[sstephenson]

Of course we support browsers other than Internet Explorer.

Here's the full list of supported browsers: https://basecamp.com/browsers

And way to miss the forest for the trees, guys—this article isn't about IE at all. I've come to expect no less from the Hacker News crowd these days.

[illumen]

Well, it did have a whole IE support paragraph... so it is about IE8 somewhat. I have been looking at basecamp over the last few days too. So for me, this was the most relevant part of the article. Unfortunately some customers still use IE8 (and even 7), so it would be silly of me to force a tool on them they can't use.

Back onto the main topic...

In my experience IE8 is the most important one to profile and speed up - since it is quite slower than other modern browsers. Spending time in the IE developer tools profiling can give some pretty good gains.

Moving expensive code into click handlers can have the drawback of making the user Touch Points, or where the user is doing interactivity slower. This is where users can often notice the slow down. But I'm guessing you managed to make it take less time than 200ms, and it's probably a little touched item anyway, so probably still worth it. The alternative is to spread the computation after load, so the user might not even notice it happen. Or if you're modifying the DOM, why not just do it before you send it to the user - and send them html which doesn't need a lot of javascript manipulation done.

It also brings up the point of testing and profiling. I noticed there was a bug report in your blog comments. It's really helpful to have tests before you start doing profiling, and especially once you have made your changes. Tools like speed.pypy.org are really nice for tracking performance regressions too. So, when a developer adds some new JS functionality into your app in 4 weeks time, you can see when the performance regression was added.

cya

[dspillett]

> Of course we support browsers other than Internet Explorer. Here's the full list of supported browsers: *

I must admit my knee jerked a little on that one. I did the "reading comments before the article" thing and was responding to what I've seen in a number of places recently which is a minor backlash against dropping IE8 support. I've seen it in a couple of places over the last ~year (since there were predictions of Google dropping support in their Docs products when IE10 is officially released). The conversation goes:

IE8 User: I'm not paying to Upgrade Windows of learning a new browser, so if you don't support IE8 I'm going away

Others: Fair enough. We wish you luck in your future endeavours.

IE8 User: Hangs around and repeats the demand to be supported in the hope that if he shouts loud and often enough he'll be given his way just to shut him up. The word "unprofessional" gets an airing at this point.

I have bee in my bonnet about IE as I have no choice but to support as far back as 6 in my day job due to some of our banking clients being stuck in the stone age metaphorically speaking... If I win the lottery I'll never touch IE again due to the hassle it has caused me up til this point, even if it becomes the greatest browser in the world!