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> How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones?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 a

> How about the hundreds of millions of third-world users with grossly outdated Android phones?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!

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!