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You down with OCB?
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<blockquote data-quote="AbdulAlhazred" data-source="post: 5483742" data-attributes="member: 82106"><p>Dunno where you get your info, but I follow this fairly closely and the numbers I see peg IE6/7 combined at between 30 and 40% of all browsers, with IE6 in the 12-18% range. Granted it is presumed that a lot of the IE6 out there is corporate, but even so that puts home use of the 2 basically obsolete browsers at probably 25% of users. IE8 is coming along pretty fast now, but is still overall a lot less than half of all IE, and IE is around 59% market share according to the most reliable numbers.</p><p></p><p>As far as Chrome Frame goes, forget it. People that still haven't upgraded to IE8 probably don't know what a plugin is and wouldn't be able to install it if they did. If I've learned anything in 15 years of web dev it is that you simply cannot say "screw the people with old browsers" when dealing with sites intended for a large and fairly general audience.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Yeah, I know all about them, trust me. First of all even when they work perfectly, which things like JQuery are pretty good about, there are vast differences in how IE renders things vs other browsers, and smaller but still significant differences between Safari, Chrome, and FireFox. All of these can be overcome, but that requires many man-hours of work that are not available for other things. UI development tools are a similar story, they exist but they are MUCH cruder than MSVS or XCode. Again this is a manpower issue, you can do whatever you want with them, but it will take 2-3 times longer.</p><p></p><p></p><p>Well, sure, the existing OCB UI might not be totally unusable on a tablet, but it probably is a subpar experience at best. Obviously nobody can verify just how good or bad it would be at this point. </p><p></p><p>Here's the thing, for an HTML5/JS version of OCB to be worth the hefty extra chunk of resources required to develop vs SL AND the abandoning of as much as 20-25% of your desktop user base they would have captured basically the iPad market, at best. We'll assume an iPad friendly OCB would work OK on the desktop, that's plausible. They then have to weigh that extra gain vs the loss AND the extra work required, which effectively means less features and less quality. Then you also factor in that their dev team is already fully spun up on the MS technology. SL is a subset of .NET, so there are code reuse opportunities there, and just general familiarity with the tools and languages. </p><p></p><p>I agree, SL is in a lot of ways a stopgap, but given the HUGE impatience level of DDI subscribers to have stuff working YESTERDAY OR WE'LL UNSUBSCRIBE!!!!!!! it is quite understandable and there's a good business case for it.</p><p></p><p>Beyond that, if the client is designed correctly it should be possible to engineer the interaction between the front end and the back end so that 99% of the application logic is in the back end, so another team can come in and design the HTML based client pretty quickly and it is all pure UI. That would make adding new stuff or fixing bugs ALMOST all just back end work with maybe a few minor UI tweaks to get access to new options or whatever in a few cases.</p><p></p><p>Trust me on this, I'm not a big fan of SL. I'm sitting here on my trusty Linux box typing this and OCB is utterly hopeless to ever run even on my desktop. I have to fire up Virtualbox to even get to the thing and it is a PITA. For my personal use an HTML version would be way better. I just think it wasn't the most practical way for them to go at this time.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="AbdulAlhazred, post: 5483742, member: 82106"] Dunno where you get your info, but I follow this fairly closely and the numbers I see peg IE6/7 combined at between 30 and 40% of all browsers, with IE6 in the 12-18% range. Granted it is presumed that a lot of the IE6 out there is corporate, but even so that puts home use of the 2 basically obsolete browsers at probably 25% of users. IE8 is coming along pretty fast now, but is still overall a lot less than half of all IE, and IE is around 59% market share according to the most reliable numbers. As far as Chrome Frame goes, forget it. People that still haven't upgraded to IE8 probably don't know what a plugin is and wouldn't be able to install it if they did. If I've learned anything in 15 years of web dev it is that you simply cannot say "screw the people with old browsers" when dealing with sites intended for a large and fairly general audience. Yeah, I know all about them, trust me. First of all even when they work perfectly, which things like JQuery are pretty good about, there are vast differences in how IE renders things vs other browsers, and smaller but still significant differences between Safari, Chrome, and FireFox. All of these can be overcome, but that requires many man-hours of work that are not available for other things. UI development tools are a similar story, they exist but they are MUCH cruder than MSVS or XCode. Again this is a manpower issue, you can do whatever you want with them, but it will take 2-3 times longer. Well, sure, the existing OCB UI might not be totally unusable on a tablet, but it probably is a subpar experience at best. Obviously nobody can verify just how good or bad it would be at this point. Here's the thing, for an HTML5/JS version of OCB to be worth the hefty extra chunk of resources required to develop vs SL AND the abandoning of as much as 20-25% of your desktop user base they would have captured basically the iPad market, at best. We'll assume an iPad friendly OCB would work OK on the desktop, that's plausible. They then have to weigh that extra gain vs the loss AND the extra work required, which effectively means less features and less quality. Then you also factor in that their dev team is already fully spun up on the MS technology. SL is a subset of .NET, so there are code reuse opportunities there, and just general familiarity with the tools and languages. I agree, SL is in a lot of ways a stopgap, but given the HUGE impatience level of DDI subscribers to have stuff working YESTERDAY OR WE'LL UNSUBSCRIBE!!!!!!! it is quite understandable and there's a good business case for it. Beyond that, if the client is designed correctly it should be possible to engineer the interaction between the front end and the back end so that 99% of the application logic is in the back end, so another team can come in and design the HTML based client pretty quickly and it is all pure UI. That would make adding new stuff or fixing bugs ALMOST all just back end work with maybe a few minor UI tweaks to get access to new options or whatever in a few cases. Trust me on this, I'm not a big fan of SL. I'm sitting here on my trusty Linux box typing this and OCB is utterly hopeless to ever run even on my desktop. I have to fire up Virtualbox to even get to the thing and it is a PITA. For my personal use an HTML version would be way better. I just think it wasn't the most practical way for them to go at this time. [/QUOTE]
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