While I commend you for finding a way to communicate to your clients in a way that allows you to not develop for IE8, you're not really being truthful. You can use "HTML5" with IE8 as part of html5shiv.js of course and IE8 doesn't need to be responsive - its a desktop browser. In most cases you can almost certainly deliver an IE8 solution without a lot of extra work.
I strongly disagree. If 1 single browser out of 8-9 in common use doesn't support web standards, and represents a fraction of a percent of my target audience, then I'm not going to spend time crafting workarounds to target that browser.
I already make compact web sites compared to my peers -- no jQuery, optimized images, mostly text-driven. No JS is required to navigate and view the site. A hair over 100 kb for most of sites, including blog and header image. I use global CDNs. So my sites are friendly to users in developing countries, as long as they don't use Opera Mini.
There's nothing "bleeding edge" about supporting JS and CSS that IE8 supports. That's as low as I'm going, and no guilt about it.
By the way, have you actually tested any of your sites on Opera Mini? You may be surprised at just how poorly it renders, unless you're still working with tables.
This complaint is as old as the hills. You may as well slap an obnoxious "Designed for HTML5" button on your site. The cost of having the world's largest addressable audience of any development platform is that web developers have to deal with the fact that it varies a lot. Them's the breaks.
Edit: because I hate comments that are purely negative, my suggestion for getting users to the latest technologies is to use libraries (like YUI and jQuery) which do the hard work of implementing newer features in backwards compatible ways, but use the modern feature if it's available. That way the difference between IE8 and a more recent browser becomes one of performance rather than the binary absence of functionality. Users can that way see what they're missing and have a reason to upgrade that's more compelling than the designer petulantly insisting their browser sucks.
Praised be lord of all code and such. I am not against IE8 - qualitatively it dwarfed IE6/7, but there are still way to many issues with supporting it. I am speaking from experience - I developed somewhat simple portal with a lot of AJAX/interactive elements. Getting all features to work on Chrome/Firefox was a charm, IE8 was harder. In the end I only managed to support IE9 and above.
That's the point. IE8 is old, and not 'perfectly fine' if you're creating a web-based product and not just looking for rounded corners. It was great after living with IE6, but we moved on. Even Google has dropped support for IE8 in most apps.
As do I, for personal projects/personal use. When my company needs to create a functioning website in IE7 for healthcare professionals because they have to use IE7 and don't have a choice in updating then it better work in IE7...
My point was "if his target audience uses IE8 they should support IE8". It's a simple question for any dev to ask themselves and it comes with a simple answer.
If you expect to sell anything or provide a service - your competitor that supports IE8 will win a number of your customers over by supporting IE8 better than you do. If you can afford to lose those sales to a competitor, feel free to disregard IE8. (It's often only a negligible amount of sales anyways.)
I don't think anyone supports legacy browsers because they want to.
I'm sorry, but you're still just producing strawmen. I don't like coding for IE, I just don't like coding for fast-moving targets that keep introducing bugs either.
Also, you seem to have an awful lot of serious problems with older versions of IE on your projects. Spending days getting a project right in IE? Writing a totally separate version? Long-standing bugs affecting your users in visible ways? User-visible problems with JS performance in IE9? Some of those were certainly problems with IE6 and to some extent with IE7, but if you're really still suffering those problems with IE8 -- the topic of this conversation, and the latest version supported on all popular Windows versions -- then I have to think that either you're in a remarkably specialised field or you're doing something wrong.
It already works on IE8! :) From my experience, IE isn't as bad as what people complain about (with js, it is horrid with rendering though), and a few tweaks of code makes it work, which generally makes the code even better on other browsers. People really don't need as many shims and polyfills as they think. Rendering though? Gosh that is a nightmare.
If you're using IE8 still, you're probably pretty used to a broken web. For most purposes, I think developing for IE8 should basically be making sure your very basic content and functionality is available in some form. But I think it's ridiculous at this point in the game to be aiming for 100% compatibility. If someone cares enough, they'll upgrade.
I do mostly contract work in the U.S. for state and local governments. The RFP's (Request for Proposals) always say something about using HTML5, responsiveness and the latest web standards.
And sometime shortly after (and sometimes before) project kickoff we always see that a large percentage of their employees are using IE8 and we have to support it.
I make a point of describing in detail what kind of resources will be required to do both a modern website/app using the latest standards and one that will support IE8. I mention that, for the most part, they are mutually exclusive and I will effectively have to build the site (at least the "modern" parts of it) twice and this will cut back on the features I'm able to implement within the project budget and timeframe.
This usually makes the customer take a closer look at their actually IE8/XP install base and I've had several customers decide they would speed up migration from IE8/XP and remove the support requirement for that browser.
Just doing my small part to help kill IE8 - one small government agency at a time.
The company I work for uses IE 7 standards for rendering within our application. A lot of things would break if the people using our software upgraded to IE 8.
> In web programming each of the browsers is slightly different in about a hundred different way
Is this actually true? There are stable, well-tested shims for just about everything out there. CSS strikes me as the only tricky bit, but generally if IE8 users don't get to see an animation I don't really care.
Indeed. I hack on a web app with over 100k daily users and we only just last month decided to drop support for IE8, and that only because some third party libraries that will simplify things for us don't support it
I'd consider supporting IE8 an anti-feature. The browser is insecure, unsupported, and non-standards compliant.
I've spent way too many hours of my life learning quirks of the horrible piece of garbage that is IE8. I don't think I hate any other piece of software as much.
If I had to support IE8 I'd instead try to make the site work without any JS. Anything even moderately complex would run horribly anyway.
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