Bootstrapped startup saves over $100K by dropping IE

This is one of those times I wish HN wasn't so strict about the title of the submission matching the title of the article--this title is extremely misleading. (As a guest post, I'm guessing the author didn't get to write the title, so I'm not blaming him). 4ormat didn't "drop" IE, they never supported it. As a result, their calculation of how much they "saved" appears to be based on some back-of-the-envelope calculation of how much more expensive it would have been to develop for IE over a period of years.<p>tl;dr: if you build a tool which solves a significant and recurring pain point for creative professionals, you can get away with not supporting IE.<p>The article does not provide much insight into building a consumer-facing application--this is the equivalent of a company using an intranet app which is IE6-specific.

Choosing not to develop for IE makes perfect sense if you're building an app. Here's my own little anecdote:<p>In the last 4 months or so I've written around 10k loc for a JS app. and probably 3x that many lines of combines CSS and HTML. Number of hours troubleshooting differences between Firefox and Chrome? I'd say about 8. So one developer day's worth of work to sort out some minor issues with vendor prefixed css. I've gotten to the point now that I routinely go days without testing in FF, and when I do fire it up.... everything just works.<p>My estimate that supporting ie6+ would have put my progress back by about 2 months. On top of that is the ongoing technical debt of continuing to support IE.<p>I don't want to say goodbye to potential IE customers and that's where Chromeframe comes into play. Chrome frame is AMAZING. Takes about 60s to install. Allows you to create your own install procedure i.e Your_Site -&#62; Install_Chromeframe -&#62; Your_Site. Doesn't require a browser restart and no admin rights needed. Wow.<p>Of course if you're just building a regular website then sure suck up the few hours it takes to make it work in IE and bill 2x for the trouble.

What is this? There was no real argument, no mentioned technologies, that were the ice-breaker.<p>Sure, in IE6, even the PNGs weren't working properly, but, talking layout, IE7+ is mostly a question of 5-10 additional rules (on small scale websites) and IE8 actually works without any (mostly), save for a css3 features like border-radius, etc.<p>As for the design, having less visual effects and no rounded corners doesn't have to be a problem – most of the designs work without it rather well (not to mention 4ormat's design doesn't use plasticity, gradients and shadows that much)<p>This article would gain much more credibility if it mentioned at least one or two technological obstacles that take you more than 30 minutes to sort out.

I signed up to say this:<p>This is the lowest quality article I have ever read for a product which virtually no-one knows (except the minute techcrunch ecosystem and out of pocket VCs) trying to trash a product which is actually used at least 5 orders of magnitude more often by 5 orders of magnitude more people.<p>Trashing IE was fun once, but the world has grown up in the last couple of years.<p>Also, that's a theoretical 100k saved now until the Windows tablet market and Windows v.next peak grows (which it will as it always does) at which point it'll cost 200k to sort it out. I worked at a Microsoft monoculture org for a number of years and that's what happened when other browsers had to be supported (Firefox, Chrome, Safari). Save now, pay later.<p>Welcome to the 2012 version of an IE6 only web site...

Leaving aside the misleading title, i am not sure how the $100k number was arrived at. Developer hours? cutting off one dedicated developer who fixed IE issues?<p>If you are catering to creative professionals, who are going to be using huge apple monitors and macs (66% of the site's users are on a mac), ignoring IE isn't going to be a big deal. Even many of those ~4.5% of IE visitors might be on IE9 /10 which are pretty decent browsers. I am not here to support IE, i hate it like every other developer who builds stuff for the web. Also, compete.com tells their approximate UVs for February was around 13k. Ignoring a small number of users here is not going to have a huge impact. If your are site/app with millions of users, then it will be a big deal.<p>PS: If you are building a hipster social network or a video post processing tool, ignoring IE is going to save you significant time but if you are catering to e-commerce/finance or any other common demographic even thinking about ignoring IE isn't wise at this point.

These "developers" would have saved company X a fair bit of money by actually researching IE. Microsoft has graciously provided a massive amount of documentation covering most Internet Explorer variants and their quirks (via MSDN)[0].<p>One of the main problems in web development today is the creation of browser-specific code; "IE6" in particular is a scapegoat for poor code. I found that once I studied MSDN and wrote no browser-specific code that IE 8 became elementary to support. IE 7 soon followed. IE 6 &#38; 5.5 were close behind.<p>For CSS, the key is understanding that every page does not need to look the same. Furthermore, reading MSDN's CSS compatibility grid[1] provides more insight.<p>For JavaScript, the key is simplification. Using DOM 0 events over fancy DOM 3 events yields big gains. Avoiding selector engines will also yield gains.<p>I'm getting very tired of incompetent web developers and their browser elitism. Do your homework.<p>[0]: <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533050(v=vs.85).aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms533050(v=vs.85).as...</a><p>[1]: <a href="http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(v=vs.85).aspx" rel="nofollow">http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc351024(v=vs.85).as...</a>

I think the argument of what browser(s) you do/don't support really depend upon your site's focus.<p>I'm pretty sure if Gruber/daringfireball.net dropped all IE support, his traffic decline would be close to 0.<p>On the other hand, if codeguru.com did the same, their traffic would probably drop off close to 75+%.<p>If your budget is tight or skills limited, focus on your target market first and make that experience the best you can. Though, that pretty much applies for browser support as well as many other things.

&#62; Recruitment secret weapon. It warms our hearts to see the look of incredulous joy on the face of a job candidate when we assure them “You heard right, we really don’t support IE.”<p>I can imagine that look <i>so</i> well...

There seems to be a common sentiment that experienced devs can tame IE, thus it's not really an issue.<p>Speaking as someone who can tame IE, I can categorically state that I don't want to. I'd much rather have that time back so I could do something much more fun.

<i>"not a single person has ever contacted us requesting support for Internet Explorer."</i><p>While that may be considered evidence of potential customers switching browsers just to use 4ormat.com, it may also be considered evidence that potential customers using IE are very much put off by being told to use another browser.<p>Just running the numbers on a back of envelop:<p>The company was founded in 2008.<p>Not supporting IE has saved $25,000 per year.<p>12 months x $7 per month = $84 per user.<p>330 lost users = $25,000 +/- per year<p>10,000 responses to the call for action * 4% using I.E. = 400 visitors who are much more unlikely to use 4ormat.com because the call to action doesn't work. Their negative experience is much more likely to lead to negative network effects than positive ones.<p>Even worse the lost revenue scales as the customer base grows, but the work to support IE is roughly fixed and is relatively modest.<p>$25,000 is 4% of $625,000 a year. Above that, the company is losing money (on the back of an envelop). With four founders, one would expect that 4ormat.com's revenue is projected to exceed that or has already.

I dislike developing for IE as much as the next guy, but does selectively supporting browsers, even when reasonable IE versions exist, bring us back to the "best viewed in Internet Explorer" days? Is this a step back for web standards?

Honestly, I drop support for IE &#60;=8 for most of my sites. IE9 is pretty good and aside from a few glitches and IE specific stuff (usually 1 small hack around per problem). IE doesn't pose as much of a problem as, say, Android browser or Mobile Safari which will do things like ignore overflow:auto.<p>I can't imagine supporting IE 9+ would take that much money. But then again, I don't run a startup.

Given that tHN is full of developers, I'm pretty disapointed that so many ppl are lumping all the IE's together as a single product.<p>I totally see that IE6 &#38; 7 are not worth the dev effort, IE8 is probably border-line, but IE9 is a good browser and people seem to be vastly exagerating how much work goes into getting IE9 to look and work like other browsers (i.e. not very much).<p>So not supporting IE9 seems a bit lazy to me, and I have to say, a little "religous" (they seemed to have ruled out IE10 already without doing any research into why). Also find it strange that they actively block it rather than just warn people about it being unsupported.<p>However, I will cut them slack because the target market are creatives, and it's an admin site rather than a consumer level site, so probably few IE users here. But others here seem to be extending this idea to the public web, which seems like a mistake...

I can sympathise with this. We <i>only</i> support Firefox for our CMS editing interface, and then, only test in the latest version.<p>This is a somewhat more extreme version of the OPs decision but we also started work on Decal when the only browser with a JavaScript debugger was Firefox[1].<p>The interesting thing is we've <i>deploying</i> Decal ourselves for quite a while and only now just starting to try and open it up as a platform for other designers.<p>We have never had a client object to having to use Firefox to manage their content, however in running people through our "Decal 4 minute challenge"[2] we've found a huge amount of resistance amongst designers themselves.<p>This leaves us in a tricky predicament: we want designers to sell the system to their clients who, in our experience, don't care about using Firefox to manage their content, but in order to engage/on-board those designers in the first place we have to get past that initial hurdle (as it turns out, 4 minutes is way too long and we're refining that on-boarding process down to a target of about 30 seconds).<p>[1] <a href="http://www.decalcms.com/page/Support/#whyFirefox" rel="nofollow">http://www.decalcms.com/page/Support/#whyFirefox</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.decalcms.com/page/4_minute_challenge" rel="nofollow">http://www.decalcms.com/page/4_minute_challenge</a>

Not a big deal these days.. most things behave the same in IE8/IE9 as they do in Chome, Firefox and Safari. It's only IE7 that's a headache and that's &#60;1% of traffic for most techie-oriented sites. If they were doing this 5 years, it'll be worthy of a headline...

Wait, what does it matter that they were bootstrapped? The title could just as well be "startup that took investments and venture capital saved boatloads of money ...". The fact that they paid out-of-pocket seems immaterial to the article?

"To date, almost three years after launching 4ormat, not a single person has ever contacted us requesting support for Internet Explorer."<p><i>yeesh</i>

As a web developer who deals with IE issues everyday, I can testify that this is worth it for those who can get away with it. If you are a startup that targets anyone creative or "new" end users, or if you have a significant web application, I'd highly consider it.<p>There are people who say that an experienced web developer can work around IE issues -- and they can. The problem is, the juice just isn't worth the squeeze. Let me explain. The cost to make your application support IE is enormous. And I'm not just talking about the cost to make it work and feature complete in the browser. I'm talking about the cost that you could be working on other products or features that drive the business -- the stuff that really matters and delights users.<p>Beyond preventing you from focusing on what matters, there's also a significant amount of technical debt that has to be inherited with every IE hack you add to your code base, and in some cases supporting IE can mean saying no to certain product features that otherwise could have been possible. This means that IE is actively inflicting damage to other browsers and is in effect lowering all your users -- even if they have a good browser -- on to a least common denominator experience.<p>IE also hurts your customer service and support personnel. Troubleshooting IE specific issues and quirks is painful, random and at times non-deterministic. You'll likely be consulting arcane MSDN articles published in the early to mid 2000's, and in general frustrating customers and developers alike. It can affect your entire organization, keeping everyone busy working around the issues -- from your front line customer service people, to product managers and developers. It's simply amazing what damage the browser can and does do to a web company.<p>I also agree that IE, in any version thus far widely available, is an albatross. In Microsoft's defense, I haven't used IE10 for development purposes nor do I target it (that's because almost no one uses it and access to the browser is hard to get outside of developer previews). But even IE9 is simply too little, too late. And in too little I mean it still doesn't get all of CSS3 right (I still have to create hacks around various issues and have only marginally more confidence compared to IE8). Not to mention the fact that users must be on Vista or Win7 means many Windows users will be stuck on IE8 for years, making it even more irrelevant. By the time IE9 has finally reached critical mass, the other browsers will likely be light years ahead (Chrome major version 30 by then??). This issue with upgrade path and slow speed of innovation is cause for great concern with developing anything on IE.<p>Developer tools in the IE browsers are also less than stellar. Microsoft has invested large amounts of effort and time into its Visual Studio line of tools and it shows. They are generally high quality and provide an excellent developer experience for working and debugging code. In stark contrast, IE Developer Toolbar, F9 Developer Tools, and Microsoft Script Debugger seem like after thoughts. The experience is subpar in almost every category compared to working with Firebug in Firefox, built-in Firefox debugging tools, and the amazing WebKit inspector and remote debugger. In addition, the tools and usage of them is fragmented across the different IE versions (a different combination of tools is needed per version to debug issues and inspect the DOM). As far as I know, remote debugging isn't widely available for IE, in any version.<p>Why has this happened? I largely feel that Microsoft's lack of focus on the browser and web standards over the past 10 years, and instead it's focus on Visual Studio and .NET have led them to a serious game of catch up. The browsers themselves are inadequate, the developer tools are not high quality, and the upgrade speed and innovation path takes years. Add all this together and it's a recipe for continued issue and pain with IE - in any version. Incremental improvements may be made, but they are just that. There will always be a game of catchup to be played, along with a new bag of hacks to implement and associated organization pain.<p>So if you can, do it! Drop IE! Your developers, employees and customers will thank you!

I can't tell whether this is web or only photo hosting, but I have to wonder whether this prevents their customers from showing full web authoring competence by publishing portfolios that demonstrably work in every browser.

In case anybody who is not running windows wants to see what their site looks like in IE, I fired up parallels out of curiosity:<p><a href="http://i44.tinypic.com/54vewk.jpg" rel="nofollow">http://i44.tinypic.com/54vewk.jpg</a>

For sites with a technical audience, IE is pretty much expendable nowadays. For example, looking at the analytics for railstutorial.org shows that more than 96% of visitors use something other than IE.

Can't believe I just wasted a few minutes reading that article. I went to find out how to save over $100k and learned nothing other than what I already knew: older versions of IE cause issues.

Please tell me this is not an April Fool's

Normally I'm not worried about IE7/6. The only time it is an issue is when a corporate client (who else is stuck using those browsers, these days? not many) complains that their new, cutting-edge social media app doesn't render properly in their antiquated browser.

We have done this for many of our projects and saved a lot of money and time. And actually it had only a marginal effect on our site statistics compared to the efforts we had to put into testing and developing for IE.

So what about IE10? It is still missing WebGL, but do you use that?

What's interesting is that 40% of the users were on Safari (Mac) and 65% users were on a Mac. This automatically precludes IE on this very large percentage of total users.

All I can say is great news. I hope this catches on with other startups.

Interesting... Wonder how much they lost...

IE sucks, I don't blame them. Helping us push to the future.

I wouldn't go out of my way to support it either.<p>If it happens to work in IE, then fine. If not, tough Rocco's.

Kind of brings you close to this thought on Microsoft's position to Firefox:<p><a href="http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-Mozilla" rel="nofollow">http://www.quora.com/Who-is-most-likely-to-acquire-Mozilla</a>