Are you kidding? Developing for a crappy browser first is the perfect recipe for an unmaintainable mess of code, since you will be relying on hacks to get IE to do render correctly, then adding hacks again for every browser that does the right thing.

First develop for a standards-compliant browser, then add (conditional) hacks to support IE. The other way around is just silly.

I think we posted this at almost the exact same time. Awesome.

But IE6 isn't 70% of your userbase. Maybe 70% of your userbase is IE but only maybe 20-25% of that is IE6 so spending 30% more time/resources on IE6 is what I would call a major fail. But hey, that's just me.

And have you ever tried to develop complex ui sites on IE? I'm sorry...it just sucks and there is no good way around that. And I'm someone who knows IE6/7 quirks pretty good. Their script debuggers are utter crap and their developer toolbar is the most ancient thing out there. At least in IE8 they are copying Firebug...at that point it might not suck as much but who knows until I use it a while.

Yes. I developed the most complex UI site I've ever seen, Twiddla, on IE first followed by Firefox.

I never understood all the IE hate, to be honest. Until Chrome came out, I used IE7 as my daily browser. It's just better than Firefox in my opinion.

Voted up for developing Twiddla for IE.

I share your sentiment.. I develop against IE first then test it against the "good" browsers... which rarely screw it up. IE sucks for script debugging.. I mean EPIC suck. You're not even told what line of what file is screwed up (IE seems to concatenate everything into 1 file when giving the error report), but I've learned to rely on myself not to make common scripting mistakes, and created a cross-browser "console" object to aid in debugging.

Safari has the worst script debugging on the planet. It essentially tells you whether or not there was an error. Oh, wait... and how many errors, total. Thanks, Safari!

Get VS.NET, and suddenly IE has the best script debugging around. Firebug rocks and all, but VS.NET will drop you into a breakpoint will a full call stack, watch, step thru, etc. It's a proper debugger.

And yeah, it takes about the same level of effort to develop against IE as it does against FF. The advantage is that your stuff generally then works right in Firefox first try.

Um, Safari has a full Javascript debugger built in:

http://developer.apple.com/internet/safari/faq.html#anchor14 (among other google results)

Amazing.. I can do console.log(). And if there's an error (which the link provided conveniently has), I get to see the entire file which gave the error. So helpful... I now know which file to sprinkle console.log()s in. Furthermore, it doesn't work at all for dynamically loaded JS.

But, then again, there apparently were several Google results.

And somehow, you managed to cause a bug in Twiddla I have never seen elsewhere. When you make the window smaller, some of your content actually goes off the edge:

http://dustincurtis.com/screenshots/Team_WhiteBoarding_with_...

I disagree. IE is the moving target. If you want maintainable code, it is best to build to standards, then hack to IE with conditionals.

IE has had the same box model since 1995. It is, and always has been the standard.

If you recall, Netscape used that same box model until version 6. So if you'd like to look for a point where standards were broken, look to W3C and Mozilla. It's certainly not Microsoft's fault that the "standards" organization decided to change the fundamental way things are rendered in a browser.

Not to mention that IE's box-model (in quirks-mode) is actually sane compared to the W3C standard.

see : http://books.google.com/books?id=ZCPWYFoWaMIC&pg=PA289&#...

Just because it's older doesn't mean that it should be the standard.

"Standards organizations" are there for a reason, so that issues like this wouldn't be so egregrious. Microsoft has had a while to fix it, and 8 years later far too many people are still using an old deprecated browser.