Aw man. As a bootstrapping web business guy, I can say I've had way more problems with supporting iPads and iPhones than IE. IE costs me $0 to support, and I don't even bother (nobody asks!). Supporting hip and popular Apple browsers can run me a grand in a fast minute. Pleasing early adopters without working really well on the iPad3 is a tough sell.<p>I think startups fighting to support < IE9 is a done decision (don't do it). Start worrying about mobile and tablet platforms instead. 'cause the future, it's knocking.<p>I'm not crazy about getting an iPad myself, but I'm starting to feel cornered into spending hundreds of $$ on one just to keep those early adopters happy. I think this is where the real browser/device compatibility discussion is, not around IE.
There is not supporting IE, and there is blocking IE.<p>You are blocking IE - I know because I changed my user agent on my firefox browser and you blocked me, and that is not cool!<p>You don't even offer an option to let me try anyway!<p>Use feature detection if you must, ignore IE completely in testing if you wish, but do not actively block it or you are just as bad as those who only support IE.
><i>"In reality we've received exactly zero requests for IE support, angry or otherwise."</i><p>Why would someone bother contacting you when it appears that your site is broken? In other words, the call to action doesn't display technical competence - indeed it implies a level of technical incompetence which probably is not justified.<p>"We're really sorry, but Paydirt isn't playing nice with your browser" doesn't inspire confidence in the product - it doesn't suggest a high level of customer service, either. Would I really want to trust something as critical as invoicing to this company?<p>Furthermore, not supporting IE doesn't scale well. At 10,000 users 1.6% is $1600 a month in revenue. At 100,000 it's nearly $200,000 a year in potential revenue - all for what is mostly a one time expense.<p>Finally, where does this leave room for expanding services such as letting my customer's see their project in real time?<p>I don't see a business case for it. I'm not saying that there isn't one - just that it hasn't be made.
You may have mis-interpreted the fact that because 1.6% of your users have IE, that means that you're in a space where those customers won't use IE.<p>What it may mean is that you don't have very many customers. If you were mainstream, you'd have more IE users... just like the rest of the Internet.<p>It's okay not to be mainstream... but, if time tracking is a competitive and profitable space, your competitors may be happy to share this blog post with their prospective users.
> <i>I've spent literally hundreds of hours trying to get sites to render pixel-perfect across various versions of various browsers</i><p>Why? This is a sub-optimal approach. The same machine with the same OS and the same version of the same browser can render very different looks just because they user has different settings.<p>How do you know that your user even has a visual display? Does it matter to you if they have a portrait or landscape display?<p>> <i>future versions of IE will probably be standards compliant</i><p>Are you saying that all your code is standards compliant and you're not using any browser-specific extensions?
One thing I hate is websites that block me from trying to use a site based on my browser. Give me a stern warning and let me use at my own risk. I'm not defending IE this has happened just as much in firefox and chrome for me.<p>I applied for a job recently that wanted me to take a test that required IE and windows. I passed on the job because that test was a fail.
The web, like anything, has costs and benefits. A big benefit is that you and develop and deploy an app once, centrally, and anyone can access it from anywhere, on any sort of web device. The cost of that is that you can't control how they're accessing it. To have the benefit, you have to accept the cost.<p>By shirking the cost of providing even some level of support for IE, you're ditching the benefits afforded to the part-time copywriter who needs to stay at her desk and work her lunch hour during the office job she keeps to make ends meet. You're ditching the benefits afforded to the business owner on the road whose laptop won't join the hotel wifi and has to use the hotel's "business center" to issue the invoice needed to meet his mortgage payment. You're ditching the benefit of a happy customer evangelising the product to a colleague, and wanting to give them a quick demo by logging in on whichever laptop is currently hooked up to the meeting-room projector.<p>The times when a user doesn't have control over their environment are the times when they need a product to come through for them the most. Especially when that product is their means of getting paid.<p>Not being able to offer "amazing things with canvas" to IE (or any browser) is okay. Not offering support to be able to log in and perform a set of basic key tasks from any browser whatsoever is, to my mind, throwing away one of the biggest benefits the web can offer as a platform.
I target a similar audience (freelancers). If anything, a feature would be supporting IE, especially when your app does a lot with CSS3 and bleeding edge HTML5 stuff.<p>And features need to be justified. Planscope (<a href="http://planscope.io" rel="nofollow">http://planscope.io</a>) gets less than 2% of all traffic from IE (chart: <a href="http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2205912/iestats.png" rel="nofollow">http://dl.dropbox.com/u/2205912/iestats.png</a>), and for actual accounts there's only been one person with IE - and that was a client that one of my customers invited in. 5 minutes later, Chrome Frame was added and everyone was happy.<p>I've also recently built a social network for amateur gardeners. The average age was probably 50. Did I ensure IE was fully supported? You bet.
My personal web projects always start with standard-conforming HTML with forms and links. They're fully interoperable contributions to the world-wide web and should be usable by every browser and robot written in the last sixteen years. I call that a feature, and I'm disappointed that so many devs set their sights lower.
Ignoring almost 30% of the internet and calling it a "feature" doesn't make it the right thing to do, or the smartest thing to do.<p>As you grow and (hopefully) become more successful you may start running into friction from IE users who want to use your service but can't.<p>Once you've saturated the market of other browser users, how will you continue to grow?<p>When you get there I think you might regret not investing in IE support today.<p>What about your application is SO compelling and SO difficult to support in IE that you can afford to ignore that entire market segment?
I didn't support IE until, much to my chagrin, I discovered about 30% of my hits were from IE. Fortunately, simply putting the !doctype meta-tag (or whatever it is) fixed almost all my issues (at least for IE 8+)
If you are spending a lot of time fixing html/css issues in IE6, 7 or 8 it maybe due to over using floats and clears. Especially for elements inside a container block which are spread apart from each other like elements in a header block (<div id="header"></div> or <header></header> if HTML5).<p>For the header block where you have elements spread apart from each other the better solution is to add position: relative in the div id="header" and then absolute position the elements within the header (i.e. div id="logo" and on the ul for the navigation; float the li(s) though).<p>Using floats, margins and clears to position the MAJORITY of your elements will prove to be frustrating once you test in IE (6,7 & sometimes 8).
> We don't spend hours debugging obscure IE bugs<p>IE "bugs" are rarely obscure. Most "bugs" are actually as-intended behavior, which is documented on MSDN. Do your homework.<p>> Sensible browsers can do amazing things (canvas, SVG animations, CSS3, web-sockets, blazingly fast JS), and limiting usage to these lets Paydirt take full advantage of these new technologies.<p>As was mentioned earlier, graceful degradation renders this point moot. Web pages <i>do not</i> need to look and function the same in every browser.<p>> Originally, we feared that we'd receive a torrent of angry emails from avid IE users. In reality we've received exactly zero requests for IE support, angry or otherwise.<p>Ignorance begets ignorance. The lion's share of people that use IE aren't technically savvy. They're people like parents, uncles or even grandparents. Why expect them to know how to send complaints when they barely know how to use a web browser?<p>> We work harder when we're happier, and skipping the dirty work of IE makes us very happy.<p>Clearly you were never working hard to begin with. Supporting IE is much easier than Internet FUD makes it appear.<p>> Who knows – future versions of IE will probably be standards compliant, super fast and reasonably secure.<p>You mean like IE 9? A little-known fact is that IE 4-6 were the most innovative browsers of their time. `innerHTML`? IE; event listeners (`*tachEvent`)? IE; editable text content (`innerText`)? IE. Those are some pretty important additions from a platform that seems to get no respect.<p>Cut the browser elitism and get a clue.
Your blog doesn't support comments. Is that a feature too?<p>As a developer I sympathise, but as a user I don't. I can understand not supporting IE 6 and 7, but not supporting 8 and 9 is not a feature, it's a lack of feature. It's saying that you aren't prepared to work with me the way I want to work.<p>It may be the right choice, but don't sell as that it's not.
IE market share has been going down for years, but it's still more or less 70%<p>That means that by not supporting IE you don't get 70% of the market. Early adopters come and go, but "hockey stick" growth like the one Pinterest got? that comes from the mainstream market that uses IE and doesn't knows what Firefox is, and thinks that by Chrome you mean actual chrome...<p>But as I said IE is going down, and when it hits 50% in 2 years or less that will be the time to stop supporting IE.
I never saw any app or website that would have a that low percentage of IE usage.<p>Anyway, if you have been working with html&css for more than 1 or 2 years it should not be hard to at least degrade gracefully on ie8+.<p>Personally I don't even think it is a choice, ie is still 30% of world average, supporting it is a must.
Graceful Degradation - look it up.<p>The baseline compatibility should be "functional but not necessarily beautiful".<p>Not wasting time getting pixel-perfection in IE is wise.
Blocking IE is retarded.<p>The fact that you haven't even considered using Chrome Frame says a lot about your dev skills. Or, you know, lack of.
Ten years ago you were an elite web developer if your site worked well in browsers other than IE. Today you're an elite web developer if you can make your site work well even in IE.
Apparently, they don't really know what they're doing...<p><pre><code> function cj() {
try {
return new a.ActiveXObject("Microsoft.XMLHTTP")
} catch (b) {
}
}
</code></pre>
I guess this JS code is not for IE support...
This widely depends on your geographics.<p>Writing from Brazil here : still over 70% of the visitors, on average, to most sites I monitor are using some version of IE.<p>So claiming a "feature" like that down here would be like rejecting 70% customers on a popular mall because they're not wearing red shoes(or some other arbitrary reason).
I don't really understand why this is newsworthy. If I made a website that had almost exclusively IE usage and chose to only support IE, would that be a feature? No, it'd just be an appropriate use of my development resources.
I get annoyed when people are too lazy/incompetent to support IE6, but blocking IE altogether is beyond stupid.<p>Don't get me wrong, I see the benefits and if dropping it makes sense (hint: it doesn't make sense when you quote average IE6 figures, check your own analytics and justify losing that many users), but quite frankly if you can't handle IE9 then I have no confidence in your product.
I don't want to be a dick, but PayDirt isn't all that complex. Don't see what the big deal is here. Even if 1.63% of their traffic is IE... It's still 1.63% of potential customers you're theorectically dismissing. I also find it rather shocking that your IE traffic is so low. Are we talking about requests or unique visitors? What group are you advertising at?
There is a lot of danger in defining yourself in terms of what you DON'T do.<p>For example, I don't know what your company DOES do, but I know you have devoted time and energy to taking a pissing-match stance against a browser.<p>This is not new, for many years there are many sites that block IE or serve IE users special pages that say "let me help you get a better browser in a highly-condescending, smug, and self-righteous way". You are not inventing anything by putting in this browser blocking.<p>Anyway, not my problem really.
There could be somewhat of a chicken-and-egg thing happening here with their low IE take-up. On IE 9 the slideshow on the home-page doesn't work, it just says "... loading fancy-pants slideshow ...". If I came across that as an IE user, I wouldn't be signing up.<p>There is also the demographic for their product, which is the more-likely reason for low IE rates. I wouldn't be surprised if the big Mac-OS screen shot on the home page turns off Windows users as well.
It's real simple, medium and large enterprises are on IE 7 and 8. Technical end users are on Chrome and FF 80% of the time, the rest is a mix but it's less than 10% IE 8 and below. This application is not targeting enterprises, it's not a big deal.<p>We have a product that is enterprise only, if we didn't support IE 7 or 8, we'd have no business left. This is a few years out of date to be news, the guy's done well to get his free advertising.
Can someone with a windows machine proxy this into IE and see if anything is broken? I can't believe there is much overhead in making things look fine in IE(>=9). Especially a straight-forward site such as theirs.<p>I haven't heard of paydirtapp before, but now I'm stuck with the impression that they are silly. Trying (and succeeding) to get publicity by being silly.<p>I should make a post about banning users on iOS 3.x, or perhaps all Opera users?
"trying to get sites to render pixel-perfect across various versions of various browsers" - That is a big part of the problem. Now, I have designs I have to get pixel-perfect, so I feel their pain, but when developing your own app, you can opt to not go for pixel-perfection.<p>I don't believe their statistics, but their target market is much more likely to have multiple browsers and is probably willing to jump into a different browser if IE isn't supported.<p>But I think it is a dumb move to block IE9+. There is no good reason for it. They didn't give one in their blog post, and I have yet to run into a situation where if I am using web standards that I had many issues with IE9. Nothing I've had to hack around enough that I would want to block it. Seems like either an anti-Microsoft for the sake of being anti-Microsoft or just front-end devs not worth their salt (cause a front-end dev worth their salt wouldn't use user-agent detection to block IE in the first place, they'd use feature detection at least.)
Users don't understand. Browsers are browsers, and for a vast majority of users, IE came with their machine. You aren't going to provoke thought, you'll just lose potential users.<p>I can understand not supporting legacy IE. Not supporting modern IE doesn't make sense. It seems a lot like nerd rage misdirected.
Can someone at MSFT comment? How is the IE team composed? Is it a threat at MSFT, to be placed on the IE team? "If you don't start performing, we're sending you to work on IE"?
Actually, I think people aren't considering the fact that some of the people using IE will download a supported browser.<p><a href="http://paydirtapp.com/ie" rel="nofollow">http://paydirtapp.com/ie</a><p>I wish more sites would nudge users to upgrade to a "modern" browser, including IE9. Microsoft is silently pushing IE10 to most IE9 users, so within a year only around 10% of users will be on a non-HTML5 browser. Assuming IE10 or latest Chrome and Firefox will be a giant step.
Sadly a lot of folks are still stuck with Internet explorer. I still make it to a point to make my web app work at least in IE8 and above and make it seamless as possible.<p>What I would do is that I'd give users with old browsers a plain version of the site. E.g. No transitions, animations, etc.<p>Supporting Internet explorer is a pain in the back, but a good developer and designer will do his best to provide availability. That's what I learned so far in the past 6 months.
Regardless of paydirt's decision, IE's tw0-year release cycle isn't doing any help to stem this sort of perception. IE10 will be awesome, but it has to ship and MSFT has to transition all users of IE6-9 onto IE10 or another browser that will stay current. If users stay abandoned in IE8, the greatness of IE10 doesn't count for much.
Hmm -- never heard of them -- neither has Quantcast or Compete. Alexa knows who they are -- says their users spend a whopping 86 seconds on the site.<p>Tweet from dbushell // David Bushell
hipster apple developers @paydirtapp <i>block</i> IE. Every sentence in this article I reply with "You're Doing It Wrong." paydirtapp.com/blog/we-dont-s…<p>F o l l o w e d
Read the whole article and all these comments and I'm still waiting to hear what makes this a quote unquote feature. Making a decision is not a feature, otherwise Friday team lunch at Chipotle is also a feature.
Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine in IE <a href="http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3945353" rel="nofollow">http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3945353</a>
I like to stay on the horn for a few seconds when people do extra stupid things while driving... that's kinda what you're doing to people using IE. Good job
We don't support Internet Explorer, and we're calling that a feature*<p>*An option few have, so don't be ignorant and categorically mimic our approach.<p>FTFY.
This would have been interesting news in 2007 when ~70% of the internet was using IE and the versions that people used were hard to support. Now, it just seems like silly bragging. I can understand silently not supporting IE because of the features that aren't present, but shouting that you don't support IE in 2012 and calling it a feature just comes off as arrogant. My first reaction is, "so what?"
Well done! I expect the contrarians to pour in screaming about not leaving anyone out and elitism and corporate users and blah blah blah... But seriously, fuck IE. if you don't have to support it then don't! More power to you! My biggest wish as a developer is for some major site to stop supporting IE. I do feel for the users but I feel it's a necessary evil to get the IE team to either ditch or fix Trident or whatever engine they use nowadays. There is no other browser that is more fragmented, unpredictable, or harder to get anything rendered correctly in than IE. if just one major site stopped supporting it then just maybe Microsoft would finally fix their broken browser. We are forced to write far too many unnecessary lines of code just to support a single browser when the rest of our front end code pretty much works effortlessly in the other browsers.<p>But we live in the real world and my wish isn't likely to come true. We do, after all, still have to think of the poor users who are either ignorant of the alternatives, still using IE due to inertia, or couldn't even upgrade to a version of IE that worked nicely (that is, if it existed)if they wanted to due to being stuck with their version of Windows Vista Home Office Extended Premium Plus which can't be upgraded to the new Windows 7 Midgrade Basic Premium Exclusive Edition Service Pack 10million which is the minimum version of Windows that'd run such a browser for less than the cost of sacrificing their first born child. Internet Explorer 9 was a noticeable improvement by far but not good enough still. Version 10 looks even more promising. Too bad they make it so that only the smallest fraction of Windows users can upgrade to them.