You’ll need to know about two posts before this will make any sense:
Yesterday the bitching about IE seemed to be worse than normal. I believe it started with the post “We don’t support Internet Explorer, and we’re calling that a feature” by @Paydirt. When reading the article I was thinking about the insane amount of time I spend on getting sites to work on IE6 and reading that only 1.63% of their traffic uses IE, it makes sense not to support it.
However later that day I read this post ”Hey Paydirt: Your Site Works Just Fine in IE” by @reybango, which shows that the not supporting feature of IE, actually is a feature. A bug would be that they didn’t test it, and it doesn’t work, but they actually put effort in the not supporting of IE. Which… in my eyes… is absolutely insane. They check if the browser is IE and just remove all of the users options, not because it doesn’t work in IE, but because they “have this feature”.
I haven’t done html/css frontend development in quite some time so I have absolutely no experience with IE9/10 myself, it was a pleasent surprise reading that most of the new stuff that’s supported by chrome and firefox is now supported in IE as well…
So here’s this company actively trying to make the browser experience worse for users with IE, not because it doesn’t support certain features but just because it wants to play the “IE sucks” feeling. What shocked me even more is the amount of comments saying that “supporting IE is too much work”, not because it still costs the crazy amount of time it used to (ie6), but because they’re developing on a Mac.
Testing in IE is too much works… because they’re on a Mac.
And it’s not just one or two persons saying it, but there’s quite some people bitching (yes bitching!) about it.
“One of the reasons I don’t test stuff in IE as much as I’d like is because there’s not a slick way to do it on a Mac.”
“I think Microsoft needs to look at better solutions for allowing Mac developers to test IE.”
“It’s expensive getting hardware to test on, taking time to test it, making sure you have a windows installation”
“To debug in any browser I can do it on a mac (decent dev env) to debug in IE I need a dev environment in windows. Enjoy setting that one up.”
Let me get this straight, you’re a frontend developer, you picked a system which makes development easier (or not, not going to start a mac/pc flamewar here). However fact is that probably most of your users use windows, and you can’t be bothered to test it on windows?
Seriously, if “no slick way” is a good reason not to test, you should be flipping burgers instead of developing. Your main job is development, not being a hipster.
If I offended some people with this post, I’m sorry, it’s not personal, just my rant about lazy frontend developers.
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