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Comment by icantthinkofone | Hacker News Reader

No. Despite the experience of those who do a little bit of web dev, those of us who treat the web as our operating system still curse IE on a daily basis.

I hope that all those who currently talk about how wonderful IE11 is take note that Microsoft is, essentially, saying they're abandoning it for all these reasons.

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If I were to rank the browsers in the order in which they give more issues to me:

  1. Safari iOS
  2. Firefox
  3. Chrome / Chrome Android
  4. IE11 / IE11 Metro

I only curse IE9/IE10 when they don't support a moden feature, but I don't mind using display:table instead of flexbox (to name an example) as long as it gets the work done in IE9/IE10.

Although I don't bother testing IE10- to be honest, I just blindly trust the document modes of IE11, I'd rather spend time testing different mobile devices than testing different IE versions.

PS. I might be biased in the sense that I have been doing web development since like 15 years ago, and I'm already accustomed to the broken box model of IE. With Firefox I literally have to ask myself every time "what the f%@k did I do wrong???", but with IE literally is "oh you silly IE, I just have to set X and Y extra attributes and it's done".

If you are having problems in the other browsers, and not IE, then you're doing it wrong. Never, ever use IE as a reference for how things should work. THAT is the reason you are having trouble with the other browsers.

Your assumption is wrong, IE is usually the last browser I test. In my experience the rendering of Webkit and Gecko have more issues than Trident.

I don't remember every edge-case I have faced since ever, but for example, the following selector used to fail with Webkit browsers, and the response from Apple were "WONTFIX for performance reasons":

.checkbox:checked + .sibling + .second_sibling { display:block; }

Also, in my experience, the sites that look broken in IE11 (ex. Facebook) is because the website author (or the compatibility lists from MS) set an old/faulty document mode via X-UA-Compatible.

I'm not trying to claim that IE is a better browser than Firefox/Chrome, because this is subjective (and personally I prefer Opera), but I'm trying to say that you must not develop a website in Firefox/Chrome assuming they never have faults.

IE is not as broken as people claim, and there are edge cases where IE is right and the other browsers wrong.

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