Hacker News Reader

Comment by javajosh | Hacker News Reader

>an excellent demonstration of the failure of the Web standards process

After reading the wikipedia article, it appears that IE is the only browser that doesn't support the W3C standard.

It's high time to stop supporting the monstrosity that is IE. All webapps and websites should be built for standards-compliant web browsers, and prompt the user to install one if they are on IE, and simply refuse to work otherwise.

The success of the web standards process is in users hands, and what users do is in developers' hands.

View on HN

Good luck with that.

Why is it so unlikely? The simple fact is that demand for the internet is inelastic. There is no good reason to not install Firefox. It is open-source, standards-compliant, more secure, as fast (if not faster) than IE. All it takes is for companies to say no - you have to spend 5 minutes installing a different browser (and you'll be glad you did).

Time to grow some balls.

I say again: good luck with that.

You're going to have lots of fun losing 25% of your customers (more or less depending on regional IE usage), many of them companies with oodles of cash. Heck, here IE usage is 14% while Firefox is 31% and Chrome 47%, according to StatCounter. Not as bad as the US, but still a huge piece of the pie.

Sure, it makes technical sense - IE sucks (well IE 9 and 10 are much better, but still).

It makes NEGATIVE NINE THOUSAND business sense - you've got to be crazy to refuse to support IE 8+.

Try telling that to enterprise IT.

Let's say Google said it. "If you want to use Google, then you need to stop using IE." There would be some complaining, but they'd get it done.

That's where the "balls" part comes in: you have to tell your users, that you just don't support their platform. Happens all the time, but for some reason browsers are treated specially and we all live in fear of losing the IE market share.

Someone did a calculation and decided that the business cost of supporting IE was worth the additional customers. It's not about balls, it's about cost benefit analysis. Us developers just hate IE because it's so different than all the other browsers.

also it sucks.

That's also where the anti-trust lawyers come in. And you should be grateful for them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com