Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by StavrosK 5719 days ago
I can tell you this is also true for historious, Chrome is at 46%, Firefox 27%, Safari 20% and IE 3%. Opera is 1.8%, but that's probably all me :(

We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users. Hell, until very recently, our bookmarklet didn't work with IE (some XSS security settings? We never figured it out), but now it eschews the nice overlay it uses for other browsers and just bookmarks stuff. It's ugly, but it works, if our users want a better experience we recommend switching to a better browser.
2 comments
JeffJenkins 5719 days ago
How do you know whether it was not supporting IE and a broken bookmarklet that caused your IE numbers to be so low? If I used IE and your service had a poor experience I'd probably use another bookmarking service.

edit: also, if the service is still new, you might largely be getting early adopters and not supporting IE could inhibit growth.

link
StavrosK 5719 days ago
We do support IE now, so those numbers should start to stabilise, but still, the percentage is very low. It probably is early adopters we're getting, but I don't think there's a way for the bookmarklet to work with IE in the way it works with other browsers. I've tried disabling all security settings, but IE still won't allow JS access to the iframe.
link
JeffJenkins 5719 days ago
I did a quick test with google's "Note In Reader" bookmarklet in IE8. The first time I clicked it I got an error about a pop-up being blocked. I clicked to allow the pop-up (which caused the page to refresh) and then it seems to have worked. It brought up a pop-up window which let me add a comment on the page I was on. It's definitely functional, but not ideal.
link
StavrosK 5719 days ago
Hmm, I wonder how they did that. Maybe the popup has different permissions than the iframe, or maybe they pass the selected text. Unfortunately, their code is obfuscated, but thanks for the tip.
link
BrandonM 5719 days ago
> We can't really justify much effort (it's usually large, too) to accommodate 2% of users.

I totally understand and agree with this sentiment. I do find it rather ironic, however, that developers today are using the same arguments for ignoring IE that were used for ignoring Firefox users 5+ years ago. Firefox users made a huge fuss about sites that were IE-only, and now many of those same users are returning the favor.

link
StavrosK 5719 days ago
I can understand that, given that effort is finite. When Firefox users were enough to support, it made sense for apps to do so.

We're not trying to be mean, we'd love to support everyone, but when it comes to spending a day trying to find and fix an IE-only bug that affects 2% of your userbase (sure, it might be a bit higher if we didn't have the bug in the first place) or write a feature that will improve the service for 100% of the userbase, the latter takes priority...

link
Macha 5719 days ago
Because now it's one version for standards, one for IE. As opposed to then, which was one version per browser.
link