new ASP.NET MVC 3 application, browsers considerations

Question

we are building a new MVC 3 application to support our business, timeline is aggressive and plenty of features to implement. I would like to understand if supporting also IE7 instead of only IE8, IE9 and Chrome would slow down development or if in the end is only about some minor adjustments in the css files.

provided that all javascript / DOM selections/manipulations will be done with JQuery can we imagine all the client side code will be fully working on IE7 and IE8/9 or do you think supporting IE7 as well would become a major effort and not only minor styling exercise?

Thanks!

Answer 1

If you are lucky enough to have to only rely on the jQuery dependency then you should find that supporting IE7 is pretty simple if you are already supporting IE8. You will not find this to be the case with other opensource js projects (OpenLayers for example is not fun to work with even though it claims cross browser compatibility).

What I do suggest is that you build generic content and css templates beforehand and ensure that they work in IE7. You should find that you will not have any other issues. I wouldn't underestimate the overhead fixing css can cause. We did have to rework our entire css at one one point as these so-called ie7 fixes started to become unmaintainable (incremental hackery is likely to become unwieldy).

It is all dependent on what you are doing exactly though, but in the average case should be quite straightforward. Dealing with browser performance and memory leaks in web applications is a whole different ballgame.

My personal preference would be to just support what you must. I am happy to ditch ie6/7 wherever possible, but I appreciate this isn't always practical if you want to get paid at the end of the day.

Answer 2

I may regret saying this because you are asking about IE*, but yes, you should be fine assuming IE7 will mostly likely function like IE8/9 with regards to jQuery.

There is probably a lot about specific issues with IE7 that do not work with different packages of jQuery, but without knowing your code, your jQuery version, or how you will implement it; its hard to offer a better solution.

Our company maintains a jQuery enabled site that gets 5k page views a day. There are currently no known jQuery bugs and we are using jQuery 1.3.2. It has been my experience that newer releases only offer even more compatibility of browsers.

Here is our divide if it helps:

Answer 3

based on the experience of the current project i'm working on, most of your effort will be CSS on IE7, it costs some much effort that would make u think it would be a better world for developers without IE6/7

Answer 4

Most of our troubles with IE7 have been styling issues, jQuery hides almost all scripting problems for us. These styling issues can become time-sinks if you haven't seen them before, but otherwise are often easy to work around. It may help to use some boilerplate CSS, for example borrow from html5reset (CSS only). It often already contains some fixes on consistency.

Some other things to consider:

• What type of application are you creating? What kind of html/css/js features will you be using?
• How "wild" will your styling be?
• What type of users are you targeting, and what browsers are they using? Gather some info on your user base with a Google Analytics account if you're unsure.

In the end, my advice: make support for IE7 a feature, estimate the workload with your team. Then explain things to the business and have them decide how important it is.

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As a fun note, have a look at the number of questions per tag I just dug up:

• 11,696 IE questions
• 8,209 Firefox questions
• 6,692 Chrome questions
• 3,244 IE8 questions
• 2,833 Safari questions
• 2,406 IE7 questions <<<<<<<<
• 1,596 IE6 questions