4 ms·

Yeah, somewhere in the late 2010s we seem to have lost interest in the idea of graceful degradation. It's one thing for a website to look a bit ugly and action

by kijin 5y ago

Yeah, somewhere in the late 2010s we seem to have lost interest in the idea of graceful degradation. It's one thing for a website to look a bit ugly and actions to require a few more clicks when accessed with an outdated browser. It's a completely different thing when you're left staring at a blank screen. The latter is what happens when an entire frontend framework decides that they'd rather give you no experience than a degraded experience because they don't want to maintain polyfills anymore. I do sympathize with the hate for IE, having suffered it for long enough. But once we've decided that IE users don't deserve anything, who's next? How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice. First they came for IE, and I did not speak out ... you know how the poem ends.

mwcampbell 5y ago
I think you have a valid point. However, I'd like to offer a factual correction on this part: > How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? As far as I know, this was only ever an issue on Windows, and it's not anymore. IMO, the best third-party screen reader for Windows is NVDA [1], and it's free and open-source. Even a user stuck on Windows XP or Vista can get a version of NVDA from 2017 that works well with Chromium (assuming one can get a Chromium-based browser that runs on those old versions of Windows). On all other platforms, the screen reader is built into the platform itself, and updated along with it. Windows itself has had Narrator built in for a long time now, and Narrator in Windows 10 is getting good (disclosure: I was on the Narrator team at Microsoft for 3 years), but there are still valid reasons to use a third-party screen reader on Windows. [1]: https://www.nvaccess.org/ https://www.nvaccess.org/
- kijin 5y ago
  You are right, but we must remember that poor people in poor regions are disproportionately more likely to be stuck on very old hardware. According to StatCounter, 5.7% of PC users in Africa are still on XP or Vista, compared to only 0.6% in North America. That's almost 10 times as much. Rallying against older browsers was once supposed to be a good fight against evil monopolists. Now it's about kicking away the ladder from people who are already the poorest and most powerless in the world, making them even less able to take advantage of the latest information and communication tools. And we're not even realizing what we're doing because we're so used to the first world fast upgrade cycle.
Slackwise 5y ago
> How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? None of these are Internet Explorer, the problem in question. Chrome and its Play Store dependencies are backwards compatible to much older phones. Android browsers even years ago had better web platform support than IE11. I fully sympathize and believe that web sites should be as compatible as possible. It's the web apps that fall apart once you take away modern functionality. > In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice. This really depends on how much their actual lives depend on being able to use the web. If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web? What part of their life depends on what site exactly? Sure, communication is relevant, but we're already saying they have smart phones and thus data connections, email, and whatever native chat apps. I'm not saying we should leave them behind technologically or that they don't matter or shouldn't have access to more information or knowledge, I'm just simply being practical with what is likely the real impact to their life. In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content. The web already excels at that. Servers cache. Browsers cache. We don't need Vue to render a blog or article. Please leave such tech for SPAs and "apps" rather than sites or pages.
- kijin 5y ago
  > If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web? It won't affect their daily lives directly, but being able to access the knowledge scattered around the web is very important to human development in general. What I wrote above is a kind of slippery slope argument, but it's a slope that I'm sure we're sliding down very quickly. You can't even read a technical blog these days without loading a whole SPA framework. If we keep going down this path, it will legitimately begin to impact the ability of people with older devices to access any information at all apart from those delivered through a handful of walled garden apps. > In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content. Completely agreed!

by kijin 5y ago

mwcampbell 5y ago

I think you have a valid point. However, I'd like to offer a factual correction on this part: > How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? As far as I know, this was only ever an issue on Windows, and it's not anymore. IMO, the best third-party screen reader for Windows is NVDA [1], and it's free and open-source. Even a user stuck on Windows XP or Vista can get a version of NVDA from 2017 that works well with Chromium (assuming one can get a Chromium-based browser that runs on those old versions of Windows). On all other platforms, the screen reader is built into the platform itself, and updated along with it. Windows itself has had Narrator built in for a long time now, and Narrator in Windows 10 is getting good (disclosure: I was on the Narrator team at Microsoft for 3 years), but there are still valid reasons to use a third-party screen reader on Windows. [1]: https://www.nvaccess.org/ https://www.nvaccess.org/

kijin 5y ago
You are right, but we must remember that poor people in poor regions are disproportionately more likely to be stuck on very old hardware. According to StatCounter, 5.7% of PC users in Africa are still on XP or Vista, compared to only 0.6% in North America. That's almost 10 times as much. Rallying against older browsers was once supposed to be a good fight against evil monopolists. Now it's about kicking away the ladder from people who are already the poorest and most powerless in the world, making them even less able to take advantage of the latest information and communication tools. And we're not even realizing what we're doing because we're so used to the first world fast upgrade cycle.

Slackwise 5y ago

> How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones? How about disabled people in middle-income countries who can't afford to upgrade their screen reader? None of these are Internet Explorer, the problem in question. Chrome and its Play Store dependencies are backwards compatible to much older phones. Android browsers even years ago had better web platform support than IE11. I fully sympathize and believe that web sites should be as compatible as possible. It's the web apps that fall apart once you take away modern functionality. > In the past, using a crappy browser was a matter of choice. Nowadays, the only people who use them are those who have no other choice. This really depends on how much their actual lives depend on being able to use the web. If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web? What part of their life depends on what site exactly? Sure, communication is relevant, but we're already saying they have smart phones and thus data connections, email, and whatever native chat apps. I'm not saying we should leave them behind technologically or that they don't matter or shouldn't have access to more information or knowledge, I'm just simply being practical with what is likely the real impact to their life. In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content. The web already excels at that. Servers cache. Browsers cache. We don't need Vue to render a blog or article. Please leave such tech for SPAs and "apps" rather than sites or pages.

kijin 5y ago
> If they live in poverty and/or third world countries, are their daily lives impacted by the web? It won't affect their daily lives directly, but being able to access the knowledge scattered around the web is very important to human development in general. What I wrote above is a kind of slippery slope argument, but it's a slope that I'm sure we're sliding down very quickly. You can't even read a technical blog these days without loading a whole SPA framework. If we keep going down this path, it will legitimately begin to impact the ability of people with older devices to access any information at all apart from those delivered through a handful of walled garden apps. > In the end, I think web developers need to stop using ridiculous frontend tech for what ultimately constitutes static text content. Completely agreed!