off-topic 2021-05-20 | Slack Archive

simongray08:05:44

@ashnur @qmstuart The combined suite of IE versions have <1% market share these days, so supporting IE9 is just masochistic at this point. Maybe you can convince your managers to drop the support? I think it’s a total waste of developer resources to supporting anything but Safari, Chrome, and Firefox these days (since Edge is now just a reskinned Chrome anyway).

👍 4

Aron08:05:14

The map is not the territory.

Stuart08:05:43

It's because our stuff runs on internal network in factories, and the machines in those factories are OLD and still run IE9

Stuart08:05:37

getting them to upgrade is basically impossible, it will be walls of change management

simongray08:05:41

@qmstuart Ok, that’s understandable @ashnur I’m not following…

Aron08:05:29

Are you not familiar with the phrase?

Stuart08:05:12

I had to google what your phrase as well 😄

Aron08:05:38

it's quite an important concept to be familiar with, I am glad I can introduce it to you : )

simongray08:05:56

I’m not familiar with the phrase.

simongray08:05:30

And googling it, I’m not sure what your point is with it.

Aron09:05:39

And I am not sure what your expectations are toward me in this situation. I don't want to be rude, just because you were.

simongray09:05:13

Eh, not really sure how I was rude.

simongray09:05:44

But you do you

Aron09:05:26

so you wouldn't say it's rude calling people masochistic and telling them what they do is a waste of of 'developer resources', which is a term insulting by itself if it means what it seems to mean

simongray09:05:21

No, I really wouldn’t. You would have to be doing a very literal reading of what I wrote that assumes bad faith. I think most people would assume that I don’t literally mean that people supporting IE9 are masochistic. In Danish we say “Overdrivelse fremmer forståelsen” - something for you to google perhaps. As for calling it a waste of developer resources, I’m not sure what’s rude about that - it’s simply stating a fact. Supporting IE9 - at least for the broader web - is wasteful, given that it’s already at some tiny fraction of a <1% market share. Your skills are better served fixing other stuff IMO.

simongray09:05:13

I was displaying sympathy with your situation, since I assumed that the choice of supporting IE9 was not yours.

Aron09:05:37

Interesting that you seem to assume my insult is derived from your 'bad faith' aka. intent.

Aron09:05:13

People say many things, most of it is not necessarily valuable. Such a short statement can be taken and understood many ways. My father also liked to argue from extremes and I picked up this habit too, it's good too establish boundaries, but not good if it enforces those boundaries. In this case you talk about sympathy, but actual sympathy would've been to think about why anyone would have such customers who are probably also people who would like to switch, instead of immediately blaming my bosses, who I can assure you are not happy about us having to support IE.

Aron09:05:52

It bothers me that I have to explain, that your average customer share numbers are the 'map' and the actual customers who actually have to use IE for reasons out of their control most of the time are the territory which we have to navigate.

Aron09:05:42

Confusing the two leads to gross oversimplification of the situation which doesn't yield any kind of actual feeling of togetherness.

simongray09:05:33

Whatever man. You’re taking things oddly personally.

Aron09:05:55

Maybe you are taking things oddly impersonally?

simongray09:05:05

(unsubbed)

orestis10:05:59

Regarding "the map is not the territory" -- here's a screenshot of our nginx logs user agents. Look at that IE bar...

orestis10:05:10

And this is happening for various reasons, most of which are because the users don't know the difference between IE and Edge, or because they have no choice (their IT department enforces IE use). The hope of the announcement is that IT departments will start migrating employees to Edge so that bar will eventually drop.

orestis10:05:34

(This is so-called white-collar employees of various enterprise-industries)

simongray10:05:06

@orestis I can relate. At UFST the internal Clojure/CLJS app we developed was made to target Chrome (and Firefox/Safari, but only incidentally because they tend to support the same things). Unfortunately, some manager in the department in charge of making a support dictionary/wiki type of thing bought a third-party CMS that only supports IE (despite IE having been deprecated for a while by then) and proceeded to encode all of the support stuff in that. This resulted in a situation where case workers have to manually switch to IE when clicking a link to the support CMS, while everything else happens in Chrome. So I’m very well aware that corporate IT decisions can result in situations where people end up using IE despite even the wishes of the developers in that same organisation. My point was this, though: for any website serving the general web, we can assume some random selection of users, and in that random selection IE will be <1% and IE9 some miniscule fraction of that <1%. In that case, spending time optimising for IE9 is really better spent on other things.

delaguardo10:05:56

#Also sent to the channel

That is really slippy position. There are 4.57 billion active internet users, so 1% will be 45 million people.

simongray11:05:07

Your website is not serving 5 billion users.

delaguardo11:05:09

sure, but even on much less scale it is still a lot of people excluded from service.

simongray11:05:55

And do note that the combined market share for all IE versions is below 1% already (0.7 something right now) and that most IE users will probably be on IE11, not IE9. You can extend your argument to lend support for any kind of minority user. What about Lynx? What about the old Opera engine? What about the Android browser pre-Chrome. At some point, diminishing returns will kick in. If you serve 5 billion users, sure you can afford to have a whole organisation in charge of catering to them, but most websites will handle much, much less traffic and will have to economise what they spend developer time on.

Sam Ritchie14:05:14

Also they are always free to upgrade the browser, yeah?

delaguardo15:05:59

1. that is not always the case 2. even if they can, why they have to?

emil0r07:05:21

In answer to point two. Because it's not worth the time and therefore the resources to cater for one person still using IE9 when there are 10000 other people using a modem browser, all of whom are paying you

emil0r07:05:43

So if they want to use your product, they have to switch

orestis10:05:31

@simongray I get your point. I think though that very few people are actually working on websites serving the "general web" these days. Because that market got eaten by the various CMSs -- just a gut feeling

orestis10:05:38

BTW Edge has an "IE mode" that can be turned on in enterprise environments. So that a list of websites that needs it will use the IE11 engine within the Edge shell so case workers don't need to do the dance you describe. But you have to have a cooperating IT department.

simongray10:05:59

Seems like UFST should switch from Chrome to Chromium Edge then.

orestis11:05:51

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode

delaguardo10:05:56

replied to a thread:@orestis I can relate. At UFST the internal Clojure/CLJS app we developed was made to target Chrome (and Firefox/Safari, but only incidentally because they tend to support the same things). Unfortunately, some manager in the department in charge of making a support dictionary/wiki type of thing bought a third-party CMS that only supports IE (despite IE having been deprecated for a while by then) and proceeded to encode all of the support stuff in that. This resulted in a situation where case workers have to manually switch to IE when clicking a link to the support CMS, while everything else happens in Chrome. So I’m very well aware that corporate IT decisions can result in situations where people end up using IE despite even the wishes of the developers in that same organisation. My point was this, though: for any website serving the general web, we can assume some random selection of users, and in that random selection IE will be <1% and IE9 some miniscule fraction of that <1%. In that case, spending time optimising for IE9 is really better spent on other things.

That is really slippy position. There are 4.57 billion active internet users, so 1% will be 45 million people.

orestis11:05:38

Our line so far is to suggest to people that if they can, they should use something other than IE11, it will give them a better overall experience. A lot of times, they can, but they're not that computer savvy to know the difference.

orestis11:05:01

Which is why Microsoft pulling the plug will be a very good things for us (enterprise clients) but not for e.g. the use case of a factory floor with Windows 8.1 machines that are unplugged from the internet anyway.

simongray11:05:32

If they’re unplugged from the Internet, then what is the problem?

orestis11:05:47

They might still be on some internal network 😉

orestis11:05:20

I saw a CNC controller 2-3 years ago where you're supposed to put a floppy disk with your CAD files 🙂

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henrik12:05:22

> That is really slippy position. There are 4.57 billion active internet users, so 1% will be 45 million people. About 10% of users have some kind of vision impairment. Take the IE budget and reallocate it to accessibility and you'll reach a far larger market.

Mno12:05:08

This all seems very demographic/company/product dependent.

cjsauer13:05:53

Anyone know of a way to get vscode to format selmer templates properly? It seems to confuse the HTML formatter even with erb/django/etc setting enabled.

2021-05-20

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