Topic: IE

[Jáchym]

I think I have already wrote about this here, basically anyone who has ever tried to create a website knows, that IE tends to be the most problematic browser, which requires additional fixes etc. Worst of all, quite often you will find out that your page looks differently even in each version of IE, which makes it even more difficult. I have always struggled with this and some parts of CSS were not displayed ideally.

Since I am now basically finished with my template and just testing it, I noticed some parts are problematic in IE. But the dilema now is whether it actually makes sense to try to fix these. The reason for that is that in less than a month, Win 10 will be released, where IE will be replaced by Edge, which uses similar cores as Chrome, Opera or FF and so finally Microsoft will have a browser that works like most of the others.

My assumption is that lot of people will update to Win 10 relatively soon because of the update being free only for a year and especially those that are using Win 8, which is a disaster. And the other point is that even those that will not upgrade, only a relatively small percentage uses IE anyway - looking at my Google Analytics, I have about 55% Chrome and 25-30% FF, which leaves only about 10-15% for the rest - Opera, Safari, IE....

Just wanted to ask what are your thoughts about this, especially those that also develop webpages.

[nincehelser]

Most developers I know stopped testing on IE a long time ago.  I'd say don't waste your time on it.

[Jáchym]

Thanks... thats sort of what I hoped someone would answer 

The funny thing is that seriously... you change one thing to make it work in a particular version of IE and it stops working in another one 

[Josiah]

I don't develop webpages, but I say forget about IE compatibility. IE is about to become Obsoleted by Edge in like you said, less than a month.
Also, with IE users being such a small percentage of your web traffic and with Win 10 being a free upgrade for Win 7 and 8/8.1 users, umm... yeah, i would not worry about IE.
From what I understand, Firefox and Chrome are the 2 major Browser "Standards". And with Edge being based on parts of Chrome, Firefox + other browsers, I think MS has finally realized the fact that IE is not even a competitor anymore.

Something that I heard (I know, I really should have a source, but I can't remember where I read it, or who said it) after the launch of Windows 10 and Edge, IE will only be maintained for Compatibility reasons. Basically, some systems still require IE to use and MS will continue to maintain IE (for awhile) for only that reason.

[Jáchym]

What I heard though is that Edge will be only compatible with Win 10, so people that will keep on using other Win versions will either have to use alternative (Chrome, FF) or IE.

Otherwise, explorer will still be part of windows, because remember it is one of the core parts of windows as such - folders etc.

[weatherc]

Few toughts from my webdeveloping...

Recent IE'es are not that bad.
I have dumped support for "old" IE's long time ago.
Actually the worst of current browsers is NOT IE, its Safari. This if something cause headaces mainly because its damn problematic to debug but also becuase it can work different in Windows vs Mac/Apple.

There are also cases where stuffs what work in FF do not work in ex Chrome, and vise versa.   

Generally i don't take much stress if something not work perfect in those really lowtraffic-browsers so long it works well in the most visited browsers, including mobile visitors. Browserstats for my site is Chrome 35%,FF 24% and IE + Safari 15% each. 30% of the traffic is from mobile devices (Android, iOs and Windows Phone).

[Jáchym]

Well the major problem with Safari is that I only have access to devices running Windows, Linux, Android, but no Apple device and so it is always bit of a gamble to see what it will look like. Fortunately I must say I usually dont have problems and stuff looks same in Safari as in Chrome etc. Firefox is sometimes tricky, some CSS commands work differently.

[d_l]

Most developers I know stopped testing on IE a long time ago.  I'd say don't waste your time on it.

+1

My web pages are far from perfect, but if they don't work for IE, I don't break a sweat.  I don't bother testing with IE either.  Just the same, I have IE versions 2.0 through 11.0 accessing my site so apparently my site isn't that awful for IE.

On a side note, I see accesses from Netscape 0.6 though 5.0, Chrome 7.0.x through 45.0.x, Safari 4.0.x through 8.0.x, Opera 6.0 though 26.0 and FF 3.6.x through 38.1.x as well.    You can't test for all of them!

It is the OS range that gets to me.  I'm seeing all Windows versions including 3.xx!

[Bushman]

Drop it like a bad habit.    If I was writing the code, I'd check for browser type then say to IE users "Get a modern browser".

[Jáchym]

Talking about Windows versions, just checked it, overall, Win has 62% (22% Mac, 8% Android, 3% iOS, 2% Linux, 0.2 % Windows Phone, 0.05 % Blackberry  )

and out of that:
73 % - Win 7
15 % - XP
4 % - Win 8
4 % - Win 8.1

[weatherc]

Drop it like a bad habit.    If I was writing the code, I'd check for browser type then say to IE users "Get a modern browser".

You can't generalize about IE. Recent IE's are like from other century than ex "old good" IE6. I have had no issues with IE11 re coding.

Talking about Windows versions,

My is:

7: 61,88 %
8.1: 26,68 %
Vista: 4,86 %
XP: 3,95 %
8: 2,07 %
   

[chief-david]

I thought IE was on its death bed anyway.

[Skyview]

Just to have a different perspective, if you're developing software (sites) for others, especially for pay, you generally do support at least the later versions of IE. There is still a huge user base and will be for a while on older XP systems, etc. If you're developing for your site only, using your stats it wouldn't make sense to worry about IE. If you're developing templates for the world to use, I personally would at least make sure it runs on the last couple of IE versions, but that's just me. For the record, I have never liked IE, but personal preference is not what it's about. Catering to your users or clients needs is generally the approach I have taken.

[Bushman]

One of my government clients insisted on using IE 8-10 and it cost them a fortune. All their clients hated it and had to make special provisions to access just their site.  Good thing I hardly pay taxes.  WOM.  For the final word on IE versus the rest of the browsers:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WKm66IcuZyg

[Maumelle Weather]

For my webpages, I have been making them HTML5 compliant as much as possible. The only place I use IE is at work, and like others have said, they designed both their intranet and internet to work with it. For that matter, I know there is one computer still running Windows 2000, and a number of them are still using XP.

[Jáchym]

I see your point Skyview, but my assumption is this:

I can guarantee you, that 90% of that minority that does use IE does not use it because they "want to", but simply because it is the browser they have installed in their OS and they just dont even know/think about alternatives. Therefore the fact that MS will now replace IE with Edge means, these people will automatically start using Edge.

And with regards to Windows older than Win 7 (XP etc.), where upgrade to 10 will not be free, well those people probably dont use IE either because XP already does not support the newest version of IE and so you would have to use older versions, which not only have problems displaying current pages, but also have security issues and so those that still have these are very likely using FF, Chrome etc.

[nitrx]

FYI these are the stats of this month

Internet Explorer 11.0   690
Chrome 43.0Chrome 43.0   301
Mobile Safari 8.0Mobile Safari 8.0   259
Firefox 38.0Firefox 38.0   242
Safari 8.0Safari 8.0   232
Chrome 41.0Chrome 41.0   196
Chrome 40.0Chrome 40.0   194
Chrome 42.0Chrome 42.0   181
Firefox 37.0Firefox 37.0   145
Firefox 36.0Firefox 36.0   106

I think IE should be supprted most visitors are no PC experts as said before the simple use the  browser deliverd by the OS , on desktops this is mostly IE, I Think with the release you will see more Edge browsers on mobile devices, safari is most used on iPad Iphone, Chrome is ofcourse used on a lot mobile devices on Android , Firefox is random

[Jáchym]

IE is supported, its just some minor design issues, but I still think lot of people will upgrade to win 10, which means automatic switch to Edge.

btw. your stats are really interesting, because they are a bit odd. The stats I have on my site (see above) are actually quite close to what you will see on other websites and in the OS statistics of browser usage in general on a large scale, published by various companies. Chrome usually has about 40-50 % share, FF about 30 and then the rest...

[weatherc]

I would not count on Win 10 and Edge for looong time yet, it will take quite a time (years) before that browser will phase out IE. I would not count on expecially Win 7- and XP-users will upgrade to Win 10 either because Win 7 is good, and XP-users have to pay for it.

Its almost first now IE-users have decreased on my page, before it was much higher in the stats at same rates as FF and Chrome. As Skyview said, i would support at least IE10 and IE11 so it works well on them and have as maximum just few really minor issues/differences to others.

Instead of stressing about browsers would i set more weight on how it works in different devices. More and more visitors comes from mobile devices (with a wide-range of resolutions) so it should deffinitely be fully responsive. Also Google takes that in act when it indexes, no responsive = lower rating.

[Jáchym]

True, although with regards to responsive sites, some parts of my template cannot be made responsive.

I have explained this in another thread already. For certain pages I will have to make a completely separate section for mobile devices with lower resolution. The good news is that more and more devices have no problems displaying same resolution as computers (at least in landscape mode).

The fundamental problem with responsiveness in this particular case is that our webpages obviously use lot of graphs, tables etc. When you are working with a normal webpage, where you have mostly text and images, it is not difficult to scale the text, images, to rearrange paragraphs etc. But the problem is that with graphs for example, you obviously cant do this. If you have a graph you cant just "split it in half" and show the other half below... same with some other stuff. So I of course try to make it as much responsive as possible, but in some cases there are elements that wont display correctly so as I said, I will prepare some sections purely for mobile devices with low res.

And when I was talking about IE I didnt mean it would not "support them", just some elements might not be displayed exactly as they should (for example they might not be aligned properly etc.). However I still believe lot of people will upgrade to Win 10 within that first yr when it is free. Looking at global statistics from Feb 2015, IE is used by 15 % of people, even that is already quite a low number and it is likely to get much lower soon. And people with XP, for which the upgrade is not free, usually dont use IE, because XP only supports older versions of IE and that version has problems with displaying lot of stuff on many webpages today and so these people are usually the ones using almost exclusively Chrome, FF etc.

[miraculon]

On my snow page, http://rogerscityweather.com/snow.php the "ruler" next to the snow bar does not render well on IE. It looks great on Firefox and Chrome. I gave up trying to improve it with sizing and fiddling with it and decided to put a "use Firefox or Chrome" notice above the graphic. (I eliminated the fly-out menu item for the summer, but the page is still working as is the rangefinder which is pointing in a random direction)

The problem is that a lot of people use Windoze as delivered and use IE as the default because they don't know any better.

Greg H.

[gwwilk]

I just look for IE and then dumb-down the output.  This code seems to work fairly well:

Code: [Select]

// Detect Internet Explorer earlier than as well as IE V11, which spoofs as Firefox
function ae_detect_ie() {
    if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']) &&
            (strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'MSIE') || strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'], 'Trident/7.0; rv:11.0')))
        return true;
    else
        return false;
}
I've added this function to the Saratoga 'common.php' so it's available in 'menubar.php'.  Otherwise the menubar sunlight pie chart displays as a red 'X' in IE, as does the dashboard sunlight pie chart.

Thankfully the 'Edge' browser in Win10 displays my dashboard normally, so such shenanigans should be history in about 10 or 20 years.
My ajax-dashboard6 looks slightly different in IE than it does in other browsers, but I haven't added any hints about modern browsers for the clueless.

[BigOkie]

Most developers I know stopped testing on IE a long time ago.  I'd say don't waste your time on it.

Wish I could get the developers where I work to do this, but the business says 'people still use IE' and the ad revenue our sites generate are more important.  As a tester (QA analyst) it's frustrating to have to use a third party vendor to test different browsers (Browserstack).

[weatherc]

But the problem is that with graphs for example, you obviously cant do this.

Ie. Highcharts scales neatly, no problems so long it not get too much data for narrow graph. It scales automaticly, no problems at all.

[Jáchym]

Yes and Highcharts is exactly what I am therefore using, but you also mentioned correctly that this only works for a certain amount of data being displayed and in some parts the graphs are just too small.