First post ever
So, I've decided to try this blogging thing all the cool kids been talking about.The last straw was PPK's reason for shutting down comments on his blog: "The opinions and musings of the average blog commenter are just not very interesting. If they were, they’d have a blog of their own."
I have interesting opinions and musings. I do! Therefore, I must have a blog.
So I built this thing. Or more accurately, I took bloggart , copied its theme, broke it and re-built it to be more flexible (I have little love for CSS grids)
What can I tell about myself?
I'm a developer dealing with web performance for the last 11 years. I live in the country side in southern France with my wife and 3 kids. I'm a big fan of the open web and free software, but up until now, I never had enough time to participate beyond bug reports. I'm hoping that would change when the kids grow up a little (and the right project/itch comes along)
This blog will be used mainly to voice out technical opinions. So don't expect vacation notes and/or general bitchin' regarding the hardship of raising kids...
Anyway, That's all for now
P.S. This is just the initial version. I didn't yet tested everything on every browser, so there are some rough edges. Besides, I have no clue what I'm doing here. ... Please be gentle :)
10 comments
Robert Nyman — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 11:10:03 GMT
Interesting. I like the discussion, and it's interesting to also talk about business value here. What's the extra cost for developing for an old browser (with a steadily declining user base) and to maintain it etc.
Jordi Boggiano — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 12:18:09 GMT
I think it really depends on the actual website you're working on. That's the problem with many things on the web, there's just not one right answer to any problem. Context is everything.
For styling, the question is quite clear in my opinion, just make it look acceptable in IE, but don't waste time re-creating rounded corners and crap like that. Modernizr can help a great deal here to provide alternative styling for non-supported features. Just like with JS feature detection, this is much nicer than browser sniffing.
The real issue is the new JS APIs. And there I think it just depends on your target market. Some of my sites have 3-5% IE because of the developer-oriented traffic, in those cases it's acceptable to ignore/nag. Like Robert said, if the IE audience grows it becomes a business decision. For some APIs the use of polyfills is fairly painless and in terms of cost doesn't represent much, so I don't think I'd advocate for ignoring IE users there.
What I really can't stand for though is blocking users. Sure it might bring adoption faster, but it's often done poorly. Being an Opera user, I've suffered from blocking many times over the years, from services that just don't want to care fixing bugs. But most of the time I'd be happy to have the option to just use their website, even if buggy, rather than be blocked at the door with a message telling reading "you're not important enough" or "we're too lazy" depending on how you read it.
Similarly, if you're gonna nag, nag intelligently. I stumbled over a site lately that was telling me I don't have the latest version of Opera -which is wrong- with a massive "lightbox" on top of the content. Hello? I am (was?) interested in your content, not in your buggy browser detection script.
adardesign — Thu, 31 Mar 2011 13:29:21 GMT
Time to start telling bed time stories for IE7, hopefully it will fall asleep fast.
egecan — Fri, 01 Apr 2011 07:30:32 GMT
I think the most important factor for flash adoption was video-sharing web sites. You simply couldn't access any of what they are offering without flash (you still can't, for some of them). I also think that the nagging is simply not enough. I know it, because I observed my 50 year old mother use her IE6 for a month and she just ignored the fact that most of the web was broken and sites displaying glowing orange and red errors everywhere. Now I made her switch to Firefox and she keeps complaining about her "missing buttons" and how her old "internet" "just worked". I also don't think we should completely "block" or anything. I just think about not serving stylesheets and then I can tell my mother, "here, look how awesome the web can be". (Probably she will answer, "can I still read my newspaper", but please excuse her) =)
Guest — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 09:58:38 GMT
Didn't Flash get their 95% market share by doing a whole bunch of distribution deals with OEMs to pre-install it on PCs together with Windows?