There's lots of enterprisey stuff out there that only "supports" various versions of IE, and bounces out other makes and models of browser. HN folks may or may not see much of that, because that stuff is typically in various corporate portal technology.
In health-care IT in particular, there's a popular radiology app that uses an ActiveX control that is bug for bug compatible with IE6 and doesn't work on IE7. That's an important reason for browser-upgrade inertia in that business. Another reason is the risk of hassles. What hospitals use now sorta works. An upgrade to IE7 might cause some patient-critical thing to break, and then all hell would break loose and the IT folks would get sacked.
It may or may not be good startup marketing to slam IE. For those of us who serve health-care and other institutional customers, it makes us green with envy, no doubt.
But it is definitely good startup engineering, if you can get away with it, to cut down the workload of qualifying various browsers by simply eliminating a vendor from the test matrix.
I don't notice Microsoft offering any labor or money to help developers qualify on their browser products, or to incent the big institutions (who provide substantially all their revenue) to upgrade.
Very true, but in some cases (such as mine) an individual working on an app can slowly work towards cross browser compatibility every time they touch a page. After a year, I'm almost there. :) There are several other apps... but you do what you can.
In health-care IT in particular, there's a popular radiology app that uses an ActiveX control that is bug for bug compatible with IE6 and doesn't work on IE7. That's an important reason for browser-upgrade inertia in that business. Another reason is the risk of hassles. What hospitals use now sorta works. An upgrade to IE7 might cause some patient-critical thing to break, and then all hell would break loose and the IT folks would get sacked.
It may or may not be good startup marketing to slam IE. For those of us who serve health-care and other institutional customers, it makes us green with envy, no doubt.
But it is definitely good startup engineering, if you can get away with it, to cut down the workload of qualifying various browsers by simply eliminating a vendor from the test matrix.
I don't notice Microsoft offering any labor or money to help developers qualify on their browser products, or to incent the big institutions (who provide substantially all their revenue) to upgrade.