Hacker News Reader

Comment by maaaats | Hacker News Reader

I can't read the page, because I don't have a "modern browser". What kind of 20th century crap is that?

Out of curiosity I fired up IE to see what they were blocking. I'm not sure I can think of a good reason to block IE 10 (7 and 8 I can understand, 9 is barely tolerable), I've never run into a major problem with that version compared to Firefox or Chrome.

some people believe that showing support for anything below the latest release of IE is detrimental to the entire industry.

Perhaps, however in this case it just seems to be blanket block on IE. I'm using the most recent release of IE on Windows Phone (AFAIK) and it's still blocking me. Furthermore, I can understand warning people, but blocking them completely seems a step too far.

Yep, they block IE 11 on Windows 8.1.

In 99% of cases there's no reason to blanket block any particular browser. If you have features that cannot be implemented (e.g. vector graphics, WebGL), I'd say that directly to the user, i.e. "Sorry, this website requires a WebGL-enabled browser such as X, Y, or Z." This should be based on JavaScript feature detection targeting the specific feature you're looking for, and not the web browser version number. If it's just text and CSS there's no reason why you can't at least display something. It may not look correct in IE <=8 but at least the user will see something intelligible in most cases.

Eh, this is a little bit of a tangent because there's no reason to block users ever I feel (and in this particular case blocking IE 10+ is stupid), but honestly? It's rarely worth the time to go through and make sure your site works on older browsers. Or that it degrades gracefully.

Yeah, if my site uses canvas, I should probably have a fallback for IE8. But in practice, and I know I'm not alone here: Unless I see that IE8 makes up a significant part of my site's traffic, fuck it.

There are already enough vendor issues between the latest versions of the big 4 (Chrome/FF/Safari/IE), spending more time going through old versions of those 4 will drive you bonkers.

It's rarely worth it and spending any amount of time catering to those users is almost assuredly not a good use of your time.

don't feel left out. I'm blocked as using a VPN or tor, which i'm not.

If you have a dynamic IP, it could be that the previous user of that IP was running an TOR exit/VPN.

If you have a static IP, I strongly recommend researching whether the router you are using has any known security problems. Lately unsecured routers have been abused as a (poor) black hat's proxy a lot.

Source: I run a filesharing service and lately we have seen a lot of abuse from IPs who after an nmap reveal themselves as routers with known security problems like publicly known (default) service control panel passwords.

From the source:

    <!--[if lte IE 9]>
      <div class="chromeframe">
        <div class="inner">
          <img src="images/logo-text.png"></img>
          <h2>Uh oh, it looks like you're using Internet Explorer.<br>For the best experience on Buttercoin we recommend using a<br>modern browser, like Google Chrome, which you can <a href="https://www.google.com/chrome/browser/">download here</a>.</h2>
        </div>
      </div>
    <![endif]-->

I'm getting:

  You are using an outdated browser.
  Upgrade your browser today to experience Buttercoin.

On Dolphin Mobile 11.4.3.

it's the web nobody asked for!

It's a site run by bitcoiners. I'm not sure what you expected.

Actually, now that I thought about it a bit, it's a perfect metaphor for the current bitcoin environment.

Yeah, I know what you mean. I've got this AM radio and I cant get DAB.....

Reply on news.ycombinator.com