without requiring a Facebook account. (It's a pretty nice service, by the way)

I ran one of my problem child sites through it. Modern.IE seems more interested in ensuring my pages add a bunch of crap for IE10 and Windows 8 rather than finding painful IE8 compatibility issues. This is pretty much just a marketing site for IE10.

The scan results are grouped into IE compatibility problems, potential cross-browser issues and the last option you mention. I'm not sure the former two categories qualify as marketing.

If they really want to help developers they should patch ie7/8 so people auto update

And push IE10 to XP, which is still like 40% of PC's out there.

XP is going to end support in April 2014. I wonder how fast people are upgrading.

I think it's a little sad that the most "modern" IE Microsoft can put out is still like 2 years behind Chrome in HTML5 features. Chrome 10 had more HTML5 features 2 years ago than IE10 has today, and the Blackberry 10 browser is actually even more ahead, and that's from a company that doesn't usually make browsers:

http://html5test.com/results/desktop.html

http://html5test.com/results/mobile.html

>and the Blackberry 10 browser is actually even more ahead, and that's from a company that doesn't usually make browsers

html5test.com does not test anything, it just checks that listed features are available. Blackberry 10 uses WebKit and they just turned on more experimental features than Chrome.

> "The virtual machines testing platform is nearly finished. Once completed, you'll be able to easily test your site on Windows, Mac or Linux. Check back soon."

Very much looking forward to this!

The VMs are now available!

http://www.modern.ie/virtualization-tools

Total side notes, but I'm really enjoying this new design trend from Google and Microsoft. Clean, simple, and to the point. Helps take that "corporate" edge of Microsoft specifically.

Also I'm glad that, like Adobe, Microsoft is embracing more modern and standard practices towards web development.

Most important thing on modern.IE:

Get a free 3-month trial of Browser Stack sponsored by Microsoft. Normally you get a 15minute trial.

Just go to the Virtual Tools page.

More important on modern.IE:

> The virtual machines testing platform is nearly finished. Once completed, you'll be able to easily test your site on Windows, Mac or Linux. Check back soon.

Having an official VirtualBox (I assume?) image would be great.

There is this https://github.com/xdissent/ievms

These kind of already existed: http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=1157...

It's VHD (although relatively easy to make work with VirtualBox), but more importantly exe files. I don't know it cabextract or unrar can handle this. In either case, it needlessly unfriendly to non-Windows users.

The IE6 image is a cab and the rest are rars. I tried to make it more friendly: http://xdissent.github.com/ievms/

Then great

I won't use them (even though I remember something about cabextract being able to extract .exe files)

I won't spend a minute testing on IE except if needed.

That's not an official cross-platform image. I have used some tools that converts them to VirtualBox, but it hasn't been very reliable. As I said: Having official support for Linux and Mac will be great.

That's the plan. :)

What's the time bomb on the images?

What I'd like is MS to make Server 2003 images, rather than XP, for IE8. And 2008, rather than 7, for IE9 and IE10.

This reminds me that MS will support IE on Server 2003 until July 2015, and IE on Server 2008 (both R1 and R2) until January 2020. Yes, both R1 (based on Vista/NT 6.0) and R2 (based on Win7/NT 6.1), because R2 is considered a "minor release" while Win7 is considered a major release.

Since they're not activated it's 30 or 90 days, I think. But you can just revert any VM changes upon shutdown and thus extend lifetime indefinitely (makes working in some environments quite a hassle, though – e.g. I'd have to re-setup the proxy every time I start the VM).

nope. It is a 30 minute trial. :)

You mean normally?

Yes. You can just sign up for a 30 minute trial anytime with your email id.

I thought this looked okay, so I tried to get a report for hacker news: http://www.modern.ie/report#http%3A%2F%2Fnews.ycombinator.co... Result: "We encountered an error with this URL."

A site for modern Ireland that is not.

[edit] I just find it odd that MS puts so much stuff on Irish domains, just because of the abbreviation. Surely they don't think they could possibly own this tld.

I've always found IETester to be a great "good enough" lightweight testing tool. No VM images to download/spin up separately or worry about expiration.

Why here? It is not even humorous.

Fantabulous. It's not a tool for developers, it's a tool for clients to unreasonably bash developers over the head with and to market MS's substandard browsers.

Already had one email going "URGENT!!!! COMPATIBILITY ISSUES WITH IE!!!!" on a site that renders and works perfectly back to IE6.

IE9 and later are not seriously "substandard".

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