Comment by nileshtrivedi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by nileshtrivedi | Hacker News Reader

List of all cross-browser gotchas from the Bootstrap site:

- Striped tables are styled via the :nth-child CSS selector, which is not available in IE8.

- IE and Safari don't actually support the <disabled> attribute on a <fieldset>

- Avoid using <select> elements here as they cannot be fully styled in WebKit browsers.

- If you add the disabled attribute to a <button>, Internet Explorer 9 and below will render text gray with a nasty text-shadow that we cannot fix.

- Keep in mind that Internet Explorer 8 lacks support for rounded corners.

- Badges won't self collapse in Internet Explorer 8 because it lacks support for the :empty selector.

- Progress bars use CSS3 transitions and animations to achieve some of their effects. These features are not supported in Internet Explorer 9 and below or older versions of Firefox. Opera 12 does not support animations.

- Firefox persists the disabled state across page loads. A workaround for this is to use autocomplete="off".

It would be nice to see if any progress is being made on these.

Bears repeting: IE8 is at < 8% global share, < 5% in many markets, and effectively 0% for any tech-related business. Google has dropped support almost a year ago. Mobile and Safari are way bigger concerns.

Careful now. If your user base is "normal" people it might be substantially more than that.

One site I run is a local news site (East Coast, USA) that does a fair amount of traffic (~10M pages, ~500k visitors monthly), and IE8 is still hovering around 13% for us, with IE7 at just over 2%. In fact, IE8 > IE9, by a fair margin. The good news is that IE share overall is down substantially.

Jul 2010: 74% Jul 2011: 65% Jul 2012: 58% Jul 2013: 34%

The industry I'm in has very non-technical users and businesses. Last time I checked our telemetry it was reporting that 40% of our customers were on XP and 30% used IE8.

Which front-end would you suggest for non-technical users (for compatibility)? Still bootstrap 2?

Well in my case the lowest I need to go is IE8, which both Bootstrap 2 and 3 support. If you need to go lower, BS2 has support for IE7.

Foundation 4 has some caveats when it's being used with IE8 (http://foundation.zurb.com/docs/support.html).

Personally: I'm quite unfamiliar with Foundation so I'd go with Bootstrap 2 or 3. If I had to do it for work I'd go with BS2 because it's stable. Otherwise BS3.

Thanks for the advice. GAnalytics shows 3% IE7 users on a couple of my sites, and nearly 3% for IE6 on one of them =\ I'd rather support IE7 than not, so I'll go with BS2.

Of course, it depends on your location and user base. The US has a slightly higher percentage of IE users, and countries like Korea, Japan and China still have IE as the #1 browser. Check your stats before making any decisions.

note: IE8 is only beating IE9 right now because of automatic updates moving people to IE10 (finally!).

that was my initial thought earlier this month as well and went on preparing to get rid of IE7 support for our specialised cms' backend. until i found out that some of our best-paying corporate customers are still using IE7.

our lesson learned: it's not the quantity that is important here, but rather who is still (stuck) using older browsers - "don't bite the hand that feeds you".

These are pretty minimal for most of the work I do, but what would be nice is if they had a separate section in the docs that tracked all the cross-browser gotchas in one place (let me know if that already exists and I missed it). We are fine with abandoning IE 8. 4% of our user base uses IE8, and I think by 8-12 months from now that will have dropped to below 1-2%. Any major features that don't work, we can workaround (like using respond.js to support media queries on ie, or hacks to support placeholder attribute in IE, etc).

Well, it seems like some of those are either not fixable, or not worth the hacks to make Bootstrap 100% consistent across generations of browsers.

Did you file issues on github in these defects?

He said he got this list from the site.

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