We know about Internet Explorer

Fred Oliveira on September 12, 2006, Comments (10)

… we just don’t like it much.

It took a while but today we got an email about how broken the Goplan layout is on Internet Explorer 6. Trust us, we already knew. Two things back our decision not to care (much) about the browser during these first days:

  • Internet Explorer 6 - which is about to be replaced by its 7th major release - has very grave bugs in terms of standards support. And we prefer standards over hacks (at least until we publicly launch)
  • There are numerous better alternatives to IE, with far better standards support. I have a strong opinion about this because I’ve worked with standards (and promoting them) for a long time. My bottom line is, get Firefox.

Now, this doesn’t mean we won’t be supporting IE soon - we will. It just means we recommend Firefox (or any other standards-compliant browser) for a much better experience with Goplan, and for secure browsing everywhere else.

Comments:

[...] “… we just don’t like it much.” It’s a small post, but very meaningfull by Frederico (Fred) Oliveira from Webreakstuff. I totally subscrive it. It’s about how Goplan does not work well on Internet Explorer 6 because it (IE6) does not respect standards. I wrote severall times about this. Now, Fred, even IE7 is not going to be very standard respectfull. But at least it can render .PNG (web standard) images. As for positioning and dimensions… let’s wait and see. I know you know this and i do have the same perfect answer: get firefox. or any other much better standard compliant browser. As an example i use Gnome Epiphany as much as Firefox. Goplan renders great under Gecko engine. [...]

While I totally agree with you - we should do webapps using standards, not in an effort to guess how IE behaves - you really have to support Internet Explorer if you want it’s users, nobody (unfortunately) is going to switch browser just because of goPlan… You also spoke about IE7 - maybe it would not be a bad idea to test goPlan with it, just to see how less suckiness you’ll get from it. Unfortunately, my guess is that goPlan will still look uterly broken with it.

It *is* possible to be standards-compliant and support IE6. At blog.com we decided to follow Yahoo’s guidelines on grades of support:
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/gbs.html

Aiming for 95% A-Grade.

We currently support IE6, Safari, Opera, FF1 on A-Grade. From our stats, this puts us on 98% of our user base A-Grade compliant.

Is the mailbox hello at webreakstuff, er… broken? I sent a note there requesting an invite for GoPlan. You may answer “No!”, but please answer…

It is possible to be standards compliant and support IE6, yes. Still (and this may get technical), you need to explore browser quirks in css parsing to give it the wrong values it would need to correctly display information. Doing that now and not next week when we’re still moving things around, testing out new things and generally working on the code, would be a mistake.

Also, guidelines are fine, but they clash with Microsoft’s plan to irradicate all browser hacks upon release of IE7, on which they’ll break. Supporting “A-grade” now would mean having things break when IE7 moves from RC1 to final. For more on this, have a look at Molly’s weblog.

Anyway, I don’t want to get into technicalities here, I’d rather leave that side of me for WSG and IxDA mailing lists, or I may be throwing rocks soon :-)

Re mailbox: No, it isn’t broken, but we do get over a hundred requests/day, which makes it impossible to reply to every single person if we want to keep working on the product itself. You have, though, been added to the queue, and should have an invite soon.

Naturally, the approach is the one you use: Aim for the standards, correct non-standard browsers in the end of the development cycle. I was not criticizing that.

> you need to explore browser quirks in css parsing to give it the wrong values

Don’t go down that path. Use the rewrite engine on apache to serve a conditional CSS:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} AppleWebKit
RewriteRule ^(.*)/browser-specific.css$ \
$1/safari.css \
[redirect,last]

Sorry for the dupe. I hadn’t read the blog yesterday and I also sent a short note re: IE breaking the layout. :)

My concern for lack of IE support has nothing to do with me. I use Firefox and I would assume that most of your clients for Goplan (i.e. web developers, freelance designers, etc) use a non-IE browser also.

As I alluded to in my note, however, most of our clients probably use IE. Hence, it precludes us using Goplan as a collaborative project management tool if IE isn’t supported.

Just food for thought…

I look forward to the coming enhancements, keep up the great work!

It would be nice to see some browser statistics about the user agents of those who reach http://goplan.org/index.html …

[...] Goplan genel olarak baÅŸarılı olsa da, eksikleri de var. Internet Explorer’da düzgün görüntülenemiyor, bu hatayı düzelteceklermiÅŸ; ve RSS desteÄŸi için parola koruması özelliÄŸinin olması gerekiyor, sonuçta projelerde genelde gizlilik önemlidir. Ve ek olarak, Goplan’ın adresi goplan.org ÅŸeklinde, goplan.com ve goplan.net adresleri baÅŸkaları tarafından alınmış. Belki çok önemli gibi görünmeyebilir, küçük bir ayrıntıdır. Ama bence böyle bir sistem için kalan .org uzantılı adresi almak yerine baÅŸka bir isim bulabilirlerdi. [...]

[...] A couple of weeks ago we posted about our support for Internet Explorer and promised to work on it because even though we prefer features to hacking support for browsers, we can’t deny the fact that most of you guys work with clients who don’t know better. [...]

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