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But aren't people like you the reason why we still have to support IE6 and 7? I think depending on your customer base, you have to support it, but I'd bet that

But aren't people like you the reason why we still have to support IE6 and 7? I think depending on your customer base, you have to support it, but I'd bet that a lot of Airbnb's users aren't using an IE6 or 7.

EnderMB 14y ago
I currently work with a number of large clients in the travel sector, and you'd be very surprised. Yes, it's restricting at times, but any developer worth their salt can write code that works in all browsers fairly easily. I've spent enough time on Reddit to know that a lot of developers refuse to support legacy browsers simply because it's too hard. It is my belief that we'll have to support IE6-8 until XP dies, and I think that will happen when Windows 8 becomes the default install for most PC's. The real problem isn't older browsers, but older machines that need to upgrade their operating systems, and once that war is won the old browsers will drop like flies.
- mixmastamyk 14y ago
  They can use FF/Chrome if they want to see the site correctly on XP. The faster people stop supporting broken browsers the faster they'll go away! If they can't/don't then they can suffer the trade-off knowingly. For a successful startup that needs to grow at a reasonable pace (not too quickly) select browser support is one way to apply some light breaking. In five years if/when the business has scaled on its merits, those browsers will be history anyway. That very early (==expensive) developer time would have been wasted when it could have been focused on building a product people want to use. Think of how Apple slowly removed restrictions to each version of iPhone so that they could handle the interest it generated. They simply couldn't have handled shipping 100 million the first year. So their focus worked out perfectly (despite all the bitching about cut/paste and At&t we had to listen to.) If they had wasted time on "perfection" it would have shipped for years.

EnderMB 14y ago

I currently work with a number of large clients in the travel sector, and you'd be very surprised. Yes, it's restricting at times, but any developer worth their salt can write code that works in all browsers fairly easily. I've spent enough time on Reddit to know that a lot of developers refuse to support legacy browsers simply because it's too hard. It is my belief that we'll have to support IE6-8 until XP dies, and I think that will happen when Windows 8 becomes the default install for most PC's. The real problem isn't older browsers, but older machines that need to upgrade their operating systems, and once that war is won the old browsers will drop like flies.

mixmastamyk 14y ago
They can use FF/Chrome if they want to see the site correctly on XP. The faster people stop supporting broken browsers the faster they'll go away! If they can't/don't then they can suffer the trade-off knowingly. For a successful startup that needs to grow at a reasonable pace (not too quickly) select browser support is one way to apply some light breaking. In five years if/when the business has scaled on its merits, those browsers will be history anyway. That very early (==expensive) developer time would have been wasted when it could have been focused on building a product people want to use. Think of how Apple slowly removed restrictions to each version of iPhone so that they could handle the interest it generated. They simply couldn't have handled shipping 100 million the first year. So their focus worked out perfectly (despite all the bitching about cut/paste and At&t we had to listen to.) If they had wasted time on "perfection" it would have shipped for years.