Does it mean you know your site is broken in the browser?
Does it mean you block that browser?
Does it mean you intentionally broke your site in that browser?
None of the above. It means you don't want to waste your QA time testing and fixing minor quirks in the browser and you don't want your users having a degraded experience on that browser. To protect your users, you may or may not provide a warning or block the browser entirely.
Products are in constant development, and every CSS change or javascript feature has the potential to break a browser and require fixes. Just because it works now, doesn't mean it always will.
It appears they successfully attempted to support IE, but decided it was not worth continuing, perhaps because of some breakage OP did not discover. Should they have stripped out any IE supporting code? That seems unnecessary.
There's lots of enterprisey stuff out there that only "supports" various versions of IE, and bounces out other makes and models of browser. HN folks may or may not see much of that, because that stuff is typically in various corporate portal technology.
In health-care IT in particular, there's a popular radiology app that uses an ActiveX control that is bug for bug compatible with IE6 and doesn't work on IE7. That's an important reason for browser-upgrade inertia in that business. Another reason is the risk of hassles. What hospitals use now sorta works. An upgrade to IE7 might cause some patient-critical thing to break, and then all hell would break loose and the IT folks would get sacked.
It may or may not be good startup marketing to slam IE. For those of us who serve health-care and other institutional customers, it makes us green with envy, no doubt.
But it is definitely good startup engineering, if you can get away with it, to cut down the workload of qualifying various browsers by simply eliminating a vendor from the test matrix.
I don't notice Microsoft offering any labor or money to help developers qualify on their browser products, or to incent the big institutions (who provide substantially all their revenue) to upgrade.
Very true, but in some cases (such as mine) an individual working on an app can slowly work towards cross browser compatibility every time they touch a page. After a year, I'm almost there. :) There are several other apps... but you do what you can.
> 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 seems unnecessary to straight up block potential customers from signing up because of their browser. Encourage them to get the full experience using another browser might be a better idea.
Suppose you are the proprietor of a physical retail business.
You're the only employee, so on Sundays you close the shop because otherwise you'd be short-staffed.
Do you listen to potential customers who complain that you're not open on Sundays by (a) offering them a degraded experience by letting them shop while you aren't there, (b) hire additional staff to support the shop on Sundays, or (c) tell them to come back during normal business hours?
If the amount of revenue you'd make by expanding the number of hours the store is open per week is less than the costs of supporting the additional staff, you ought to pick (c); otherwise, pick (b). It's bloody irrational to pick (a).
Did you mean to post this comment to the previous article and not this one? The article shows that the site works in IE9 and IE10.
Not to mention that the author not only chose (c) but also posted the equivalent of saying closing the shop on Sundays is a feature because Sundays suck for shopping(which is obviously wrong) and basically advised other sites to do the same.
> The article shows that the site works in IE9 and IE10.
To return to the analogy, a closed store will have stocked shelves and a cash register on sundays. The problem is that the store owner doesn't want to pay someone to work sundays making sure things are ok and stay that way. Likewise, supporting IE is not just a process of running through a site once and saying, "looks good." It requires continual testing, and this testing happens every time the site changes.
Also, Chick-fil-a is closed on Sundays and they claim it is a feature. And some people are religious about browsers too.
Does it mean you know your site is broken in the browser? Does it mean you block that browser? Does it mean you intentionally broke your site in that browser?
None of the above. It means you don't want to waste your QA time testing and fixing minor quirks in the browser and you don't want your users having a degraded experience on that browser. To protect your users, you may or may not provide a warning or block the browser entirely.
Products are in constant development, and every CSS change or javascript feature has the potential to break a browser and require fixes. Just because it works now, doesn't mean it always will.
It appears they successfully attempted to support IE, but decided it was not worth continuing, perhaps because of some breakage OP did not discover. Should they have stripped out any IE supporting code? That seems unnecessary.