Gracefully Dropping Support for Dinosaur Browsers in Trello

http://blog.fogcreek.com/project-asteroid-gracefully-dropping-support-for-dinosaur-browsers-in-trello/

by joeyespo • 12 years ago

59 52 12 years ago

blog.fogcreek.com

themoonbus• 12 years ago

The worse problem is IE8, which is the highest supported version on XP, and is a way bigger piece of crap than IE9... especially with XP's still high market share.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/03/weeks-...

IvarTJ• 12 years ago

It's as if it was only yesterday that we saw Microsoft bragging about IE9 being arguably slightly ahead of the other browsers.

netnichols• 12 years ago

Ugh... yeah, I'd give my pinky finger to only have to worry about IE9 and up.

JohnTHaller4• 12 years ago

Windows XP is abandoned on April 8th. A large number of the Windows XP machines still in use are in China (nearly all pirated). The other ones can often be safely ignored for most businesses as they're not going to be customers anyway.

joshyeager• 12 years ago

I'm not sure why you think that the non-Chinese XP machines won't be potential customers. In my experience, the largest remaining IE8 (and even IE6) holdouts are big enterprises and government organizations. Those organizations are also some of the richest potential customers out there.

For our product (enterprise task and workflow management), we see about 2% IE6/7 and about 5% IE8 in our customer base. Of those customers, most are planning to upgrade away from XP sometime in the next year or two.

avenger1233• 12 years ago

I am starting to wonder if the overhead of doing an API first design is that much more than integrating your domain model into the web app directly. The benefits of having an API backend really seem to shine in the scenario that Joel is describing.

Branch a version of the codebase for the older browser, remove all the support for old browsers from trunk and off you go.

I think the main decision that Joel has made is that they will not shoehorn new features into the older browsers and instead force them to upgrade if they want the new features. May not work for other web apps but seems to be a good compromise.

mandlar• 12 years ago

Are there any other known examples of websites that follow this API first design? I would love to see more discussion about this design choice.

avenger1233• 12 years ago

I think the biggest example would be Amazon. The biggest advantage I see is that Joel's approach still allows some level of iteration on the domain model and all the associated business logic.

It seems that mobile is pushing this type of design as it makes the most sense (so Facebook, Twitter and Google follow this approach quite a bit). It looks like the logical next step is why can't the desktop browsers be just another "View" as is in mobile.

baddox• 12 years ago

Discourse works this way. It's a Rails-powered API with an ember.js front end.

https://github.com/discourse/discourse

spoiledtechie• 12 years ago

I really liked where they were going with this and understood the idea of it rather fast.

I think its best seeing that you can also support and branch the API for that as well.

All your cache then sits on one api site rather than on multiple different sub domains...

Its an interesting concept.

wizzard5• 12 years ago

I haven't found that there's much overhead at all. And there are a LOT of benefits... for instance, you can use a much leaner framework on the services side, since all you really "need" is routing. The services can (should?) run on separate boxes, so you can divvy up labor vertically. You can also version the API so that when you want to make changes, you don't have to upgrade your web app all at once.

bobbygrace2• 12 years ago

FWIW, Trello didn’t launch with an API. It’s something we added in the first few months after launch. Just about everything goes through the API now since the mobile apps also use it, so you could say it’s an API first design NOW.

spolsky• 12 years ago

this blog post is by Bobby Grace, not by me.

avenger1233• 12 years ago

My mistake. Feels similar in style to your articles :) Sorry Bobby.

hunvreus• 12 years ago

It is one of the advantages of the API-first approach. I am convinced that's the way to go for building a modern Web app, but spinning off a special version of your client is not free; you still need to apply, as the author put it, "the occasional fix" and need to be aware that part of your audience is experiencing things through a different interface. Moreover, this approach requires a bit more investment upfront compared to regular Web development approaches.

wil4212• 12 years ago

How do they determine what browser version users are on so they can show the right version of jellydoughnut-xx?

wizzard5• 12 years ago

He kind of skips over this, but the way he says you don't even get served the "collection of files" until your browser is determined makes me think they're using the request header.

So maybe that 8.48% decrease is just people starting to spoof.

I feel like if you're savvy enough to be using Trello and yet still on IE9, there might be a reason you haven't upgraded.

Scorponok• 12 years ago

What, so you spoof your client so you can get a version that's unusable in your browser because of its poor feature support? That doesn't sound like a great idea.

yincrash• 12 years ago

How many people who use trello even knows how to get IE9 to spoof a UA header? I sure don't. And if they can't update their browser, they probably can't put some sort of request proxy in between to change headers.

wil4212• 12 years ago

still on IE9, there might be a reason you haven't upgraded.

Corporate IT users sometimes dont have a choice which is the case for some users on my current project. 2011 isnt that long ago to support something for a corporate app but I guess things move much faster other places.

tezzer• 12 years ago

I just got a report from NASA's systems admins saying they have approved IE9 for general rollout to the work force. The key paragraph:

"Beginning Tuesday, March 25, Internet Explorer (IE) 9 will be deployed to all ACES Windows computers. Not only does IE9 improve the security posture and comply with federal requirements, but it also has a new look and many new features. While there are later versions of IE available, the EUSO and HPES must do due diligence in analyzing each version from a security and compatibility perspective to ensure the protection of NASA systems. The ACES team will continue to evaluate and roll out the latest and safest versions possible."

So I had to laugh when the article stated, "Some of the browsers we supported at launch just can’t be considered modern by today’s standards. I’m talking about Internet Explorer 9 specifically."

dspillett2• 12 years ago

Our largest clients (both large banks over here) are still on XP+IE8 on their standard desktops. At least we are no refusing to support anything older (there are still pockets of IE7 at RBS it would seem) but I'd love to refuse to support IE8 too...

JohnTHaller4• 12 years ago

You should start refusing on April 8th, at which point Windows XP is unsupported and insecure.

mathattack2• 12 years ago

I was just pitching a client that was on IE 8. D'oh! Very hard to keep things working on older stuff. That said, it seems very surprising that overall usage of IE was so low. I would have thought it to be at least 20%.

giovannibajo12• 12 years ago

Trello launched from day zero, in Sep 2011, without IE8 support. At that point, IE <= 8 was about 80% of the IE crowd[1]. FogCreek said that IE8 support was coming, but it never materialized, and they eventually just passed on.

So the truth is that Trello always stayed pretty much ahead of the IE usage curves, so that most people with IE willing to use it, simply couldn't.

I guess this is the reason why they don't have many IE users in the first place.

[1] according to W3Counters, which is the first I found with 2011 numbers readily available.

will_work4tears• 12 years ago

Yeah, we just recently got our IE upgraded to 9 on our Army (MAMC) network. FF 24 ESR too... moving on up.

Unfortunately many networks on many of the bases are still using IE 7 and 8, so we have to support those some of the time (project dependent).

j_s• 12 years ago

Active users at work: 38% IE7, 8% IE8, and 45% IE9

yuhong• 12 years ago

I still remember the backlash from when they were going to require IE10 for VS2013.

ForHackernews• 12 years ago

IE9 is a dinosaur? Loads of locked-down corporate intranets still run IE6.

chc2• 12 years ago

The fact that one is from the Triassic while the other is from the Cretaceous doesn't make the latter less of a dinosaur.

droithomme• 12 years ago

I can't think of any dinosaurs that first came into existence 3 years ago in 2011 and were the most recent dinosaur of its particular kind available until September 2012, 20 months ago. It seems like a terrible metaphor to say everything more than 20 months old is a "dinosaur". It's such a bad metaphor in fact that I wonder for the sanity, competence and/or neutrality of anyone seriously advocating it. I doubt anyone genuinely and sincerely believes that things more than 20 months old are all dinosaurs, even tech things. On the other hand, I would not be surprised at all if such terms were used as part of a propaganda or agenda driven attempt to mislead people. That sort of thing happens a lot.

ceejayoz• 12 years ago

IE9 is a dinosaur? Loads of locked-down corporate intranets still run IE6.

IE6 is pond scum.

wila2• 12 years ago

Interesting to see that users using Vista are already being seen as 'should be dropped'. AFAIK Internet Explorer 9 is the highest IE version on MS Vista.

Not that I like IE or Vista, just seems to me that there are a ton of people out there with IE9 as max IE version.

jessaustin• 12 years ago

It makes me wonder why Ms bothered tying the browser to the OS in this way. It's not as though the Justice Dept. is going to haul them back into court to explain their fibbing about how great it was to tightly couple the OS to a particular "strategic" executable that runs on it. Was that really a concern when they came out with Vista?

radicalbyte• 12 years ago

I don't understand why Microsoft haven't created a special application servear for old IE versions. If an Enterprise could install a server which provided IE via a Remote Application window it would allow them to upgrade to the latest version of Windows.

Remote Application is already used to provide support for legacy apps, much in the same way that terminal emulators are used to access legacy mainframe systems.

Hrundi• 12 years ago

Microsoft provides free* virtual machines, each with a specific version of IE. Not quite the same thing though, but they are actually pretty cool.

http://www.modern.ie/en-us/virtualization-tools

* not sure if an enterprise can use them though.

saraid216• 12 years ago

If you go up to the main site, you'll notice there's a "free 3-month trial of BrowserStack". I think this effectively means that enterprise is fine.

Joeri• 12 years ago

Internet time moves fast, but not that fast. No way is it that hard to support IE9, and no way that a three year old browser can be classified a dinosaur. IE9 has a modern fast ES5 javascript engine, sufficient css3 support, canvas, inline svg, and fixed most of the IE-isms in earlier versions. Unless trello is porting their codebase to webgl i cannot imagine it being that much work to support ie9. Supporting ie9 is simply part of the cost of doing business.

mixmastamyk• 12 years ago

The article states support isn't being dropped, rather IE9 users are being shown to a land frozen in time. Not a bad strategy I'd think.

Gracefully Dropping Support for Dinosaur Browsers in Trello

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