Because IE has "special needs". Very often different stylesheets or even different markup is served for IE. This could be circumvented by faking IE with the user-agent string but ideally it would just support IE out of the box.
I'd be curious as to what problems they are having with IE to not support it. When I get in there it complains about me using IE but I can edit the objects they provide much the same as any other browser they do support. It's just the UI bar is not showing so I cannot create new objects.
It's just curiosity really, what's the technical hurdle in this case for IE?
> It appears they successfully attempted to support IE
No, they wrote standards compliant HTML/CSS/Javascript which should work on any browser, then decided to write some server-side code to check for a user agent and serve different HTML to that user agent.
> It appears they successfully attempted to support IE
No, they wrote standards compliant HTML/CSS/Javascript which should work on any browser, then decided to write some server-side code to check for a user agent and serve different HTML to that user agent.
IE compatibility mode is broken. It has two "modes", one of which changes the user agent version and one that doesn't (but still changes the functionality of the browser). Guess where the sniffer scripts get the version from.
The only way to make it work reliably is to look at the window.documentMode property which requires changing your code, thus defeating the point of the compatibility mode in the first place.
As someone who doesn't use IE, I'm more impressed by a site saying "This site is only compatible with IE right now - we're working on it, though!" than with a site that is obviously broken and incompatible. And if you don't intend to ever make it work in the other browsers, say so up front.
And users will figure out very quickly that it only works in IE; better to be up-front about it.
If you spoof your user agent, or use IE11, you don't get redirected to the "crying" page (the page uses 301 redirection BTW).
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.3; Trident/7.0; rv:11.0) like Gecko
Also worth noting, an excerpt from the IE blog[1]:
Obviously, maintaining Compatibility View Lists requires a significant investment
on the part of the IE team—resources which could be used to implement more
new standards, performance improvements, etc. Please please please: use
feature detection rather than User-Agent sniffing.
If the IE team doesn't want people to use UA sniffing, they should teach by example.
This is important. There is a Government website that I use that only works in IE. They built it years ago through contractors using .Net and I bet they don't have any ability to change it. I wonder if they even have the original source code.
There is not supporting IE, and there is blocking IE.
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!
You don't even offer an option to let me try anyway!
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.
That might work for them because they are using the builtin webkit engine - but you can do the same by controlling IE via OLE, and unlike the method used in the article it is no different from a user who browsed with IE normally.
The point is to avoid being detected as IE by _existing_ websites, which typically do extra work to display nicely for IE, and that won't necessary anymore, hopefully.
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