Bootstrap 3.3.0 and Bootstrap 4
blog.getbootstrap.com
blog.getbootstrap.com
https://github.com/twbs/bootlint
I could see myself integrating something like this into a text editor or a build process -- something that watches for bootstrap usage errors and helps my team correct them early and quickly. That is, of course, assuming that we stick pretty closely to vanilla bootstrap, which we usually don't.
One of my biggest issues with Bootstrap (and similar frameworks) is that, beyond a certain point, you find yourself overriding and customizing them to such a degree that it's more productive to just build your own "vanilla" components that are specific to the way your site or organization uses them, and then just ditch Bootstrap altogether.
One thing I'd like to see is a way of generally linting HTML structure (not validity, but actual structure) with a goal of reducing complexity and improving maintainability, regardless of what frameworks you may be using. Something that spits out a ratio of meaningful, semantic markup to "div soup" and tells you where you should spend the most time mopping up the soup. It could also have some understanding of which kinds of div patterns are acceptable -- bootstrap components, your own component library (see: OOCSS), etc.
This has been similar to my experience. Bootstrap can be overwhelming at times, and there have been a few cases where I had to solve buggy behavior by specific Bootstrap components by writing elaborate fixes that would not have been required had I used my own framework. From that standpoint, working on a time-consuming, yet practically throwaway-type site, Bootstrap was really frustrating.
I do really like the low-baggage approach of Initializr's Responsive configuration as well as the Responsive Grid System.
Things like the nav bar are really clever, but way too much for most of my projects. I like the button styles, but usually modify them... stuff like that.
I don't think the name carries the explicit rejection of ongoing use that you believe it does. That you can use it to get started quickly does not mean you can't use it indefinitely; it's often necessary to tweak or hack Bootstrap to fit your specific visual requirements, but for a project that can actually use it without serious modification, I don't see a reason to throw out the convenience and consistency it provides arbitrarily, simply as a matter of course.
I think Bootstrap was meant as components ready to be used out-of-the-box as they are, but not necessarily easy to extend and customize.
I think what we need is a framework that makes components easy to create and extend, and then build a widget library on top of it that provides the most commonly needed components/UI patterns.
If the components where easy to understand and extend, then we can just look inside them, copy paste and make our own by modifying just the part that we need.
The problem is that they are not, in the case of Bootstrap these seem to be quite extended set of jQuery based components that you can spend a lot of time debugging to understand how they work, and modify them to do what we need.
Dropped support for IE8
That seems pretty premature.
Edit: Looks like Google doesn't even support IE9 anymore. https://support.google.com/a/answer/33864?hl=en
Second, IE8 is still very popular browser with 20% market share. You don't want to lock out 1 in every 5 of your users.
Third, a major point of using frameworks is not having to worry about browsers. This is why making frameworks are hard.
Fourth, people who are stuck with IE8 or below are typically not by their choice.
I wonder what that's doing to the maintainability of your code base. I'm sure the overall cost is higher than just the pay of a single developer ruining your architecture. Supporting IE6 is more than just about fixing bugs.
Unfortunately my home nation (though very small) is also on something like 20% WinXP (thus limited to IE8). It's ridiculous, but as long as clients are willing to pay us to support IE8, then that's what we'll do, much as we hate it. In my country it hopefully won't be long before it becomes prohobitively expensive to support IE8, so there's that... :)
Chrome and Firefox are still supported on XP. Surely they could switch browsers if forced?
http://chrome.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/extending-chrome-suppor... http://www.neowin.net/news/mozilla-to-support-firefox-on-win...
In the UK, analogue terrestrial television was eventually turned off, and replaced by digital, following a lengthy publicity campaign.
I would guess there are very few people staring at blank TV screens and wondering what to do now. My point is, you need to give people a push sometimes.
Best I can tell IE8 is somewhere around 6% in the US (these numbers are rough to find because most of the places that collect statistically significant numbers charge for the info). On my site (which centers around a first-world disposable-income-heavy hobby) IE8 is basically non-existent. Your mileage may vary.
Anyone not ensuring their site works on IE is leaving money and customers on the table. Note that it doesn't have to look exactly the same, but it should still work and allow customers to learn, buy, sign in, subscribe, etc.
We're talking about dropping support for a browser that is mostly used on a thirteen year old operating system that even Microsoft has dropped support for.
My site is unlikely to ever have a significant number of IE8 users. It revolves around a nerdy hobby that people easily spend $500/year on, often in big chunks. They aren't letting their tech get that out of date.
I fully admit that this isn't every market, but you absolutely CAN make decisions about your specific market and decide that IE8 just simply is not and never will be worth it.
On the other hand, there are certain markets that will probably have to worry about IE8 for ten more years.
Anti-virus companies use an IE8 user agent string sometimes for finding dangerous sites. Other bots and crawlers still use the IE8 string, although it seems like many are switching to Chrome.
I've never been able to find a resource about this, but is there any data available for the breakdown of bots/crawlers and their effect on browser usage statistics?
One reason I ask is that using the web with IE8 is pretty miserable and a lot of sites are flat out broken. I know there is an aspect of corporate networks on it, but 20% just seems really high if you realize that 20% or more of the web is broken for IE8 users.
Business owners looking to make profit anyway they can DO NOT.
We do A/B testing for very small % gains yet we are ok with delivering a site that wont work in IE8? It is a hard business case to make with clients.
I'm glad the framework is moving forward, we all like playing with new toys, but I hope there is an IE css file that will "fix it enough" to make it work for IE8
http://gs.statcounter.com/#browser_version_partially_combine...
Shows 7% for North America IE8
We are in an awkward spot of soon having to say, "Sorry ie8 wasn't a suitable upgrade".
Let's be clear – if you develop a service on the web, and a significant proportion of the users or target market uses IE8—enough that there's a positive ROI—then you are making a poor business decision by refusing to support it.
IE updates come in too slow, longer than once a year - it's been a year since IE 11, and IE 12 is not even on the near horizon. Chrome and Firefox have had how many updates since then? Even Safari has updated in that time. Windows 10 is slated for release after April 2015, that's a year and a half since their browser has been updated!
IE selectively implements standards for business reasons and IE has a history of versions sticking around for long periods of time.
IE's developer tools, even in IE 11 are horrible. They're not even a shade of what webkit, blink and mozilla based browsers offer.
Finally, and the most damning of reasons: you need to have a Windows machine or a slow and painful (and expensive) virtualization service to test IE if you don't use Windows to develop. We all use macs, if someone isn't using a mac they're more than likely using some linux distro. I haven't worked with a developer that used Windows as their main development machines in 5 years, and in that case they were actually developing a windows application.
IE doesn't deserve our attention, users can install a different browser or deal with it, but I haven't heard a user complain about it, at all. Once in a long while someone might ask, sheepishly, and not make a big fuss about it when we tell them that we don't really support IE.
I maintain such a web application myself. I work primarily on OS/X as my main development machine, and run various windows versions in virtual box in order to test these older browsers. Since the feature is usually completed using modern browsers up-front, there almost always a QA glitch that has to get worked out on IE8, chewing up another 20-30% of the total time of the project. Time that costs everyone in the business time, energy and pain. Think about that; 30% of the cost of development to support < 3% of the users.
When the large web companies like Google and Facebook remove support for these legacy browsers, every web developer on Earth cheers. Every instance of IE8 that is snuffed from existence is more time we can spend on creating great software features, and not wasting time back-porting.
We're enterprise and upgrading to 3.3 as we speak. We see a 4-8% of users coming in from older IE, mainly XP. We have customers in USA only.
Our public website: 3% IE7, 5.2% IE8
App: 1% IE7, 3.3% IE8
It's pretty bad. We once got a ticket to make sure our app works with "ALL BROWSERS" because it was broken in IE6. That ticket was 6 months ago. The users are out there.
But it makes little sense to develop new tools that support IE8 at this point. By the time Bootstrap 4 is released (probably many months from now), IE8 usage will be even lower.
Further, since it's solely responsible for so many edge cases, polyfills, and hacks, it doesn't hurt to gently push for its demise. Even Microsoft is trying.
Well why in the name of all good design did Microsoft not put out a version of IE9 for Windows XP while it was still supported? That would made everything so much simpler, including for them -- after all, they have to worry about IE8 just like the rest of us, XP or no.
Stop using XP.
Seriously.
But there are millions of people in developing countries who can't afford to upgrade, or don't know how. Have you considered that? This is not a first-world problem.
Why not accommodate those users? MS doesn't have to support the OS itself, but think of how much trouble it could save developers around the world -- inside of Microsoft and out -- if all these XP machines were automatically upgraded to IE9.
http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/08/suppor...
IE8 implies XP. XP is now actively nagging users about how dead it is every time they boot. The holidays are coming up. It is not unreasonable to expect some people to replace their prehistoric computers around the end of the year.
1. Functional without Javascript
2. Functional in IE7+
And also http://youtu.be/CUkMCQR4TpY?t=19m21s
The essential point made is that for much of gov.uk, it isn't that difficult to make the site work without Javascript or work in IE7 either.
Purley personal opinion, but web design has become incredibly bloated with so much cruft added to web pages - be it unnecesary Javascript or excess CSS. Web developers pick the tools that make their lives easier (as you'd expect), but that doesn't always mean that users get the best experience.
- Foundation ceases to be an option since they drop IE8 support in Foundation 3, far too soon IMHO - Various jQuery UI-based frameworks out there (e.g. Kendo UI) has good Bootstrap theme support
Bootstrap is pleasant to work with and extend. Each of the javascript components are simple, isolated, and well thought out.
But don't take my word for it!
The "affix" plugin in bootstrap: https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap/blob/master/js/affix.js
The equivalent in foundation: https://github.com/zurb/foundation/blob/master/js/foundation...
How can a JS framework expect to be taken seriously if it doesn't even provide a half-assed abstraction over a half-assed excuse for a language?
Less ... well, there's less to keep up with since there's one implementation of it that I'm aware of.
I used to prefer Sass, but mostly because it was the only thing going at the time, but I'm starting to lean toward Less.
Even lacking missing those features, the 12x compilation speed improvement in libsass is pretty compelling.
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass
It's already got a 3.3.0 available, it is kept sync'd.
I have very occasionally run into a bug or problem with the sass port not being kept properly parallel to the original less, but mostly it just works fine.
https://github.com/twbs/bootstrap-sass/pull/757
Releasing the LESS and Sass versions at the same time is a bit premature. Looks like the Sass version wasn't tested as much.
But, hey, look, they already released 3.3.0.1 of the sass version fixing the problem, 3 hours after the ticket was filed, that's pretty responsive, sometimes that's the most you can ask for.
(Part of the issue is it's not JUST a Sass version, people expect a Sass version that works with Compass with or without Rails, and that works with Rails without Compass, and that works with Sprockets without Rails, and that works standalone with nothing but Sass just compiling css like the Less version, and each context has it's own picadillos).
> Updated grid system with at least one additional tier for handheld devices.
Bootstrap already has a Mobile and Tablet layout, so which form factor would this addition address? Phablets?