4 ms·

> works in < 90% of browsers [0], so it's kind of for academic consideration only for now. Says your particular organizations policies, why is the line drawn a

> works in < 90% of browsers [0], so it's kind of for academic consideration only for now. Says your particular organizations policies, why is the line drawn at 90%, why not 95%? Is this restriction based on calculations or was it simply arbitrarily chosen? If it's arbitrary, allow me to offer an alternative, focus support only on "modern generation" browsers which auto-update by default. All popular browsers adopted auto-updates as a collective effort to improve end-user security, and so as web developers we're able to encourage this by only supporting those platforms. As you can see on caniuse, grid support on those modern browser platforms is 100%. The only ones lacking are IE which microsoft has abandoned, and Opera Mini (I can't speak good or bad about that, I haven't examined it). The idea that you must support as many browsers as possible is a relic of the 1990s dot com bubble when it was unclear which browser was best and there were no agreed upon standards. It's now 2018 and you're either using Firefox or Chrome and to a much smaller extent, Edge or Safari. Any other browser that wants to be taken seriously is going to support the standards set by those platforms.

notahacker 8y ago
If you're a business with actual customers, your decision about which browsers to support and where to draw the line is going to be driven by whether not supporting them costs more money than supporting them, not by whether the dev team would prefer people to download software worth taking seriously or buy a newer phone if they wish to continue being customers.
- originalsimba 8y ago
  I actually agree with you 100%. I disagree with the presumption that those "13%" unsupported cases are "actual customers". In the same way that I've always thought it was false to suggest all software pirates are potential customers. Some simply arent. If you're so desperate for revenue that you have to scrape those "13%", that your product can't attract enough of the remaining "87%" to put keep your grandkids fed, then maybe the more significant admission is that the market you're in is "too" saturated. (I don't believe in "too saturated". <3)
reaperducer 8y ago
> The idea that you must support as many browsers as possible is a relic of the 1990s dot com bubble Your notion of forcing people to change browsers (who may not be able to for accessibility reasons, corporate policy reasons, or hardware reasons) is the real relic of the 1990's. Remember when half the web sites you'd visit put up a big notice "Your browser is not supported. Download the latest browser here?" Non-support is the relic. Support is what makes a business work. The customer's money is still green, even if they're not using the latest tech.
- originalsimba 8y ago
  > Your notion of forcing people That's the wrong way to look at it. Is the FDA "forcing" you to eat non-poisonous food? No of course not. As the more technologically knowledgeable and competent of our society it's our responsibility to help steer the evolution of internet applications in the right direction. > Remember when half the web sites you'd visit put up a big notice "Your browser is not supported. Download the latest browser here?" Your example is not lost on me, I was there. But this is different. That was about promoting proprietary features of specific browsers. That was corporations vying for market control. Today the only thing that matters to anyone is standards compliance, performance and security. Developers are the architects of the internet. It's not only a responsibility to build it with a forward-thinking approach, it's an opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. The difference is seen throughout the world when comparing communities where people care, versus cities where people are just collecting their paychecks. > The customer's money is still green That sentiment gets it's origin from people who had business deals with the Nazis in the early 20th century. ---- Speaking of money, the 13% of "outdated browsers" is not actually 13% real people using real browsers. It's robots, it's faked agent strings, it's web scraping tools. We're not talking about actual customers who would be spending money on your services or products. The actual number of real people still using crap like IE9 is very tiny, if not zero. "Active" users, the sort who participate in the online economy, are using modern browsers that auto-update themselves and already have full support for Grid.

notahacker 8y ago

If you're a business with actual customers, your decision about which browsers to support and where to draw the line is going to be driven by whether not supporting them costs more money than supporting them, not by whether the dev team would prefer people to download software worth taking seriously or buy a newer phone if they wish to continue being customers.

originalsimba 8y ago
I actually agree with you 100%. I disagree with the presumption that those "13%" unsupported cases are "actual customers". In the same way that I've always thought it was false to suggest all software pirates are potential customers. Some simply arent. If you're so desperate for revenue that you have to scrape those "13%", that your product can't attract enough of the remaining "87%" to put keep your grandkids fed, then maybe the more significant admission is that the market you're in is "too" saturated. (I don't believe in "too saturated". <3)

reaperducer 8y ago

> The idea that you must support as many browsers as possible is a relic of the 1990s dot com bubble Your notion of forcing people to change browsers (who may not be able to for accessibility reasons, corporate policy reasons, or hardware reasons) is the real relic of the 1990's. Remember when half the web sites you'd visit put up a big notice "Your browser is not supported. Download the latest browser here?" Non-support is the relic. Support is what makes a business work. The customer's money is still green, even if they're not using the latest tech.

originalsimba 8y ago
> Your notion of forcing people That's the wrong way to look at it. Is the FDA "forcing" you to eat non-poisonous food? No of course not. As the more technologically knowledgeable and competent of our society it's our responsibility to help steer the evolution of internet applications in the right direction. > Remember when half the web sites you'd visit put up a big notice "Your browser is not supported. Download the latest browser here?" Your example is not lost on me, I was there. But this is different. That was about promoting proprietary features of specific browsers. That was corporations vying for market control. Today the only thing that matters to anyone is standards compliance, performance and security. Developers are the architects of the internet. It's not only a responsibility to build it with a forward-thinking approach, it's an opportunity to have a positive impact on the world. The difference is seen throughout the world when comparing communities where people care, versus cities where people are just collecting their paychecks. > The customer's money is still green That sentiment gets it's origin from people who had business deals with the Nazis in the early 20th century. ---- Speaking of money, the 13% of "outdated browsers" is not actually 13% real people using real browsers. It's robots, it's faked agent strings, it's web scraping tools. We're not talking about actual customers who would be spending money on your services or products. The actual number of real people still using crap like IE9 is very tiny, if not zero. "Active" users, the sort who participate in the online economy, are using modern browsers that auto-update themselves and already have full support for Grid.