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Not every site is about money. My numbers are actually closer to 3% than to 5%. I could not care less.
by the-dude 11y ago
Not every site is about money. My numbers are actually closer to 3% than to 5%.
I could not care less.
- onion2k 11y agoIf your point was "Why bother if you're building a site where the IE traffic is of no consequence?" then you should have said that. Obviously there's no point spending time and money writing code that no one benefits from, but that isn't the case for every site. Plenty of sites still need to work in IE because it will affect their income. If someone out there is writing a website whose only customer is an eccentric billionaire who spends $100m a year but insists on using Mosaic 2.0 on a dusty old 286, then they should be testing their updates on Mosaic. Go where your customers are. If you don't have customers, do what you like. Although I'd question whether you even need a website if that's the case.
- the-dude 11y agoI do have customers: about 97% of them. I also provide free services as a gift to my local community ( Groningen ), just to give back. I am not downloading GBs of VMs and spend hours of time to validate IE for a couple of illiterate smugs.
- JosephRedfern 11y agoHow does using IE make you an "illiterate smug"? Not everyone has a choice.
- spacecowboy_lon 11y agoSome humility on your part might not go amiss treating your users like this is not very professional.
- onion2k 11y agoIf 'a couple of illiterate smugs' represents 3% of your userbase then you only have 67 users to worry about. I don't think I'd do much optimisation for a site that small either. ;)
- the-dude 11y agoI know this is HN and everybody is building the next Facebook and has humongous numbers of users. But there is also local bands, volunteer ran music venues and such in a city of 200k tops. Which is apparently unworthy of HN. Noted.
- onion2k 11y agoI don't believe that's the case. Most startups, even YC startups, have no aspirations to be the next Facebook with it's billions of users. They just want to do as well as possible in their market. Every startup should aspire to serve it's customers as well as it possibly can - regardless of whether that's a couple of hundred thousand people or a couple of billion people. But that has to include the all the customers, not just 97% of them. Start with the low-hanging fruit of course, but never settle for "those customers are too much effort to bother with". That sort of negative sentiment is toxic.
- zhte415 11y agoIndeed you may not care less, but a lot of people do. 80% of my visitors are on corporate locked-down machines running IE8-11. I, and many others, do care. It is appreciated someone else sees the bother.
- jtheory 11y agoRight; in some cases it's not a personal decision. We have a set of users who are using our site in healthcare environments, on locked-down computers that are difficult/expensive, so in some cases they're stuck on IE7/IE8. I'm pretty sure calling them "illiterate smugs" wouldn't go over well. On the other hand, these computers don't have access to the general internet, so in this case they don't risk running afoul of site creators who decide to be "clever" and go out of their way to aggressively (or even insultingly) demand that visitors upgrade. But restricted corporate users who hit that sort of thing would be unamused.