IE 10+ Only? Who is Umbraco 7 made for?

[Dan Booth]

According to the release notes it states: "we have been running the application in the latest Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE10 - we do not plan to support any older versions then those [sic]."

Based on my experience, this would mean almost certainly that we could not use Umbraco 7 for the vast majority of clients for the foreseeable future. It also means almost certainly zero adoption for anyone developing UK public sector websites. So it doesn't really matter how awesome it is, I can't imagine it being a viable choice for most development companies I know. Isn't this a shame?

I also think that even if we could offer it to clients, that most would find the UI more confusing than the older version. It may look more modern, but we know from Windows 8 and, to some extents, VS2012, that minimalism doesn't always equal usability, especially among the less computer literate. It feels too much to me that U7 interface has been developed by "hipsters" wanting to follow all the latest trends with too little regard for content editors (who invariably aren't hipsters or even good with computers). The old U6 interface icons may look ugly to us but I know from experience that people find it easy to use. It uses a paradigm that is familiar to a lot of people and is quite common across many CMS's.

Don't get me wrong, there are some amazing new features in 7 - such as Container document types. But I'd rather have basic stuff like an always-open tree, right-click access to common features and some better visual cues for what is going on. Maybe these will come, but then again if most of our clients won't be able to use it, then does it matter? I also think visually it's a bit, well, amateurish looking. It kinda looks like it's been put together by developers rather than designers. I'm presuming it's going to get a major polish at some point?

Sorry to seem negative, but sometimes I think people are rather scared of criticising Umbraco (for fear of upsetting all the hardworking people), and that's not always healthy.

[sniffdk]

I haven't yet played around with the beta, so I can't comment much on the UI part of things.

But I strongly agree that IE10+ only seems very limiting, and I do indeed see it as being a stopping factor for (our) future potential clients.

I do find it to be a very odd choice though. Considering the normal Umbraco take on backwards compatibility, dropping IE9 and below seems totally out of place. I would love to hear the reasoning for this.

And Dan, I actually very much appreciate you speaking out with criticism, something that is not too often seen here.

I really do hope the Core team sees it as constructive criticism instead of unimportant ranting.

Cheers

Mads 

@sniffdk

[Richard Terris]

I found the UI quite intuitive actually although does require some polish as you said - to me the save button appearing up the top right is not where I was expecting it.

But a major overhaul like that was always going to divide opinion and is a bold move by Umbraco that shows that they're trying to move forward so kudos on that front.

You're absolutely right about adoption though, a number of clients I deal with specifically use older versions of IE, some as far back as 6 - I don't think this is too uncommon in the corporate arena where the browser choice is controlled by a large I.T department.

But I find it genuinely hard to say what is intuitive and what's not; Because I find something easy to use doesn't mean the "average" user will so I guess it might be interesting to survey content editors and other types of existing users from as wide a spectrum as possible, if that's not already been done.

In any case I don't think there's any stopping the wheels that are now in motion.

[James South]

I haven't had the opportunity to play with Belle at all so like Mads I cannot comment on the UI. I am curious now though.

For us, no support below IE10 means Umbraco 7 is simply a no go; we have to support IE8 and we will do for the next couple of years at least. Our situation will be the same as across almost all digital agencies in the UK.

What is causing the limitation? It's not Angular, they state that they do support IE8 in their FAQ? If it's something HQ need help with I'd be happy to try and help overcome any limiters.

I'm a huge Umbraco fan and I love the direction most of the stuff is going but I feel very strongly that providing this level of support is not wise and will hurt future development.

James

@james_m_south

[Geoff Beaumont]

Can anyone point me at those release notes? I can't find them.

I also haven't played with v7 yet (installed the latest nightly yesterday hoping to test and see what the actual browser compatibility was like, but couldn't get it to work - I'll try later with a different build), but this is setting off alarm bells!

Right now, IE8 support is a must - but I can't be certain whether that need will disappear over the next few months as XP reaches end of life (all our clients who are using both Umbraco and IE8 are still on XP - I do have a large client whose standard build is Windows 7/Server 2008 terminal services with IE8, but they aren't using Umbraco).

IE9 definitely isn't going to be going away any time soon, so lack of support for that is a much bigger deal to us.

[Anthony Dang]

They said there will not be explicit support for IE9 and below. That's not to say that it will not work. There may be some UI quirks.

Here's my 2 cents about what's going to happen...

By codegarden next year they will have v7 really really polished. At that point they will add some "if ie9" etc css/js to fix the quirks.

Besides, in a year this will hopefully be less of an issue because hopefully less clients will have old browsers.

On Monday, 14 October 2013 21:36:39 UTC+1, Dan Booth wrote:

[Dan Booth]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2013 10:08:23 UTC+1, Geoff Beaumont wrote:

Can anyone point me at those release notes? I can't find them.

Sure - http://our.umbraco.org/contribute/releases/700 

"Browsers and accesibility

As almost all the html and css has been replaced, alot of testing the of the visual side of things, and accessibility is needed, we have been running the application in the latest Chrome, Safari, Firefor and IE10 - we do not plan to support any older versions then those. [sic]"

[Geoff Beaumont]

Thanks Dan.

Anthony - it doesn't read like there's any intention of adding support for IE9 later, in fact it explicitly states that there's no plan to support older browsers.

[Dan Booth]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2013 09:24:31 UTC+1, Richard Terris wrote:

I found the UI quite intuitive actually although does require some polish as you said - to me the save button appearing up the top right is not where I was expecting it.

Sure, a lot of it was pretty intuitive because it follows how Umbraco currently works. But I did find certain aspects confusing - the lack of a permanently visible tree meant that after you created a page you felt like you lost context. Actions you'd normally accomplished via right-click, such as deleting a page or sorting nodes, required a lot more clicks (once you figured out you had to click "..." and then "more actions").

 

But a major overhaul like that was always going to divide opinion and is a bold move by Umbraco that shows that they're trying to move forward so kudos on that front.

Bold can be good. But let's not forget Umbraco 5 was a bold rewrite, too :) If you move the cheese too far, people will be left behind.

But I find it genuinely hard to say what is intuitive and what's not; Because I find something easy to use doesn't mean the "average" user will so I guess it might be interesting to survey content editors and other types of existing users from as wide a spectrum as possible, if that's not already been done.

I agree - I can't be neutral in my judgement as I'm not an "average" user myself. But in my experience content editors like familiar paradigms - such as Word, the "desktop", folders etc. whereas Neils mentioned in another thread they were moving away from all that. 

In any case I don't think there's any stopping the wheels that are now in motion.

No, I agree. We just have to try and help make it as good as it can be with feedback.

 

[Niels Hartvig]

The wording is a bit off - what's meant is that we're optimising and testing for modern browsers which is IE10+, Chrome, Safari. It doesn't mean that we're trying to *not* make it work for people in the UK public sector. 

While we'd love to make everyone happy, our resources in the Umbraco HQ are limited and if we had to add official support for more browsers, v7 wouldn't happen - we simply don't have enough manpower to deal with that. It's really that simple. We know from past experience that officially supporting older browser quirks in a large application like Umbraco is not a small task (especially when it comes to the testing part). However, this is an area where the community - or a subcommunity like Umbraco users in the UK public sector - could contribute. Testing and submitting pull requests for making v7 work perfectly in older browsers are very welcome (although, there's some obvious HTML5/CSS3 features which can't be supported). 

But before you all think we're nuts and haven't done our homework, we actually did some research in this area. First of all, Microsoft is aggressively rolling out IE 10+ with auto-updates and the browser adoption will be faster than previously with their forced updates (where we all know what it felt like to be stuck with clients in IE6 land). Secondly, IE10 is *actually* the most popular version of IE today; twice the size of IE8, 33% more than IE9 and with a clear growth pattern. Because of this we're not alone in dropping support for older Microsoft browsers, among many - Google Analytics - is dropping their IE8 support by the end of the year. 

On a more general level, it's completely legit to be negative but let's try to keep a decent, constructive tone on this forum, Dan. Calling out the core team as hipsters could easily start a downward spiral where focus gets removed from the great constructive criticism in your post that can move the project forward. It's also helpful if we keep forum posts to a (one) specific topic so information doesn't get hidden behind specific topic lines.

All the best,

NIels...

[Geoff Beaumont]

Okay, that's fair enough - that's a perfectly reasonable approach to take. Might be an idea to update the release notes to reflect this!

I doubt any of us have any illusions about the amount of work involved in supporting older browsers, and if IE8 support can reasonably be dropped it will be a big labour saver (and probably avoid compromises having to be made with what's done in more modern browsers in order to keep things maintainable).

That said, while I'm hopeful that we'll see a rapid decrease in numbers of old IE browsers between the XP end of life and automated updates, I think you're being wildly optimistic about the upgrade trajectories we'll see from larger (and many medium sized*) organisations where automated updates will be disabled and a usually highly conservative desktop strategy enforced. We'll see what the stats say...

* - My most conservative clients in this respect are actually mid sized businesses, who lack specialist desktop support teams and so play as safe as they can. Which generally means they upgrade only when forced to.

[Carsten Fallesen]

I had a brief look at v7 the beta today and was quite surprised that it did not even start in IE9. After a bit of debugging it turns out to be simple to fix by adding a few lines of conditional code in the main HTML document. 

For IE8 it seems to be a lot worse, since v7 uses jquery 2.0.3 which does not support IE8 and below. Maybe it will be possible to load jquery 1.10 instead when using IE8 or below, but that seems like hack.

I am also a bit worried about the missing support for older browsers, but on the other hand we have to let go at some point and as I understand it v6 is not going to be abandoned in the near future.

[Niels Hartvig]

While we do see that some organisations are sticking to old versions
of Internet Explorer, we often see that users who have a specific need
are allowed Chrome or another alternative browser. I also don't think
that Google would be dropping IE8 support if it would be a major
showstopper.

Best,
Niels...

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Umbraco UX" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an
> email to umbraco-ux+...@googlegroups.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.



--

-

Chief Unicorn (founder)
Umbraco - the Friendly CMS

Højbyvej 5A
DK-5260 Odense S
Denmark

http://umbraco.org
Phone: +45 70 26 11 62

[Dan Booth]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2013 14:59:58 UTC+1, Niels Hartvig wrote:

I also don't think
that Google would be dropping IE8 support if it would be a major
showstopper.

Have you considered that Google might have an ulterior agenda for this? 

 

[Niels Hartvig]

I doubt they'd be ready to sacrifice Analytics usage (which drives their primary business - Adwords) for Chrome if that's would you're suggesting. 

/n

--

You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Umbraco UX" group.
To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to umbraco-ux+...@googlegroups.com.
For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.

[Dan Booth]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2013 15:52:10 UTC+1, Niels Hartvig wrote:

I doubt they'd be ready to sacrifice Analytics usage (which drives their primary business - Adwords) for Chrome if that's would you're suggesting. 

To be honest, what Google are doing is a red herring to this discussion. They make billions in revenue and have lots of streams. 

All I know is that I've worked with hundreds of clients building Umbraco websites and there has been a consistent requirement from a significant proportion of them to support IE8. As a business we cannot afford to just drop these clients - they will go elsewhere. We're not Google.

Since that is the case I don't personally want to invest a lot of time in Umbraco 7 as it will be a waste of my time, since we won't be able to use it. I find this really sad as I'm sure, in time, it would have been great. Oh well, we can stick with 6.

[Niels Hartvig]

Dan,

It's positive that there's an alternative even and you should also be
happy to see that we're running v6 and v7 side-by-side for a while
(with a 6.2 scheduled post v7 launch).

Ideally, I could only hope that you did want to invest a bit of time
into v7 as both the project and your clients could clearly benefit
from it. Maybe do like Carsten Fallesen did earlier and investigate
and report how we could make it possible to run v7 together with older
browsers.

All the best,
Niels...

[Dan Booth]

Sure, Neils. It may be it won't require that much to make it work. I do understand what a pain it is supporting older versions of IE - but in the commercial world this is something we're always up against, unfortunately. I am really excited about U7 and will definitely be hoping we can use it going forward. But I do see v6 having to be around for a fair while yet (but the fact that it will be supported is great).

Cheers,

Dan 

[Shannon Deminick]

Just some quick info about v7 IE compatibility. 

IE9 - isn't really HTML5 compliant and we using HTML5 parts that IE9 doesn't have. Currently IE9 will not work for any file uploads in the UI and for lots of form validation since it doesn't support HTML 5 form validation.

here's the chart

http://html5test.com/compare/browser/ie09/ie10/chrome29.html

To support IE9 there's angular bits that would need changing, non-html5 form field validation fixes, and we'd have to re-create how file uploading works from scratch - we are currently doing this with a multi-part form submission which works extremely well with one request, allows any number of files to be uploaded at once and also lets developers hook into the current editor API if they wish to attach their own files - but only supported in html5 browsers.

http://shazwazza.com/post/Uploading-files-and-JSON-data-in-the-same-request-with-Angular-JS

So file uploading would have to be rewritten with a new API - or we'd detect support for multi-part posts and revert to a legacy async file upload (most likely using a custom directive + jquery file upload) which would need to submit files before the real form data, wait till they're uploaded then submit the form data and wire it all up.

IE8 support would require quite a dramatic overhaul of all of the markup that currently exists in v7

I think for both IE9/8 there's be quite a few styling issues that would need to be hacked to get working as well.

[Dan Booth]

On Wednesday, 16 October 2013 23:17:53 UTC+1, Shannon Deminick wrote:

Just some quick info about v7 IE compatibility. 

IE9 - isn't really HTML5 compliant and we using HTML5 parts that IE9 doesn't have...

I take it that this requires something more than just using a compatibility framework like Modernizr ? Will the architecture be pluggable so maybe the community can chip in, either with packages or pull requests?

Also, slightly unrelated, is the UI theme based on bootstrap? How customised is it? I'm just wondering if it would easily adapt to bootstrap themes, as that would be a cool way of allowing easy customisation.

[Dan]

That's interesting, thanks Shannon.

Out of curiosity, I thought that v7 was using BlueImp File Upload, which has IE6+ support?  If it is, then is it the Angular integration with this that limits the legacy browser support?

Regarding the form validation, could something like http://parsleyjs.org/ be useful here?  It allows you to use HTML5 validation but falls back gracefully to IE7.

Thanks,

Dan

[Geoff Beaumont]

Given that it sounds like IE9 support is going to involve different versions of server side code (and cover areas that are particularly crucial from a security perspective, like file uploads), one of the main challenges for getting this working is going to be keeping IE9 specific code clearly marked (ideally separate). At some point we aren't going to need IE9 support any more and we don't want crufty unmaintained code cluttering up the Umbraco code base.

On the UI side it sounds like most things can be handled, as Dan says, with Modernizr/conditional comments and some javascript and CSS shims - it should be relatively easy to keep that cleanly separated.

[Geoff Beaumont]

On Thursday, October 17, 2013 9:16:01 AM UTC+1, Geoff Beaumont wrote:

Given that it sounds like IE9 support...

Meant to add that for entirely selfish reasons I'm only considering IE9 - unlike Dan I, for our particular client base I can see IE8 support not being required by the time v7 is ready for the wild.

[Adam Shallcross]

Just a quick question...

Is there no way of supporting both options and show the version specific to the browser the user is logging into the backend on?

What I mean is in the short term until we don't have to support IE8 can we not just detect what browser the person is using and show the old interface and if they are using a newer browser they can use the shiny new version?

This way you get the best of both worlds until such time that the browser wars end and we are all IE10 and above?

This would also prevent all the arguing going back and forth between us here about why U7 doesn't support older browsers...just revert back to the old interface for those people who can't use the new one in a full and modern experience.

I understand there may be some areas that may not work such as some datatypes, but is this not worth investigating and leave it up to the developers to mend the areas in the old interface that they specifically need to work for their custom installations?

I am not suggesting that the HQ should support the older interface and make any improvements to it. All their effort should be in improving the new U7 interface, but it seems to be a semi-solution that may work.

Although I am not overly technical and may be speaking out of turn...just trying to find a solution of best fit to avoid the constant tooing and froing :)

[Shannon Deminick]

@Dan - file uploading is using HTML multi-part form data - as mentioned above and full details are on that blog post. This allows us to upload any number of files + JSON data in *one* request. It would take some API re-jigging to support an alternate option but would prefer to use that as a fallback mechanism if using a non-html5 compliant browser. And I'm sure there's a way that we can work around the HTML5 form validation + angular integration but that'll involve some effort.

@Adam, this is why we still have 6.x support and we'll continue to enhance and release it alongside v7. If your client's browsers simply will not support v7 then they can still happily carry along using v6. It is not possible to have v6 + v7 running in the same site for various technical reasons.

At some stage in the future with some community involvement I'd assume that it could be possible to have support for IE9 but it will involve time and browser specific hacks.

[carl....@gmail.com]

Care to share some code? Which file are we talking about?