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It's not just engineering/R&D that makes this decision. IT departments generally have the last word on what applications (browsers, for example) will be suppor
by bmj 10y ago
It's not just engineering/R&D that makes this decision. IT departments generally have the last word on what applications (browsers, for example) will be supported. A real life example:
I worked on a team that maintained a data portal website used by major pharma companies and clinical research organizations. It had to be IE7-proof for a very long time because many of our largest clients were still running very old browsers internally because of IT rules. Our R&D team would have loved to drop support for these antiquated browsers, but, shockingly, our sales and operations teams were not willing to tell multi-million dollar clients that they better upgrade their infrastructure or they couldn't use our software.
- DougWebb 10y agoI had a similar experience. I was developing a customer portal website for one of my company's clients. Well into the project I found out that everyone at the company, including everyone who would be doing QA, had monitors that only went up to 800x600, they were all locked down to an old version of IE (8 or 9 I think), and they had a default-blocked web proxy in place so they needed special permission to even see the test portal I had running on my server. Happily we did convince them to get some hardware and software upgrades, so by the end of the project they were able to see their website the way most of their customers would. The proxy continues to be a nuisance; their developer can't access the cloud server where their production website is deployed; he has to rely on me to make any changes that are needed there.