Startup Skips IE Support, Claims $100,000 Savings 273
darthcamaro writes "Guess what — you don't have to support Microsoft's IE web browser any more to build a successful website. In fact, you might just be able to save yourself a pile of cash if you avoid IE altogether." (Here's the story, from a few days back, in Canada's National Post, about the frugal financing of social startup Huddlers.) Evidently, no one complained about the lack of IE support either. I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though; not being dependent on IE sounds great, but loses some sparkle if it means requiring Chrome or Firefox.
Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages (Score:5, Interesting)
this article is also rather old
Come on: Julia Johnson May 25, 2012 – 2:53 PM ET | Last Updated: May 28, 2012 7:45 AM ET
Not that I'm skeptical or anything.... (Score:4, Interesting)
....ah sod it, I'm calling BS on this. Back in the days of IE6 & 7, maintaining cross-browser compatability was a nightmare. Now not really - IE renders as well as any other browser, and there's not a single one that doesn't have it's own quirks in some form or other.
Re:Useless (Score:5, Interesting)
I'd like to read more details about what $100,000 worth of IE-specific development would buy, though
Boring pixel perfect rendering to make the artists happy. Blah.
This. So very this. I'm involved in a web project right now where both IE support AND pixel-perfect rendering are apparently vital (it took us about a month to convince the spec designers of the concept of "your fonts are not the user's fonts" and "Illustrator is NOT a web design tool"). We're actually expected to maintain pixel-perfectness in an automated testing environment. Seriously, half our development time has been wasted trying to figure out how to test this with an art department breathing down our necks with pixel-measuring tools for a web application.
So you can see why I posted anonymously.
Yes, it's true, they saved $100k (Score:3, Interesting)
Although not $100k in IE-specific development; They saved $100k in advertising for their PR stunt, because now they get tons of free PR from all over.
All versions? (Score:4, Interesting)
I'll give them IE6 and IE7. I'd give an awful lot to not have to support IE8, even. But there really isn't any reason to not support IE9, unless you need WebGL for something. A lot can be said about Microsoft's past shenanigans in the browser space, and none of it is good, but they pretty much cleaned up their act with IE9, and that should be acknowledged and encouraged.
Though I'm still suspicious of their WebGL stance. That sounds, much like the NPAPI plugin thing in the past, more like a simple attempt at lock-in than an actual security concern.
Re:They skipped IE support on their ADMIN pages (Score:4, Interesting)
If you drop support for IE 6, then you can actually start to develop 1 page, with standards markup and be fairly successful. If you drop support for IE 7, then the incompatibility issues are fairly infrequent. Dropping support for IE 8 doesn't typically get you a whole lot, except for rounded corners, and you can drop the odd opacity/gradient code (Which isn't hard to generate). Between IE 9 and firefox/chrome the oddities are just about even. Chrome has a few bugs, Firefox has a few bugs, and IE 9 so far doesn't have any bugs I'm aware of, but it has a few features missing that the others support (Text Shadows mainly).