On 27/06/2013 23:30, Craig R. wrote:
In the development community, IE is not liked. In a seminar on developing

javascript, I was told "IE is your enemy". Things that work everywhere else

won't work on IE. Things that work on IE won't work anywhere else.

Matt (who tests web software for a living)


Matt, I appreciate the difficulty in dealing with IE (I'm NOT a fan of MS products). However, when providing a service or product, you cater to your primary and secondary customer first. Whatever it takes. After that is accomplished, you expand further. Stats show desktop comp browser market share at 56% and Firefox at 22%. Mobile devices are 56% Safari. Chrome is down the list. You certainly should have IE and Safari covered before moving on. It is inappropriate for management to do otherwise.

Craig R


A few thoughts on browser support from my personal experience:

I appreciate the importance of having to cater to customers and thus,
given the installation base of IE, needing to have this covered. This
used to be the standard in web design.

However, new developments in web technology --namely HTML5-- and
Microsoft's unwillingness or inability to properly support these when
the vast majority of other browsers, desktop or otherwise, do more than
a fare job at it, means that developers are now faced with the choice of
offering reduced functionality to all users, or developing more
innovating products and services, but dropping full support of IE.

The reality is that Firefox, Chrome and a list of other browsers are
free to download and easy to install in just a few minutes.

Having myself faced this dilemma recently, I have to say that I would
prefer to offer my customers a basic level of service on IE and an
advanced level of functionality on other browsers.

Here is a simple example: if you want to upload a bunch of files you can
select them one-by-one from the browser's file dialogue or you could
simply selected them from the files explorer window and drag them onto
the browser (same as you would do from one file explorer window to
another). Which method would you prefer to use? This is just a very
small example from a big list of things one can/cannot do, depending on
if you fully support IE or not.

Microsoft had raised expectations that the new Windows version would
have a standards-compliant IE, but it seems this is far from the case.
It used to be that Microsoft tended to adulterate existing standards in
order to promote use of its proprietary products, but in this day and
age it boggles the mind why standard features which have been working on
practically every other browser for some time now will not work or will
respond very differently on IE.

End of rant.