Comment by EnderMB | Hacker News Reader

Comment by EnderMB | Hacker News Reader

The biggest issue holding back Web Development isn't Internet Explorer. It's incompetent developers.

I agree entirely with this post. Sure, coding a site to work in IE6 is a pain in the ass, especially when working with JavaScript-powered elements on a site that need to work in every browser. I've always followed the Yahoo graded browser support (http://yuilibrary.com/yui/docs/tutorials/gbs/) baseline when building new sites and have even moved it over to personal projects.

I would chalk it up to experience with older browsers, but I've worked with students fresh out of university that have had to pick up projects that have IE6 as a requirement, and they've coped just fine. Many of the developers that are so up-in-arms over cross-browser support are largely new developers or aren't that good at their job. They'll only be versed in what their favourite blogs will preach, they'll use any jQuery plugin or JS polyfill they think sounds good to make their site better, they've never used the profiler within Firebug and never check the size of their web pages. I spend a lot of time on /r/web_design on Reddit and it is not uncommon to see users posting "great websites" that use Modernizr to "make their sites cross-browser" and weigh in around the 5-10MB mark for something as simple as a basic home page. A large number of front-end developers probably wouldn't last a month at your average agency or development team for a large website.

We all want IE6 and to an extent IE7 to die a horrible death, and Microsoft have clearly done their best to try and get people off a dead platform and onto a new OS. However, we're not talking about rocket science, we're talking about rejigging some code or learning the nuances of each browser your users use. Quoting the latest StatCounter figures (or whatever backs up your argument) to provide an argument for ditching old browsers will have battle-hardened developers laugh in your face, because they aren't your users!

If you're making an application then you have a case for not supporting legacy browsers, but if you're complaining that setting up your crappy WordPress-powered site is too hard in IE6 then either shut up or find alternative employment.

"The biggest issue holding back Web Development isn't Internet Explorer. It's incompetent developers."

IMO the biggest issue holding back web development is that the technology at the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications and now we have hacks upon hacks to have a stateless protocol meant for document display to act as a full application environment.

Don't get me wrong, I stand in awe at the amazing things some people are able to build on this shaky foundation and I don't discount how incredible it is that the web even exists at all with buy in from all the major corporations (Google, MS, Apple, etc) who otherwise want to rip each others throats out... But at the end of the day, ignoring all of the context of history, if the web didn't exist and I asked someone to come up with a way to develop rich, secure, network-bound apps and he went to work on it for some years and the wire protocol he came up with for it was anything like HTTP/HTML/CSS/JavaScript, I'd think he was a complete moron.

> IMO the biggest issue holding back web development is that the technology at the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications and now we have hacks upon hacks to have a stateless protocol meant for document display to act as a full application environment.

That is what the OS and desktop is for.

I used to think that, but honestly the desktop lost in 2005 with the rise of Ajax. There's probably no way back. And HTML5 is even doing markup elegant.

> There's probably no way back.

Yes there is, native applications in mobile devices.

If anything, I see the same pattern on mobile as on desktop: - Native is the only way at the beginning - Multiple platforms appear - Devs begin to see the cost of developing x times the same app - Browsers get more powerful and easier to program, native functions are made available on the browser.

Have you seen Boot to Gecko? I've seen that in real on a phone, that looked real good. Don't know how the day to day use is, but is not mature yet and will probably gain capabilities. I see lots of potential in that kind of technology.

You beat me to it!

We've done well to get as far as we have with HTML5, JavaScript and everything else in-between. However, the web is not a suitable platform to develop on. Sure, it's very handy and there are some applications that work well on the web (i.e. Gmail) but people keep going overboard with their ideas, trying to create graphics applications and "Web OS's" and other tools that really just don't work.

Absolutely spot on. It really bugs me how much all developers around the world have to suffer because they have to go to great lengths the stretch this framework to do things that it was never designed to be capable of.

I think Zed Shaw also mentioned a lot of these issues in one of his talks recently.

There was a lot of cross-browser compatibility issues developers had to deal with. Now cross-device is also added on top of that.

What GUI frameworks out there are more pleasant to write client-server GUI apps in than the modern web?

I'm amazed at how we got where we are, too. But I don't feel that it's a particularly shaky combination. A markup format, the abstraction of stylesheets, and a powerful scripting language to make the documents 'alive' - it seems like The Elements.

I really feel as though, if we set out to do better than the web, we'd either end up with applets or what we have now.

> technology at the foundation of the web is all pretty shitty for building real applications

What we need is for people to stop wasting their time on those semantically-impaired application silos and contribute more useful (progressively enhanced) content before the web of multipurpose hypertext completely disintegrates.

Just stop supporting IE6 and IE7 then tell users they need to upgrade. If enough sites did this then these browsers would go away. People could even recommend that IE8 be upgraded. Legacy support takes non-zero time. Apple drops legacy hardware support pretty quickly, for example. Being "lazy" has its advantages.

What you think about legacy browsers is irrelevant. If 5% of your clients users use legacy browsers then they'll not want to throw that market away just because their web developer is terrible at his/her job.

If a company is making $1M over two years and 5% of their customers use legacy browsers you're missing out a potential $25,000 a year, probably more than you'd charge for "legacy browser support" for the lifetime of that website. This simply isn't your decision to make, and if your tech-illiterate boss found out that you don't want to do it because it's hard then they'd be pretty annoyed.

As I said before, either learn to do your job correctly or find alternative employment.

You may not think about it but by NOT supporting those 5% or telling them they have to upgrade (which is unbelievably easy) saves much, MUCH more than 25,000. Hell, my friends dev team wasted thrice that just adding support for a heavy JS web app.

They complain about the cost and later said it'd cost a 1/10 to just get their admins off their fat hairy arse and update their computers. If not that, you could even use Chrome frame!

Read the article. It pushes Progressive Enhancement, so if you are building an app that relies on JS your only choice is to either strip back the JS or ditch older browsers. My beef is with normal websites that don't support legacy browsers.

Regardless, you don't get a choice in what your users use, and more often than not they don't have a choice in what they can use or install. Chrome Frame is a good option, but the average user isn't going to jump through hoops to view your site and if the average marketing manager looked through a site the requirement for an external tool before a user can use the site would be the first issue flagged.

As I said above, it's not hard to get a typical website working in IE6-8.

How many times are we going to have the same argument?!?!?!?

There is always a choice. IT departments can, and do, install modern browsers on people's desktops. IE6 can run along side Chrome, for example.

The guy sitting in the cubicle doesn't have much say when the upgrade happens. When the guy in the corner office starts to feel the pain, a few phone calls are made and something gets done. If you keep pushing progressive enhancement then we can support IE7 and IE8 for another decade. Of course, the amount of Javascript that you can use on your site will be limited.

As many times as it takes for you to realise that you don't have power over everyone's IT department.

Yes, installing a browser is trivial, but people are at this offices to do work. The argument is that these people shouldn't be browsing the Internet in the first place.

The only thing keeping these dead browsers alive is legacy operating systems, and Microsoft needs to find a way to get people off of XP. If Microsoft can kill XP and get people on Windows 7 then IE6-8 are gone from the equation. This is the real battle, not whether you can be a lazy developer.

Everyone already realizes that. Now when you realize that we do realize then we can make some progress.

Once it becomes uncomfortable enough for enough people, or the right people, then IT departments will respond. That's how many departments work. Push change out as far as possible.

As I have already explained, there's an opportunity cost for supporting legacy. Companies like Apple are quick to drop legacy, and move forward. It works quite well for them. Google doesn't support less than IE8 for their apps (are they being lazy?). They claim to only support the last two browsers. It'll be interesting to see what happens when IE10 ships.

One thing that I think would be useful is to tell people that your site no longer "officially support" browser X before you actually stop supporting it.

From my meagre experience, the biggest problem with IE6 and 7 (and to some extent 8) is incorrect layout.

Beyond very simple pages, it becomes almost impossible to get the same page to look even remotely the same on both IE6 and modern browsers. One solution I've seen used is to disable styles entirely on IE6 (and suggest Chrome Frame) and deal with IE7/8 quirks only.

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