Migrating IE Web Apps to Mozilla 407
PabloHoffman writes "Have you ever wondered what would it take to make your (unfortunately) IE-only web app to work on Firefox?. IBM published an interesting article about migrating Internet Explorer specific web applications to Mozilla-based browers. It covers basic cross-browser development techniques, and some developing strategies for overcoming the differences between both browsers."
Developers. (Score:1, Insightful)
That's Easy! (Score:5, Insightful)
Meh. Somebody needs to either fix IE, or take it out back and shoot it.
ObDuh strategy 101 (Score:2, Insightful)
The forgot something... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Developers. (Score:5, Insightful)
Not if the requirements document says build this app for IE only and don't worry about interoperability.
Re:Interesting question (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:How about making server side only apps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:How about making server side only apps? (Score:3, Insightful)
These issues lie with the developer at heart, and the QA engineers. One needs to ensure compatibility at the unit-testing stage, having followed standards (as in the IBM article) in the design and coding stages...
Re:Developers. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:The forgot something... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Developers. (Score:3, Insightful)
On the other hand, if IE starts falling out of power, then some companies may regret those poor choices, and some already are.
Here's the deal... (Score:1, Insightful)
IBM should read their own article (Score:2, Insightful)
Already been done (Score:2, Insightful)
It's called the W3C [w3c.org].
Sadly, despite the W3C's efforts, it seems that the Browser Pissing Contest rages on.
Re:How about making server side only apps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The forgot something... (Score:3, Insightful)
Obviously, when doing work for the company I have to be careful and make things look at least reasonably proper in IE (for which the IE7 javascript library has been a lifesaver). However, for my local LUG's webpage, I can just tell IE users to switch browsers or go fuck themselves.
You guess wrong (Score:4, Insightful)
All of the native framework web controls have two distinct rendering modes. One is for "uplevel" browsers which includes any javascript/DHTML/etc. goodness that the latest browsers support. The other is for "downlevel" browsers and basically renders everything in something like HTML 3.2 compatibility. The server runtime detects which mode to use based on a section of the machine.config called browserCaps (essentially the
Updated versions of the browserCaps info can be found here:
http://www.codeproject.com/aspnet/browsercaps.asp [codeproject.com]
It should be noted you can choose to either replace the data in your machine.config to make it a system-wide update, or just add the same data to your app's web.config file.
On a related note, you can find an updated version of the original browscap.ini here:
http://www.garykeith.com/browsers/downloads.asp [garykeith.com]
Re:.NET becoming deprecated (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Developers. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Or the other way around... (Score:3, Insightful)
Problem is that patching servers is boring, and they have more interesting things to do like deploy something new and noteworthy.
Re:The forgot something... (Score:4, Insightful)
That's a perfectly acceptable position to take. As long as your competitors take the same position, that is.
IE only is unprofessional (Score:4, Insightful)
If I have to use IE to use a website, my opinion about the company's website I'm on is usually changed. In this day in age, you have to be proactive, not reactive.
Re:The forgot something... (Score:1, Insightful)
It's lack of resources, not lack of foresight.
Not it doesn't (Score:3, Insightful)
And an unlimited amount of dodgyness. It doesn't make the application more robust at all but it might give a better user experience.
Any validation the client does MUST also be performed at the server end because
(1) How do you know the client DID validate it
(2) correctly
for some ill specified and overly cached version of "correctness"
Sam
Re:Here's the deal... (Score:3, Insightful)
I have not yet been able to ensure that the others that I work with do not have MSIE installed, but that is one of my goals. In furtherance of this goal, I will not suggest any application vendor that I know provides MSIE only applications. And I will not recommend any MSIE application. And I will recommend against the purchase of or use of any such application. (This doesn't mean that I'll always come right out and say why I'm against the application. Those who know me well will know my attitude towards MSIE, and they will need little explanation. For others, I'll find some easier to understand reason that is also correct..or I'll be silent...but security issues are almost always present, if I can't find any other valid reasons. A better approach, when there is time, is to come up with a competing product that I find superior.)
I consider MSIE to be a security nightmare, and we will have as little to do with it as I can manage.
Re:Developers. (Score:1, Insightful)
If I did that, I would be fired.
I am dead serious.
My employer is adamant about making use of specific IE-Only features, and about 'wasting' zero development effort on cross-browser compatibility. I do think this is short-sighted (and have said as much), but the fact remains that the person who signs my paychecks has given me very clear instructions on how I am to spend the development time he has purchased from me.
This does not make me a bad developer.
Oh, and I humbly suggest that you use a spell checker next time.
Use Standards (Score:2, Insightful)
It's not hard to code cross platform. Developers are just lazy. If web developers stuck to W3C standards than this wouldn't even be an issue. If game developers used OpenGL instead of DirectX than it would trivial to port games between platforms. And so forth.
Re:Developers. (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem arises when you depend on proprietary extensions.
Also, based on your argument, what do you consider an acceptable loss from potential sales revenue? Do you consider excluding 10% of the market to be acceptable? What if that 10% had a large chunk of disposable income and would be more likely to buy your product? Just because the "majority" uses IE doesn't mean it's right to exclude the minority who choose not to or cannot.
If anyone's being moronic, it's you.
Re:How about making server side only apps? (Score:1, Insightful)
Tom
Re:How about making server side only apps? (Score:3, Insightful)
Javascript has plenty of uses, but relying only on client-side code to validate data is a recipe for disaster.
Yes and no. If that is your only method for validating data, yes it is a recipe for disaster. However it can be very handy to validate data before a form is posted to make it easier to alert the user. Of course the server side componants should also validate what they receive as you state. A good three tier design needs to check validity on all three tiers.
I use a lot of javascript to make the UI cleaner (usually simple scripts), to make small changes to objects without having to reload a large page, and to validate form data before it is submitted. Since this is a company internal site I have the advantage of a limited number of browsers, nearly 50/50 between IE and Mozilla. Under these circumstances I can make use of javascript to a much greater extent than if I were creating a public face.
Money talks. (Score:3, Insightful)
Not when we have $$$ to spend. I do, and if your site won't let my browser through, you lost a customer.
It's also a good harbinger of how good their customer support is in general, I've found.
I would also point out that the ones with the small "world view" are the ones supporting only one browser.
Re:Already been done (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is that Microsoft just dosen't seem to give a damn what the W3c has to say about anything. Microsoft is a huge part of the standard making process but is not willing to abide by the rules it helped create. Any more discussion outside of w3c would be pointless because Microsoft would ignore that too.
The reason POP, telnet and FTP are standardised is that they were fully locked in concrete, with nobody willing to debate them further by the time Microsoft got onto the scene, thus they had no chance to embrace and extend them. The very fact that no more debate was allowed (unlike with w3c and HTML) is what saved them from a similar fate.
Next time you have a great idea that seems so obvious that it is brilliant, maybe you should simply look into what the w3c actually is when it is mentioned before you start prattling on about its shortcomings as a standard setting body.
Re:First stop: W3C standards (Score:4, Insightful)
Bwahahaha!
You obviously don't do professional web design. Getting the code to validate at W3C is the easy part!
Re:Use Standards (Score:3, Insightful)
If web developers stuck to W3C standards than this wouldn't even be an issue.
And browser developers. If browser developers stuck to W3C standards, web developers wouldn't even have a choice.
Insightul??? (Score:3, Insightful)
This brings us ASP.Net 2.0, which is so much of an improvement over the old ASP.Net, it's just amazing. Honestly I didn't care much for ASP.Net until I tried v2.0. It amazed me FAR more than everything else I've seen (like RoR, Zope, Plone, etc). Its good enough that I don't even wanna use anything else anymore (asp/php/whatever? no thanks!)
It's anything but deprecated/on it's way out or being replaced by something better (much the inverse - other platforms are adopting it - ever heard of Mono? I guess not.). It's currently THE best platform to develop for (web wise) and that has the best tools (VS.Net 2005 rocks).
See for yourself [asp.net]!
Clearly, you have no idea at all about all this. No wonder you posted as AC.
Why develop web apps with IE ? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:That's Easy! (Score:1, Insightful)
I like it even better than the FF debugging tools and miss it sorely when working on Linux or bsd.
Re:How about making server side only apps? (Score:4, Insightful)
Client-side validation of a big long ugly form that the user has to submit along with, say, a few MBs of files - is a way of saying "We don't hate you, and don't want you to hate us".
Don't dare trust it though. Don't trust a damned thing - make no assumptions about the correctness of anything the client sends.
Re:Mistakes (Score:2, Insightful)
For a good example of this, try logging into Yahoo! mail on a slow internet connection.
Username: usernameLastHalfOfPassword
Password: FirstHalfOfPassword
Re:Developers. (Score:3, Insightful)
Let's say you are implementing a feature and are faced with two approaches, the IE-only approach and the standards-compliant approach.
Even if you know your audience is IE users with no choice in browsers, it would still be unwise to choose the IE-only approach. You may be relying on some undocumented side-effect of IE that will get "fixed" in their next release/patch.
As an example, I had to support an app that provided a list of items as anchor tags. IE did not require the anchor tag to be closed since it would automatically close it on the next "</p>" tag. After upgrading to IE 5.5, this "feature" started causing stack overflow exceptions.
Most people, when they say "IE-specific" they actually mean "IE version x/windows verion y/service pack level z"-dependent.
Re:Read my last journal entry... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Mistakes (Score:2, Insightful)
This is exactly why I always fire a function onload that checks to see if the field to get focus has content first. If it does, then I don't focus it.
Re:Converge and respect (Score:3, Insightful)
I guess the comment is just trying to point out that there is no BENEFIT to not keeping to the standard and setting it. If they want to do something other than what W3c says, why not suggest it and let everyone adopt it or provide better solutions- as another pointed out, this is what w3c is for.
And you think people will listen? HA! Who cares? For the user, IE displays pages fine, so why would a user care about such technical detail of making it right? As long as 10-95% of people are using IE (yes- that means until eternity), people will make their pages compatible for it, so end users will never notice the difference, and never care what some hippie spouting open-source thinks. So no bank or major site is going to let their pages look horrible in IE due to some code changes, so they'll update it.
And M$ will say that IE is better for A B and C. And then you have a bit war. If there was a right answer, we wouldn't be having this discussion. If there was a superior OS in every way, we wouldn't need two... but each has it's advantages and market.
-M