I think a reasonable approach is: "It should look great in the latest Firefox and Chrome, and it should be usable in IE 10, even if it looks a bit rough." The effort to make it look great in every browser that ever existed is pointless. If a customer insists on that, charge them triple the price.

Liked for the thumbnail

Thumbnail is Dope... 😂😍😍

When I first started web development, our boss insisted we had to support back to IE4 and the sites had to look pretty much identical in all browsers. We'd have to support at least three different major versions of IE, all with their unique quirks. Oh the fun of adding multiple containing divs just to fix some basic alignment. Things feel much simpler now.

Excellent lecture, Kevin! I wasn't intending to watch the whole video but it was so intriguing I stayed to the end and was so glad I did. Your videos are terrific and I watch one or more almost every day. Keep up the good work!

0:52 "But before you run away..." - said Kevin when unsuspecting me just ran away to the kitchen to check up on the cooking disaster. Wow, a timing.

Very informative and to the point Kevin! Absolutely agree with you, since it’s almost impossible to make it perfect for each browser.

This is an exceptionally good video as it contains some very important core facts we should be aware of before we start to write the code; well done Kevin.

This death row inmate (IE Explorer) already suffered a lot. It's victims are suffering with it. I think it's time to set it's execution date and stop all this sufferings. BTW Great discussion Kevin like always. Very thoughtful and mature insight with very valid arguments.

Haha, had to like this video just for the thumbnail, honestly portrays my feelings towards IE xD Cheers Kevin! Doin' great as always!!

Recent subscriber here. You are right on the money. I coded my first web page in early 1996 before we even had CSS. Ever since then I have always stuck to my 3 point design principle. 1, Content, without adequate content a site is of little value. 2, Ease of navigation. If the visitor can't find it, even adequate content is of little value. And way down the line of importance, 3, Make it pretty. Too many sites these days put #3 at the top of the list and forget 1 and 2 entirely. I've always coded my sites in such a way to avoid using any fancy or gimmicky thing if the usability of the site requires that thing to work. Use the fancy things to make it look pretty, not to make the site work. BTW less than .5% of the visitors to my personal site still use IE, so few that IE doesn't even show up in my top 50 browser list anymore.

Very informative, Kevin. Keep up with the quality content!

If the internet was a group project IE is that one group member that slacks off and barely does enough to be a team player lol..

Awesome Kevin, I agree with your thoughts and I do have the same.

Adapt what is useful, reject what is useless, and add what is specifically your own. Bruce Lee

Your thumbnails are always spot on hahaha.

I had this exact problem at my work. We develop sites for Chrome and I saw your video where I learned about aspect-ratio. I used it in my work and boss came to me and said some pictures aren't displaying correctly. After some debugging I found out that boss is using Safari and he wants our sites to work in Safari also. So I had to rework that site without aspect-ratio and it just felt wrong :D

The cover image is priceless.

I appreciate the insight that some people don't have a browser choice. I hadn't considered that before.

What a difference 4 years makes. IE is no longer supported, and you can just say "IE isn't supported anymore." If companies really have to use it for some legacy app (which should be rewritten), then turn on IE emulation on Edge and call it a day. Likewise, Edge has moved to the Chromium engine so... it's pretty much Chrome. Develop in Chrome or Edge, test in Firefox and a sanity check in Chrome/Edge and Safari.

I totally agree Kevin. There are games I really want to play but my graphics card doesn't support them or I don't have enough RAM. Does that mean game devs should stop making super awesome games with 4k graphics? No, it means I need to upgrade my gaming rig. The same goes for browsers, if you aren't tech savvy enough to realise that there are other browsers besides IE then you probably won't even know notice what you are missing out on. If you are then go and download Firefox or Chrome.

Great video, worth every single minute!

Thank you for an insightful talk. I read somewhere thought that it is better to avoid polyfills and go with the @support instead. Shouldn't we strive for very dry CSS?

Great video as always

At first I hated Internet Explorer for the difficulties it presented but, as I was solving each of the problems, I began to enjoy the successes as if I had knocked out Muhammad Ali or touched the rear part of Queen Elizabeth II (I have a fixation with the big ships). Seriously speaking, the learning curve was short and fast. I think I got the right attitude, which is not usual in me (ask my family). Since then, I consider adapting a design for full compatibility with Internet Explorer as an extra item in the quotes I give to clients. Now I'm going to watch this video. ;) Cheers.

Watch out for z-index flattening in PostCSS/NanoCSS. At work, I had a weird bug that didn't flatten all the z-indexes after inheriting from an old theme's styles I had to overwrite. It took us ages to figure out it was PostCSS/NanoCSS. Don't worry though, can disable that feature.

Liked it even before watching for the epic thumbnail

My approach is simple: code it to meet expectations. If you need to support ie11 and edge etc then you do that. If you only need to worry about chrome them just worry about chrome

Best thumbnail ever.

great points in this. I feel the amount of work you put into browser compatibility is highly dependent on the target audience of your site. Why put in a bunch of work to make a site work for IE if there aren't a lot of people visiting the site with that browser? Like you said, it just needs to be functional. Also, target audience dictates what CSS features you actually put in the website. For example, if you're building a website that targets an older audience, they likely won't care about the newer fancy features that CSS offers as much as a website that would be targeting a younger audience.

Broo I love how you actually look like browser compatibility beat you up 😆

I've been a fan for awhile now. The thumbnail for this vid pushed that to SUPER FAN. As an IT practicioner for 30 plus years and having lived with (painfully in a work mode) Microsoft's CRAP in more way's than can be counted? I don't care about internet explorer. Less than don't care. Re your statements? They show you are a consumate gentleman Mr. Powell and I applaud it. However, I'll add, and yeah this is what, four years later but still relevant I believe... I'll add, the group left using this, for whatever reason, are real however, think about demographic of what your site is targeting as well I'd say. Who is your audience? Given that, I'd say an icon/image/banner or two that says something like "Works best with Chrome" I'd think would also go a long way. Per your point, as the dev, I believe it's your job to ensure everything "works" but at the end of the day? I don't care about internet explore, funny, I was a Netscape guy and / OR ANYTHING besides a Microsoft guy. The practices that Microsoft has regularly employed over the years negatively impaacted more people than can be counted and they did these things (often they were not "questionable" in nature they were downright predatorial) without ANY regard for the rest of, not only the user base, but the world at large. It was, beautiful for me, as someone who has worked through all that when a product like Apache went stellar, frankly when anyone WON any small battle with the juggernaut they became. Lastly, it was even more enjoyable in mobile when IOS and Android became what they became while the whole Windows Phone world fell flat on it's face. Yeah, I know, it's a David and Goaliath thing. However, I think the beauty of open free market capitalism is when one companies success is then followed by a thousand companies success. Not one, and one only. /end diatribe

I get why newer features differ in implementation, but the small unnecessary differences annoy me. Also Internet Explorer, that's all I need to say.

I have to admit that I never thought of it this way. What you said makes a lot of sense and for my own stuff, not work stuff because they are anal, I'll feel better about using newer CSS effects.

I must say, when it comes down to browser compatibility we see eye to eye. Great video 👍

I liked the video before I even started watching it because of the thumbnail.

You can create custom css style-sheets for internet explorer using the tag I think inter browser compatibility is improving a lot thanks to the W3C standards for modern web rendering.

my stuff isnt working in Chrome, its not a webpage but more so a tool for work to navigate folders and files. How can i fix this to make it work over all platforms correctly

Kevin, I have an interesting question. How is it possible that a website has a small cookie consent container with max-width of 22 rem but on Safari browser those same rem are rendered as smaller width? I don't know if this matters but the website uses media queries in rem. The problem here is that the container cuts off a part of the content inside of it, but only on Safari.

is there a website compiling all the cross-browser tricks or hacks? It would be pretty convenient if there's one.

I cbf to worry for long about old browsers. As long as the text is readable, I'm not going to stress over visual issues. That goes for things a lot bigger than just having a funky border. As long as everything can be read and accessed, that's the end of the testing unless there's at least a good 10% of users on it. I think CSS grid is still really sketchy to use though. Unless you have a very finite number of items, the way that's supported in IE is going to make the content useless by overlapping everything. The CSS you have to write to fix this only works if you have a finite number of items, and takes a while to write for me because trying to line things up with numbers like that just messes with my head. Learned this on my last project and not sure if I'm going to continue using grid except in very straightforward situations.

It's not _we_ who should be dealing with it - it's the people who make those browsers. There should be some conformance tests that a browser have to pass in order to be called a web browser. What's the point of having web standards if they can be violated or unsupported without any consequence? By making workarounds, we're perpetuating the vicious circle. Moreover, it should be us - web developers - who decide how those standards should look like, not W3C that mostly consists of the very corporations who develop those browsers, and who use those standards majorly to destroy their competition, not to make our lives easier and the Web a better place.

@Kevin Powell, Great stuff! Just some feedback take it or leave it, can you super impose your logo in the top right of the screen with abit of padding for your future videos and use the same background colour as the logo screen? This is hard to explain but I feel like your intro sound beeps are incomplete sounding, can you add 3 slightly faster speed descending notes to it with the last having abit more punch?

it's gotta be 100% *perfect* and *exact* across all browsers! lol j/k in all seriousness, though, MS ought to get onboard with the "standards". it's still VERY annoying to have to write special code JUST for IE/Edge. Stupid "Edge" cases!

Thumbnail is accurate of real life.

Thank You!!! :)

I have had trouble with touch events on iPhone and I guess Safari devices. Anyone know what the workaround is for this? These links work just fine on other browsers and other devices.

How do i write and IF statement to stop opacity or even remove something in IE but leave it in for Chrome?

Epic thumbnail 😂

video was too long but it was useful❣

@Kevin Powell, i recently developed a screen for invoice app with flexbox. i was seeing the screen on Firefox but it sucks big time in chrome. i think this is called as intervention but not a bug. my 4 column flexbox invoice header broke into 1 column on chrome browser. I am in the process of investigating on why. that's how i got your video..

2,5 years further and Safari is still not deprecated. Really disappointing.

The only problem here seems stillt to be if the customer says it has to look the same on every browser, because they don‘t know about the crossbrowser nightmare... any answers for them?^^

Telephone rings, you answer. Client talks about the requirement that it must work on all major browsers and devices. YOU: That's pointless, sir. CLIENT: This is Kim Jung Un. Make it work or you end up in Gulag... cemetery. You have two weeks. YOU: Yes sir, that could be done in a month but I didn't say it's impossible sir. One month is possible sir. CLIENT: One month sure but you nevertheless you will end up in Gulag...alive.

What is about modernizr and HTML5shiv?

I´ve tryed: .myClass { @supports (mix-blend-mode: screen){ mix-blend-mode: screen; @supports not(mix-blend-mode: screen){ text-shadow: -1px 0 black, 0 1px black, 1px 0 black, 0 -1px black; } but it not work on chrome, what did I do wrong?

When will someone step in and clean up the internet mess.

18:50 some US govt sites wont let you use some of the features with anything but IE and chrome.

Great video! It is 2022 when I write this comment. IE hypothetical death is near as Microsoft announce that IE will not get any support in the future.

Why dont they all just work together??

hoooold on! Who says, that IE users want to see the beauty and fancy of modern web-techniques in the world wide web? Think about it, is anyone driving an old ugly car to a beauty contest? Of course, but they dont know what and why they do that. If my focus is on good web-expierience, then i use a modern browser. Never forget... First thing: Every surfing human looks for information, not animation!

See, mobile traffic is around 60% today. How can we overlook Samsung or other major developer browsers?

Like if the Caption Made you Grin 😏.

just by watching the anti-internet explorer thumbnail i was unable to not click at all

Any good news for upcoming vds ?

Keep going

Sir big fan of u Please reply i commented first

‘I only design for internet explorer’ is basically the Amish equivalent of web devs

You should change the thumbnail to firefox.

I just came here to say that other youtubers can stop making thumbnails for their videos, because none of them will ever be remotely close to being a great as this one.

Big fan. I think you forgot to link to caniuse.com.

At least today IE isn't large and/or secure enough to be bothered with.

I always tell my clients that I am creating for the future. IE 11 is not part of it.

IE -> Opera Mini

Why can't we all build it and if they don't use the correct browsers (ie not Explorer) to protest? If everyone who uses Explorer sees a crappy mobile experience on a big screen for a lot of sites, they will notice and google what is going on. Then we will see change browsers. We can't just keep complaining about it forever, something has to be done!!! WHO I WITH ME??? OMG optimized for chrome?? Let's do it!! Tell your boss, YES YOU CAN!! The elderly have grandkids who will do it!

internet explorer is dead so i dont need to worry about the IE

Can't or won't? If they're at work, they should be working, not surfing the web.

Do you know of any books on this topic?

I just hope there is only one browser... Yes, chrome is enough...

22:00

I dropped IE years ago. It's a dumpster fire and a waste of my time.

You sound like Jerry from Rick & Morty

Poor ie in thumbnail

Just had a look at your website in IE. I am please to see that is still is usable as this means most of my projects should also still be functional in IE (as I have not checked). As a side note: please stop using a green screen background for your videos - it is very distracting!

vicious circle... it's kinda necessary but it's also pointless work for programmers. we can't stop preparing content for all the browsers, but the way we code websites doesn't make this browsers to change at all. if internet explorer knows that we will prepare suitable content for their shitty browser, they doesnt have to fix anything to make our life easier. people who create content will try to suit it for all the customers, cause it gives more profit for the company that needs the website etc... but imagine what would happen if we all said "STOP" and just didnt care at all. technology goes forward and this behaviour stops it a bit :D if almost no website would work appropriately in 5 years on explorer etc - no one would just use it and even companies would have to update or change browser. the same stuff is with TV. New TV doesnt have EURO plug and samsung doesnt care about pegasus users - just change the console mate if u wanna play something, its 2018 :D :D just joking a bit but im nervous AF when i code something and then i look into it from old safari or IE

IE 11 is a pathetic browser.

Yes, it is tempting to punish IE user with a basic design, but experienced designer should be capable to create a decent IE alternative design and serve it up in a separate CSS so other capable browser don't have to deal with IE nonsense. I don't think the all User have to have the same experience across all browsers, but I do think, that any visitor is a potential promoter, customer or friend so why offend this user with less than the best his browser can provide. So optimize as best as possible and do the extra work. Usually this extra work is not that unreasonable. It may look different but it should still convey the color scheme and pleasant proportions and be accessible throughout.

The answer for me is simple: I'm not gonna support, because my website is intended to run on modern browsers

@supprots(@supports) { ...... }

Please speak in hindi.

Your facial expression is 90% of time like you're guilty or sad. Please work on that, because it's very irritating. All the best :))