Slashdot Mirror
When Should You Stop Support for Software?
hahafaha asks: "I am currently working on a website for a small organization. We (I am not alone in this) have a beta version ready, and are currently testing the site on browsers. We have tried all of the big browsers (Firefox, IE, opera), as well as other browsers, such as lynx, links, w3m and even NetFront. So, when can one decide that they will stop supporting a system. Obviously, going (for example) down to IE 1 is crazy, but is IE 3 crazy? This is not only relevant to web design but to any programming at all. When, for example, can you say that I will *not* support a certain version of Windows. Can you say that now about Windows 98? How about 95?"
Do you use java, javascript, CSS, flash, CGI, etc., or not?
A pure text website with some graphics can support lynx, whereas a flashier site will require more up to date browsers.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
Depends on if you consider x% of the interweb population to be valuable to your business.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
For example - Slashdot gave up links support when they added captchas.
That is what I see. When the vendor drops support - and that can range from normal EOL to extended contract based EOL - it is time to stick a fork in it. Sadly, it looks like I get to keep a copy of Solaris 8 running for a few more years....
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
Why not come up with some percentage of people you are willing to support, say 90%. Then find out how many people use each variety of browser or OS. These numbers are usually available on the net. Then you select the top N platforms needed to fill out your percentage supported number.
Whenever the cost of supporting the customers that comes from supporting those customers, exceeds the benefits of satisfying those customers.
The trick is determining the costs and benefits. But often it is not that hard.
That's a business decision, not your's.
If the company is willing to pay you to support old browsers/OS's because the company is getting something out of the clients with those browsers/OS's, then that is their concern.
Now try to figure out when it is unprofitable - figuring in ill-will, etc.
If cost is no consideration, you wouldn't be asking the question.
This issue is a bit more complicated than you think.
If you're looking for a baseline that may be acceptable for customers, you could just use the browser vendor's support matrix. If the vendor doesn't support it (IE 2.0), it'll be difficult for you to support it.
Realistically speaking, it depends on your target audience. It's probably safe to ignore IE5 and older versions of Netscape, because your customers probably can update to newer versions, even on older OS versions.
Among other things, when Microsoft stops supporting it, I stop supporting it. Well, not really. But I stop including Windows 9x workstations in the standard contract, so if you want them supported, each one is an additional charge, and no guarantees are made that problems can be resolved.
Personally, I think that a lot of places upgrade more frequently than necessary, but even I think that anything over 5 years old should have been replaced by now.
Shouldn't the only be stricken as in This is not relevant to web design, but to any other kind of programming?
One of the big advantages of HTML is that it usually scales down nicely. I admit that once you start to rely on Javascript/DHTML/AJAX etc. exclusively you will run into problems, but if you care in any way about search engines being able to crawl your site you will most likely have at least a site map that can be handled by googlebot as well as lynx, links, w3m and any revision of Netscape or IE, however old they are. The pages will possibly look like crap if you rely on advanced CSS like hiding DIVs on demand, but will most likely still be useful. [This wont apply if you just cashed in 10 millions from a VC to build an MS Office clone in JS].
This usually will not require a second development tree, just keeping your design clean and based on standards. I consider this a mayor sales point to management. As a nice extra you will even be able to handle requests from the future mobile web crowd, reaching your side from their smart phone, or even the millions of kids Nicolas Negroponte intends to provide with $100 laptops.
For non-web platforms: as long as it pays.
This may be cruel, but if you invest into older technology that will not generate any new sales, this money cannot be put into offering better service and features or price cuts for the new versions. It will be hard to determine how long something pays, e.g. customers may buy the newer version because they have learned from experience that the product will be supported for a long time, so not supporting W95 might actually be the wrong move. Try to determine how many support request you get from users with older versions and if they are returning customers. Determine the cost (in money and new features that cannot be implemented due to support for the old platform) for keeping the old version on board. If the costs are higher, kick it. Beneath other things you are responsible to stay in business, so you actually can support the current version for your customers.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
I think the best way of looking at this is with money.
Who are your customers, and what are the demographics of their systems. Windows 98 is still a very prevelant system out there. I am writing this post from a computer that is still running windows 98. The big questions are
How many are you going to loose by not including their system?
how many can you afford to loose?
And how much would it cost to include them?
30% Troll, 50% Underrated, 10% Interesting
Score:5, Troll
Really, in order for technology to grow, you HAVE to stop supporting older browsers. Even with the hell it would create for a while, i want all of the major technology companies in the world to get together, decide on standards, and stop supporting old ones.
Why can't the computer industries do what TV is doing in America? They are forcing everyone to go digital. No more anolouge. Period.
If you have to ask yourself if you end support for a product and the answer isn't obviously no based on what you are actually trying to accomplish (probably taking real-world usage and demographics into consideration), then it's probably time to drop support for that product anyways.
File under 'M' for 'Manic ranting'
I develop websites as well as part of a much larger firm. We stop providing support for older browsers (Like IE 5 and 5.5 Mac) when MS decides to stop supporting them.
:)
.8, and Safari (forget which version).
We will only test on XP, Win2K and win 98, but not 95... (that's just silly
Our browser support goes back to IE 5.5 Win, NS 6, FF
Take the hint from others and you will be able to justify your actions.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
I'd use a combination of statistics (perhaps netcraft?) and common sense. Obviously, lots of people still use Windows 98, but not so many are still on Win95. Pretty much nobody is on Win 3.1. Also, you should try to know something about your particular customer base. If your customers are older or poorer, they might have crappier, more poorly updated computers...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I suppose the obvious answer would be "What is the lowest level that you could reasonably expect from your userbase". For a site touting the latest and greatest in web technology, you might be a bit heavier in your requirements than for, say, a site on nutrition.
For regular applications, you might ask yourself what the lowest level is that can reasonably be expected to do what's required. i.e. if you need a gig and a half of RAM for most operations, you might not support Win95 simply because it can't support you RAM-wise.
Then, even if you could do it in '95, would your userbase still be in '95? Really, it just boils down to "what's on the machines of the people you want to serve?"
You are standing in an open server west of a blue house, with a boarded front door. There is an Exchange mailbox here.
Profitability.
If you're programming for money, then do you want to do business with the largest userbase possible. That means, what you are doing is popularity driven. If your customers are on win3.11 or dos6 machines, then you code for those machines. If you've got your current product sufficiently done and have some extra time left over, then is the time to spread into new markets as is with all businesses. Ultimatly, if cost doesn't justify the support then don't do it.
If you're programming for fun, then you do what you want because it's rewarding to you. Make your app for a certain platforms and it's popularity will drive itself. Hence the OSS model. Doing anything else is sadomasochistic.
The last and best place support should end up is in a perminant forum with a very good search utility and an FTP file archive all running on old, redundant, stable hardware that will mabye get a few hundred hits a year. Your reputation will be very good for providing support like that since people know in 10 years when they plug in their old machine they can still find drivers or programs for it even if nothing new is being produced for it. It's also very cheap.
There's a formula you can use to help you figure this out.
A) Take the amount of money you're getting IN SALES of older product. Pull a number out your arse to represent the goodwill you get by supporting older products, and add it in.
B) Take the amount of money you're spending TOTAL to support older product. Include salaries, time estimates, etc. Add in the costs of anticipated sales you'd get by people upgrading to the newer version.
Profits=$A-$B;
when Profit is close to or less than zero, you need to drop it.
For some of my specially-crafted, workflow applications, I actually require end users to use Mozilla or Firefox in certain places. In this case, the margins on the sales are high, the number of people using it is fairly limited, and the code being displayed is rather complex, so the cost of getting all the required features working in the legacy IE5/6 browsers was large, while the benefit of supporting doing so was minimal. I don't get asked about supporting IE, but I do get asked lots about Mac.
You want feature N? Get Mozilla. Free download! Works on Windows, Linux, and Mac!
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
You question was about stopping support, however your scenario covered adding support.
Anyway, support depends on what the company is about. If the website provides an online service, then you would like to support a resonable range of technologies. However, if it's the site of a developmeny house that uses the 'latest technology', using table formatting instead of CSS just to support ancient browsers may not look too good.
If it's just an informational website, then pick the top 3 browsers for each of the platforms you care about and support the versions that were released in the last 3 years.
Help me take back Slashdot. When did 'News for Nerds' become 'FUD and Conspiracy Theories for Extremist Nutjobs'?
If you have a retail site for example, you had better support every platform, or else you will miss out on potential customers. Consider this analogy: You own a drive through restaurant, and are unable to accomodate vehicles made prior to 1995 due to their width. That is you own business decision, but how many sales will you lose if part of the population can't get to your drive through window?
If you don't make it easy for all your customers to use your product/service, then you are leaving money on the table...
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
It's a business that's being run... There's a cut off point between the amount of effort being put in and the reward for that effort.
Deleted
Simple, when the market will bear it.
Strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government.
If by 'should' you mean to imply an ethical decision, I think the answer is that you should not support the platforms but should try to support the standard, and the browsers 'should' try to do the same. It's only too bad we don't all live in my fantasy world. If by 'should' you mean to imply a business decision, you simply need to crunch the numbers and decide how many of you potential customers you will alienate by not supporting their platform. Compare this to how expensive it is and you have your answer to what you 'should' do. This of course will depend on the nature of your customer base.
Windows is like decaf - it tastes like the real thing, but it won't get you through the day.
If I were you, I'd put up a counter and see what browsers are visiting the site, dropping support for browsers that never visit.
The same principle goes for the rest of everything. Have a peek at the statistics, and if no one uses it, then don't support it. It's that simple.
Alternately, don't support it if it's just too hard/impractical to support it. If a minor change would do, then it wouldn't hurt.
I'd like to implement a policy where where browsers that have not had major changes to their rendering engine within the last 4 years would be unsupported.
Conveniently, this *would* exclude IE: last major version from 2001.
Realistically though, even 4.x browsers is a real stretch.
Some people are stuck with "obsolete" software. Their platform may have been deemed obsolete and unsupported by the major software vendors, even though it still performs useful work and can't be easily replaced or upgraded. I use Netscape 4.7 on several systems because that was the last release available before Netscape dropped support for the platform.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Considering Windows98 is stable and mature and most of the P1s, P11s and older threes still run Windows98 just fine, stopping support for a very common version of windows will cost you customers. Also there are alot of small businesses with networks that have switched back to windows98 for their desktops because of ongoing horrendous security problems with XP. So it all depends on who you are marketing your software to.
I just read that using Opera, you insensitive clod.
Whatever you end up doing, don't block browsers out with the horrid "Sorry, you do not have Internet Explorer 5.0 or better" message. Most of the sites that show that message, I can view just fine if I can manage to get past the browser-blocking "welcome" page. Let the browsers "try" to view the page, even if your "what kind of browser are you?" check thinks it shouldn't be able to. Even if it doesn't display perfectly, the user might still get the information they were looking for.
-- I prefer the term "karma escort."
(total number of users) * (% of users using browser) = # of users who you won't be supporting.
.5% of total market share, but you get my point).
We have a two-tired philosophy: we don't test with browsers that have 5% market share, because we're a small business with limited resources. However, if a user reports a problem in a 5% browser that's easy to fix, we'll fix it. If it's a fundamental issue (lack of CSS support, etc), we'll just say "sorry, can't do it."
If it's not fundamental but not easy to fix, we'll consider the direction that the browser's market share is going in. An IE 4 problem that would take a lot of time to fix is not as important as an Opera problem that will take a lot of time to fix, because any work we do to support IE 4 is less and less valuable every day; Opera work should be worth more or less the same in a year that it is now (yeah yeah, it may gain another
As you get more users, that threshold drops. If you've got a million revenue-generating users, it only takes a fraction of a percentage drop in revenue to justify the resources needed to support an old browser.
Cheers
-b
If I wanted a sig I would have filled in that stupid box.
How about Safari and konqueror?
The True FOSS Skype Replacement
The basic level is IE 5+, NS 6+ (and assume NS 4 never existed). If you develop in Firefox odds are most of it will work cross browser nicely; just correct for nuances in the different versions of IE (and to be more complete include Safari and Opera, although they're smaller shares and should require minimal work if you stick to standards).
A site I was doing for IE 5+ and NS 6+ just happened to work in the new Opera (8.5 I think) and there was some pretty funky javascript going on there too.
And they were running things like Windows 3.11 and Novell 3.12 until 99. I talked to a friend there and he said they still have over 200 MS Mail servers for legacy support.
Companies like this will often pay huge amounts of money to software manufacturers to keep supporting their products because many times it's cheaper than upgrading, or there is something specific they need done.
I still remember the old medical database they were running from the 80s. They hired six engineers from the now-defunct company to continue supporting it.
I wish I could remember the name of it, but I worked there over 10 years ago now.
So the answer to your question is similar to what others have already said. If a customer is willing to pay you to support IE 3 then go for it. But otherwise, when a product is EOL, you generally have an excuse not to support it.
I see a number of ?s/comments to the effect of 'IS it profitable?'
The aspect of where both you and your users WILL BE in 18 months is not examined and what it would take for continuing support.
Be forward looking, don't be like your 'whatdoyameanweranoutofcopiertoner' manager.
-or-
Bridges being built for tomorrow's traffic, not today's.
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Ok, seems like sleep deprivation caused me to drift away. Anyhow, you don't need to support obsolete browsers. But I guess from Firefox 1.0.7, and from IE6 and up,... you're good to go. Right now, browsers shouldn't be able to be distributed unless they firmly comply with some standards. The acid2 test is a nice, strong test for browsers.
When Should You Stop Support for Software?
Whenever I feel like it. GOSH!
This may not exactly be the case with websites, but with software, the answer is (For me) "it depends". For example, I've written a program that's used on accounting and point-of-sale computers, many of which still use Win98SE, so I have to support it, work around its quirks and bugs, whatever. You can't tell a client he has to upgrade, he'll just go to your competition.
I am, however, quite stern about system updates. As far as I'm concerned, unless there's some expecially delicate update (Like XPSP2, or the few buggy MS fixes in the past), there's no excuse not to update for 99% of computers. If it works for you, great, but if you call me for support - I better not find out you had VB6 runtimes from the stonage, no VBScript, or whatever. Especially when I specify my program's dependencies (With links to the files on MS's website!).
As for websites - I try to make things simple and server-sided as possible anyway. I test on IE6 and latest Ff.
I'm on a Powerbook G4 armed with both Dreamweaver and GoLive. (What can I say? For a while I had very low overhead and could afford extravagances like that). And I have a droplet that launches Terminal and fires up lynx pointed at the test files created by either program.
See, funny thing about lynx: it's useful precisely because it doesn't show graphics, style sheets, and fancy web technologies. View your site in a text-only browser like lynx first, and then you'll know how other people using non-graphical browsers. This means not just lynx, but braille or speech browsers used by the blind. If after launching your site in lynx you find you can't get around in it or can't find links, then guess what? Neither can they.
It's not a perfect guarantee of accessibility, but it's a great head-start. You'll still want to keep your favorite tools on hand, but right now lynx is cheaper than Bobby.
You cannot truly appreciate Dilbert until you read it in the original Klingon.
Wouldn't it be great if everyone followed standards precisely and without error so that everything was 100% compatible?
One of our ColdFusion-based web sites has tens-of-thousands of authenticated users, but there's one user running MS-IE 5.2.7 (I think) on an old MacOS PPC who can't post a form back to a particular page - the browser sends the POST request, but no form data. It doesn't even have a file-upload element, the page works for everybody else and it would seem she has no problems with any other page on the site.
Should we waste time acquiring an old PPC (we're talking Performa-style here), installing the matching MacOS on it with the Internet-enabler and then trying to find a matching version of MS-IE (which even MS doesn't support any more) to install just to see why this happens? How much would this cost in hardware, software and man-hours? How can you justify it?
There's a point where you must say, "Sorry, unsupported." Where that is for you, only you can say.
While not everything can be universal-platform, I wish more websites had a better text-only/lo-fi version.
My current work situation forces me to do most of my browsing from a blackberry. I make purchasing decisions based on the information I get in this form. Even if Flash and images weren't a problem, because of speed I would prefer something that would actually work in LYNX (with pictures only used when the content REQUIRES it...not the "design."
LO-FI site options give you exposure to a remaining 5-10% of the population. From a business standpoint, is it worth it to your company?
Do you care whether Microsoft still supports something? Don't you really care whether your customers need access to your business? You decide which potential customers will not be able to use your services or business.
On my site (which is a usability site) Netscape versions before 5 cover 8% of my visits. This might not add up to a large number, but try to imagine a shop where a security guard stopped entry to one in every 12 people because, say, their shoes were too old. How long do you think that security guard would last in their job? Looking at these stats, I have to try and support Netscape's 3 and 4, but my IE3 numbers are quite low. Of course, I would do what I could to encourage them to change, even though the presence of these dinosaurs implies that they cannot be changed over for modern versions.
Having said that, if you are too accomodating, then they might get p****d off if you just cannot support IE4 on Win95 anymore. I think it's reasonable for them to expect IE 5 to be supported as you say, and IE1 is silly, but where is the line drawn?
I always liked the interface for IE3 and have a soft spot for it btw.
bang goes my karma... again...
When, for example, can you say that I will *not* support a certain version of Windows. Can you say that now about Windows 98? How about 95?
I think Microsoft been telling developers for the last few years to forget about Windows 9x to focus on Windows 2000/XP (and soon-to-be Windows "I'm NOT Duke Nukem Forever" Vista). If Microsoft is officially ending support for a particular product line, that's a good indication to move along. Of course, Microsoft support solution for every problem is to upgrade to latest and greatest version of Windows. Go figure.
There was an article cited on Slash about the horrors of of this from the design side when automakers brought up their system requirements.
So from this viewpoint, I would probably go for the ten year boundary on hardware and software, even though many software makers would like it to be as short as possible.
Heck, Symantec has dropped support for many of their more recent products for a variety of reasons
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
More up to date browsers?
It is not so much that lynx is not up to date, but just that it does not have a fancy GUI.
Firehed - Unfortunately, thanks to medical breakthroughs, common sense is not as common as it once was.
If you stick to standards closely enough and are reasonable enough, you dont need to support them all. You will get a nice layout with modern browsers via CSS and a decently usable text site for older browsers that dont like CSS. Most of HTML standards are backwards compatible.
Of course, if you will make a nested table monster you are screwed.
I start with, once vulnerabilities for a given OS or browser are identified and xyz corp says upgrade to next version to get protection then that is the cut off. If they mfg won't support it then I do not. Most people here know that vicious attacks have helped software companies more than hurt them. They were under the pressure of "old version works good enough for me" till the black hats came out and forced people to upgrade not for new user features, but just fixing things broken in the first place.
I do admit I have some sites that do not adhere to this policy explicitly. Life is complicated and this comment box is small.
Gizmos Gagets For Ninjas
I think the question ought to be "when do you START support for software".
Because the answer is, "When you can afford to".
It's all nice and good, but for a small organization with limited resources it doesn't make sense to take the extra effort to support Lynx, when 99.9% of your potential customers are going to be on the top 2.
From a business perspective it makes absolutely no sense to spend money on that. Then as you grow bigger and you are less resource limited, you can start being a "nice" citizen.
After all, what good is your website going to be if you have to abandon it after you spent all your money on making the website viewable by 100% of the people instead of on things that make better business sence.
Additionally, you have to keep in mind also that even though you can look at server logs and see what percentage of hits were by a certain browser; most people will have access to multiple machines, and if your website is interesting enough, even though they can't get to it with Lynx, they will probably get around to looking at it with Firefox at some point.
If you're supporting I.E. 5, Firefox, Opera, and Safari, you're miles ahead of the pack. Really, how much extra effort do you need to put in to support those 10,000 full-time Lynx users, considering that maybe one will surf into your site?
You may think your (website / application / organization) is going to take over the world and needs to be relevant to 100% of the population, but it isn't and it doesn't. Have you tested it with screen readers? Have you made available a high-contrast, large font CSS file? Is it available in English, Spanish, Hebrew, and Mandarin? How does it look in low-rez on WebTV? On Cell Phones? You're already blocked off from large portions of the population anyway... all you can do is design to standards, check with the major points of compatibility, and release. If 3% of people can't get to your site, and they're not the particular 3% that you are trying to target, then it isn't that big of a deal.
If you can get that last few percent easily, then go for it. If not, delaying releasing the site just makes it unavailable to the other 97% of your users.
The ______ Agenda
I work for a company that provides contract system and network administration for small- to medium-sized businesses. They pay us on a quarterly basis to do routine maintenance on their systems and to be available on an on-call basis. We also host, manage, develop, and design web sites.
If a client has a Win98 system and they're paying us to support it, we do, even if Microsoft has end-of-lifed that product. We try to get them to upgrade to something more recent if the hardware can support it, but companies in the SMB sector are usually reluctant to upgrade unless the computer goes into failure mode (lately, bad capacitors on motherboards have been making the decision for our clients).
On the other hand, when developing web sites, we try to be compliant with the more recent browsers (IE 4+/Netscape 4+, Mozilla/Firefox, Opera, Safari), though we do add alt tags to images, avoid frames, and check our work in lynx (I'm concerned about ADA compliance and access to blind users with screenreaders). Our clients usually don't have any clue about browser versions and accesibility; it's our job to make things work.
Bottom line: if you pay me, I'll support DOS 3.2. But if you're browsing one of our sites with Mosaic 0.99, prepare to be disappointed, unless you're a client that's willing to pay to have us write a script to detect your user agent and serve a circa 1993 site for your ancient browser. It's all about the Benjamins in the contract support business.
k.
"In spite of everything, I still believe that people are really good at heart." - Anne Frank
Oh! Oh! I know this one. I have a degree in Economics so I think I can help you here:
You should stop supporting older software when the cost is more than the benefit.
Note that "cost" and "benefit" do not *have* to be expressed in dollars, but that can often be a good proxy (especially in a commercial venture).
-- Don't Tase me, bro!
Make an educated decision on whether supporting that 1% (or whatever) of IE3.0 users is financially viable.
Ditto for the other minority browsers.
The decision is one only management can really make - give them the options (cost/design compromise vs % of visitors) and let them make the call.
Easy.
smash.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
My 2 kopeks. If you use web standards you won't have to worry about supporting older browsers. If a site is designed correctly the CSS will degrade gracefully. See Zeldman's and Meyer's work. As for supporting older software, as long as someone is paying you enough to support it then it's worth it.
"You'll get nothing, and you'll like it!"
Actually, according to this graph, Safari and Opera are about equal. It would appear many Mac users don't use Safari.
If you can read this sig, you're too close.
When the customers you would lose by not supporting a browser don't purchase enough from you to justify the costs in supporting those browsers. Period. (Rep might be worth something, particularly looking forward.)
If you can't associate particular browser usage with specific revenue amounts, and/or quantify the cost to support a given browser, to make those decisions, that's why God gave us MBAs.
--
$tar -xvf
I only develop websites for the very latest browsers. This means Lynx and Safari-- but NOT IE-for-mac or Netscape. Nor do I use ANY browser detection (only feature detection). Anyone using anything less will just need to cross their fingers and hope it works.
Wonder what the public key field is for?
Somehow I am betting you are way past that with your current testing - but who knows
I have mod points and I am not afraid to use them
It depends on what you mean by "support" for older browsers. If you're looking for pixel perfection on every "supported" browser then it's mostly about how much it costs you in time and money to do that. Can you afford to make your webpage look and act the same in IE 6.x and 1.x?
If, on the other hand, "support" means "usable" then I would take a lesson from Dan Cederholm, author of Bulletproof Web Design (a great read, BTW!) He advocates using lean, semantically meaningful (X)HTML. All of the style is maintained separately in stylesheets. You give up pixel perfection, but you end up with web pages that look good in modern browsers, are usable by the visually impared, easier to maintain, and (most importantly) degrade gracefully even to the point where they are usable by the lowliest of browsers (i.e. PDAs, cell phones, webtv, etc.)
What are you doing now, you lazy drunken obscene unsayable son of an unnameable gipsy obscenity?
Part of the challenge of determining what systems to which you will present lies in weighing the advantages and disadvantages of given software versions with their popularity. As such, I would actually endorse prioritizing support of Windows 95 over Windows 98, since Windows 98 added few if any notable technological advantages over Windows 95 OSR2, feature additions of dubious usability, and was (in my experience) less stable as well. Additionally, developing for Windows 95 always produces compatibility with Windows 98 as a consequence, although the inverse is not always true. "Newer" or "more popular" do not necessarily mean "better" or "more suitable" for testing.
In the end, it matters what your userbase is--you should do a study (or have statistics ready, in hand) about what major browsers your clientele and users will use to navigate the site. Obviously, if you have a large amount of dumb terminals browsing the service from remote point of sale stations or other technology that's likewise impaired, you're going to have to accomodate it. No doubt about it. Design's all about solving problems, and while you won't be able to accomodate 100% of users 100% of the time, you can solve for the majority of cases. Remember not to buy into hype about dropped vendor support, or the newest internet technologies--what good will a brand-spanking-new-AJAX site do if it's targeted at blind people who use the JAWS screenreader? Likewise, if your audience uses IE 5 Mac most of the time, go from there. (Websites are a lot easier in this aspect if you already have one--you've got statistics, and you can poll your users directly about what they'd like, or if you're really paranoid, you can get someone to analyze traffic patterns and site layout to see what the end product should ideally be.) You should work from standards-compliant code and augment it from there, as it's really helpful to be able to get a clean page marked up and rendering in the newest, latest browsers (usually), and then hack your way down the spectrum as your situation demands. If you have a large digital divide between users--say, 50% Windows XP users, 25% Unix users, and 25% high-traffic DOS users, your best bet may be to fork the program/site. Due to the fact that the older technologies take much less time to code for (ahh, simple CLI versus tons of GUI menus), you might be able to get away with this. If not, you're stuck between a rock and a hard place, and should consult your users--would the advanced group mind giving up some functionality to support the retro OSes and platforms? Ask 'em, since they'll be using it, not the members of the board or council who make the decision.
I have Windows Mobile 2003 on my iPaq, and I just bought it. It reports that it's IE4. You may want to consider supporting that.
and no more than that. The problem with supporting ancient software is that those ancient users never have the need to upgrade. Stop supporting archaic software, and they will upgrade.
I don't keep up with the latest hardware for my computer system, for example. The only time I upgrade is when some new game comes out and I can't play it. If they just continued producing games for old hardware, I'd never upgrade.
Do it doug.
Assuming you are mostly worried about script compatibility:
Get it working in very early Firefox, maybe like whenever the XmlHttpRequest object was added. Not that you need use that object, but its a good base line. I currently only test with version 1.0.4, and seems to be a good litmus version for both earlier and later releases.
Odds are real good it will work in IE 5+ after that with very little effort, and even back to IE 4 with a little more effort (just for bragging rights). Don't worry about IE 3. Don't worry at all about the Windows versions. IE and other browsers will work pretty much the same regardless of Windows version. A few builds of IE 5.5 were bad, so if you find something that behaves bad in just that version, don't worry about it.
Firefox is an easy cross platform browser, as in you get the same behavior on Mac, Linux and others as you do in Windows. Get it working on any, you'll be OK with the rest.
Earlier IE is less portable across platforms. For the most part the latest versions for Mac and Linux are well behaved. Don't worry too much about IE 5 and earlier on other platforms besides Windows. If the user is not on Windows, odds are pretty good they don't use IE either.
IE had a solid document object model all the way back in version 4. There is very little you will be doing that won't work that far back. The XmlHttpRequest does not go that far back, but you really only need that for AJAX on the Mac. Your AJAX implementation (if you have one) may require it regardless.
document.getElementById is perhaps the one function you might notice missing in IE4. A simple bit of global script can cure that:
if (!document.getElementById)
document.getElementById=new Function("Id","return this.all[Id];");
I'd recommend:
1. Get it working in early Firefox, any platform.
2. Get that working in whatever IE/Windows combination you currently have.
3. Get that working in IE 5.
4. Try IE 4, see if you can get it to work just for billing and bonus points.
5. Fix what you broke for the early Firefox.
6. Test in the latest version for both browsers in Windows.
7. Address the few issues as users report them.
Forget other browsers. They will toe the line with either IE's or Firefox's document object model. Safari and Opera are examples of browsers making the effort to be compatible with the rest of the web, their latest versions won't give you much trouble (except with obtuse things like vertical buttons).
HTML rendering is another matter entirely, but I'd bet the above recommendations hold true to those as well.
Cheers
The university I attend has a IT policy to EOL and stop supporting software that is more than two versions older than the most recent version. For example, they support MS Office 2003, XP, and 2000, but do not for Office 98/97 or earlier. I think this is a pretty good approach as you only have to support three versions of a product and the users can predict when their version will get EOLed.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
Use a server side scripting language like PHP and don't worry about browser support for Javascript (can be tricky.) Have pages that don't break if the browser doesn't support CSS. Use compliant HTML. Not sure how complicated your project really is but from this perspective, I'm wondering why you're bothering with specific versions of operating systems? It's still good to test with the widest range of browsers possible if you have the time, but it's often safe to only support what vendors are currently supporting.
Do you have a captive audience, e.g. are you developing an in-house app for employees of a company with a fixed browser platform? Or are you developing for random users on the net?
In my experience, hardly anyone uses Win95 anymore. Those with ancient hardware typically run 98SE or NT4. With those folks, imho you're within your rights to expect that they at least update to the latest browser version their OS supports. I'm not sure what that is for 98SE and NT4, but I'm guessing IE 4 or 5.
You might also want to test on Safari, unless you're fine with blowing off OSX users.
I can explain why many mac users don't use safari. When it was first released, it did not support many websites. You still had to use netscape/mozilla or IE. By mac os 10.3, it got good. Most sites worked unless they used a microsoft centric technology. (like including windows media 10 series streams, etc) Thats not apple's fault. Then the dark times came.. apple released mac os 10.4. Safari is now broken. Most sites relying on cookies are broken. They introduced a faster rendering engine that actually screws up more often. (white screens!) Many of the bugs are annoying like session cookies don't stay or long term cookies expire on you after the browser is closed. Some sites using sessions/cookies don't work at all. In some cases images do not appear if they are dynamically generated (schwab.com's customer interface) Most people only take so much before they go to another browser.
Personally when using my mac, I surf about 60 percent in safari and 40 percent in firefox 1.5. At work, I administer all the macs. One department uses safari on all their macs (3), while another department uses firefox (30/35). I give users the option to use safari, firefox or IE (only on 10.2 or lower systems).
The windows admin only allows IE usage and as such everyone is on IE6 w/ XP SP2 on that end.
MidnightBSD: The BSD for Everyone
It depends on your definition of "support". To many web developers, "support" means you deliberately prevent the site from working on unsupported browsers. A slightly more lenient web developers will instead throw up a "hey idiot" message to users that they aren't using an approved browser.
What you need to do is to make the page conformant to standards. Don't use yesterday's revised standard, use something that reasonably supported by a lot of browsers. And use only what you need, because the more odd corners of CSS you decide to use, the fewer browsers the page will render correctly in.
Dish out IE-specific pages to IE, because it whines if it doesn't get them. Then dish out standard HTML/CSS/Javascript to everything else. If you want to be thorough, dish out HTML 3.2 for older browsers.
You will want to *test* the page on a lot of different browsers at a lot of different versions. You should be doing this anyway, without having to ask Slashdot for permission.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
is to code to the most current/secure standards possible for apps that are exposed to general web audiences. for us, that means DOM 2 compliant xhtml 1.0 strict browsers firefox/safari/ie6, etc. clearly, it all depends on your app, and as long as the information layer degrades gracefully for older browsers, you should be good.
Three browsers, that is.
First, create your site in well-formed XHTML that looks good in Lynx.
Next, add as much CSS as you like to make it gee-whiz pretty in whichever of Firefox, Safari, or Opera that you personally prefer most.
Finally, add in enough <--[if IE]>...<![endif]--> statements to make it look good in the latest version of IE, and tolerable in the oldest version still getting ``support'' from Microsoft.
If you develop that way, your site will be accessible to virtually everybody and look good to everybody who expects it to look good.
Of course, you'll want to check all the other browsers just to make sure you didn't trigger some obscure bug along the way...and all bets are off if you're trying to do some sort of COMET 3.2 Intarweb thingie.
Cheers,
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
but is IE 3 crazy?
in a word, yes.
next question?
Windows CE would be a much better Microsoft operating system for the job, or something completely different - and the software would be much better written in something completely portable. Porting old software and device drivers from MS Win98 would not be a trivial task in a lot of cases (the source code may no longer be possible to obtain in some cases), so there is still a lot of stuff on legacy systems.
Run^WWork in Linux?
This completely depends on your customer base. If 80% of your customer base is Windows 95, then you'd better support that platform. If it's just two percent, and the other 98 percent is Win 98 and Win XP, then it's probably time to rethink that last two percent, especially if continuing to support is holding you back.
That said, think a long time before you drop support, and only do it if continuing to do that support is hurting your company or the product in some way. Customers in that minority that enjoy your products, and especially long time customers who are in that minority, will be pretty vocal about their happiness that you've got a product they can still use. This can help drive further sales.
At some point, you might have to drop support despite the wishes of these customers, but until that time, continue to support 'em as long as you can.
We have a set of potential customers we'd love to be able to support with our products, but the platform vendor bailed on 'em a long time ago. We can't even get the development software for the platform any more. We've had a number of inquiries about that platform, and we know that if we could support those folks, they'd love to have our software, but there's not much we can do.
I'm not trying to attack or troll, but seriously, you can't develop a product to beta stage, and then start questioning whether it should run on hardware/software X or Y.
The correct way to go about any project is to identify the target audience and their technology, and develop accordingly. 12 years of bone-headed decisions have taught me this simple truth.
Never build a house first and then question if the design was right or the tools were chosen correctly - identify what you need in a house first, design it accordingly, and then pick the tools to build it.
**ducks**
If you write standard compliant software / websites / whatever, you don't have to care that much about software versions.
/cdrom && cd /cdrom/slackware /etc/rc.d/rc.S
... because there aren't any reasons not to upgrade. Upgrading is easy, fast, and free.
Also, Software should be easy to upgrade. The point is, sometimes you do have a reason to run old software. Is there a reason not to upgrade your win95 machine to Winxp?, yes, the reason is that it CAN'T be really upgraded, actually, you are reinstalling. My Slackware install has been in my machine since Slack 7. It has been upgraded several times, and now is a slack 10.1.
Each upgrade has been as easy as:
mount
killall5
upgradepkg --install-new */*
That's it, I don't even have to reboot (i allways upgrade my kernel from source).
That's the answer: If your software is not badly designed, upgrading should be easy, and nobody would keep old versions running. I think that noboyd out there is running Slackware 7 anymore, or Redhat 6.2, or 2.0 kernels, or Emacs 19
In Windows, upgrading is complex, takes lots of time, and costs lots of money, and in many cases, it isn't a real upgrade, but a reinstall.
WTF am I doing replying to an AC at 5 A.M on a Friday night?
What? You mean my website has to work in browsers that can't implement a box model? Pfft, screw that. You can't paint on a broken canvas.
But you could care less about a blogger's-eye view. So do this: scan your access logs for browser, OS, screen resolution, etc. When the percentage of an outdated-setup drops to a point where you can exclude that slice of the pie without hurting your business, drop it.
If the target audience is likely to have more obscure or out of date software then it would be best to make sure that there is support for them. If the target is "normal people"(mom and dad, grandma and grandpa, or windows users) with an average income then I would go with mainstream IE5 generation to current generation browsers. If the target audience is unknown then they probably won't like the site anyways, unless you got lucky and just happened to design it to there tastes. So its best to go off what the general publick actualy uses.
I say first off code good, w3c-compliant HTML code that any browser should be able to render. Try to keep your website simple, elegant, and to the point. Keep the stuff that requires plugins to view (Java applets, Flash/Shockwave animations, Quicktime movies) to a bare minimum as they will take much longer to load and to tell the truth, a bunch of flashy-blinky stuff gets very annoying very quickly. Also, not everybody will have the plugins to view them (for example there is no Shockwave for Linux) and the others might not want to have to go out and get plugins just to view your site.
And as for testing- look at your logs and see what people use and use those browsers to test. One caveat to that is that lots of browsers can spoof their headers to appear as other ones, except for IE, which neither can nor would ever need to. Commonly, they will appear as IE 6.0 on Windows XP but the browser could actually be anything. So if you see more than the occasional hit by a browser other than IE or Firefox, you kind of have to assume that there is some spoofing going on and should test with those browsers even if the apparent share may only be 1% on your site. I know because I do it- my user agent string usually says Safari 1.2.3 on a Mac PPC or Firefox 1.0 on Windows NT 5.1 (XP) when it is really Konqueror 3.5.0 on i686 Linux. The rendering engine in Konqueror is very similar to the one in Safari so the pages that are for Safari will work with Konqueror just fine. Firefox's GRE is a bit different than Konqueror/Safari KHTML, but it usually works OK. Some web sites tend to have heart attacks when they see the real user agent string and scream "UNSUPPORTED BROWSER!!!" "UNSUPPORTED OS!!!" "DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!!! DANGER!!!" but with a fake one in place, it works perfectly.
Which also leads me to say- don't check browser/OS version for your site unless you are doing junk like using ActiveX that *requires* IE on Windows. It is a pain in the butt and as my user-agent string experience has proven, useless. Just don't do it.
Just "gittin-r-done," day after day.
I am almost 100% Safari now. I would say Firefox is better, but the integration with other apps makes Safari more usefull. I wish I could use Firefox, or Safari would add an "adblock" feature.
I really depends on what you're designing for. For example, if you're designing an intranet site for a comany, you only need to look at the highest browser that the lowest powered systems within that organizatino can support. To put in in perspective, if you're designing for that organization and the "oldest" OS they have is, say, Windows 2000, then you only need to design to support that OS. Anything predating that you don't have to worry about.
As far as internet sites are concerned, the rule of thumb is generally determined by the people you're trying to appeal to. If you're writing a site that's meant specifically for MAC people, then you write a site tailored to the people who you're writing for. If it's more general information, study the logs of the people who go to the site. ANY major log analyzer will tell you exactly what percentage of anything is connecting to you. Cut the cross section of the people still using crap equipment and software (less than %2 or so) and don't support it. They'll either upgrade or move on. If they don't have the where-with-all to upgrade to something modern, do you really want to deal with supporting their needs as a customer? Do you really want to try to explain to someone running a Pentium-90 with 32MB RAM on Windows 95 that you can't sell them a Radeon X1800 because their computer can't support it? And how much extra man-power will it cost you to do that? I sure wouldn't want to support it -- who would?
My $.02,
Xserv
"I love lamp."
Part of the problem is that every single site that offers user-agent statistics is in some way biased by its userbase. I really wish Yahoo and/or Google would publish user agent statistics; that would be probably as close to a proper sample of the world as you could get.
Right now, make sure you're turning on user-agent logging for your new site. Yes, the logs do waste some disk space, but they compress to nothing, and there's nothing better than seeing exactly what percentage of your users are using various browsers.
As an example, I made my life much easier when I stopped supporting IE 5.16 on Mac. There's a few very subtle differences between 5.16 and 5.17 when it comes to div's encosing other div's, and 5.16 rendering will break when every other browser is OK. I was able to end this nightmare when I showed my boss that he was the only user in the past six months who had accessed the site with IE 5.16 (which implies, of course, that every 5.16 rendering bug ended up at priority 1.)
And just a reminder that IE 7 is coming, with an, er, interesting collection of fixed bugs, maintained bugs, and removed hacks
Believe it or not at last word most of the motion control systems were being run on DOS. I've been out of the loop for years so it might have changed. A lot of stepper based hardware has always run on DOS. Then again early versions of Windows are pretty useless these days. Even 95 I can't see the point. Some games only run on 98 so there's still like in it. Then of coarse ME never had a reason to exist. I still have nightmares about the one install I did with it. It was an upgrade and it made most of my fonts including system ones go away. I managed to scrub it out and the magically appeared again. Win 2000 still has a lot of life left in it but NT is rapidly fading into obscurity. Some companies were hanging on with it but support is getting really sparce and support for basic things like video cards is getting hard to come by. No matter how useful it might have been eventually you have to throw in the towel and upgrade. Cary
The problem is of course "major release" is a malleable term. In our terms say the software was 3.0 , 3.1, 4.0, 4.1 we would suppose 3.1 and up. As soon as we say this though some very large company doesn't want to upgrade and we end up supporting older more "legacy" systems because of the all mighty $$$.
As for testing other companies software for interoperability with ours we support our desktop products back to Win95 on windows platforms. For servers it does back to Windows 2000, RH right now back to 4.1, Solaris back to 8.
The unfortunate reality of all this is that every case will have enough variables for any given company that I don't honestly think there is a hard and fast rule to even start to apply.
What happens if you say "Nothing before IE 4, period", then a week later some customer comes up and says "If you can't get this working with IE3 we're taking our 2 million dollar purchase order and shopping elsewhere"?
I'm a fiscal conservative, it's a pity we don't have a political party anymore
Is it feasible to have two sites, direct ancient and text-based browsers to a simple text site, and modern browsers to a flashier site?
I definitely use lynx reasonably often, and lots of sites don't convert well.
And as a side note, try to avoid javascript dependence if possible. I have no-script and it bugs me when I have to allow js because a site doesn't work at all without it.
In my experience, most users of Opera and Firefox won't fall back to IE if the website appears broken. You've already pissed them off by not working with their preferred browser. If you're not somehow handing bars of gold through the screen, they won't stick around longer than it takes to close the tab.
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
If my browser can't render it, I just move on to another site that can.No loss for me, except maybe scrolling down one or two links on google search results.
I'm sure I can find another site that I can purchase the same item or service from without the use of javashit and Crappy Site
Sequins.
I hate when i go to sites that were not created with the mind that people might use something other than IE. But i see no reason to support anything from 1998 back. Now days its all broadband and flash
Statistics tell you when supporting something costs less than not supporting it and losing the business.
I guess I don't know why anyone would ask this question, because for a business, the factor is money. If its not making your business money, then you stop supporting it. If you feel there is good PR to be gained, then obviously that can result in making money.
But the bottom line is that its simple statistics, and you should be able to tell how many users are coming in with browsers you aren't supporting by looking at the logs.
One word: Camino. According to its website, it has fairly good integration with other apps, and still uses Firefox's rendering engine.
Want a high quality FOSS RTS game? Try Warzone 2100!
I'm glad this thread came up, because I was just thinking along these lines myself. I'd suggest that live software be supported, come hell or high water, because there's always the unknown benefit that hasn't come to light yet. For example, Quantum Bookkeeping requires that the world plan for a changeover date that includes all countries. However, all countries aren't running the same computers, so quantum computer emulators must be kept alive for the humblest of systems, and they can. What I have seen instead is a deliberate policy to divide and conquer users. If you wonder why, it's because my Ingrid WinXP VB6 software cannot register its major component on the 2nd Vista beta. In the run up to Vista I have seen updates that are deliberately breaking software that is not current, but software that worked on WinXP SP2 machines, further pruning the user base. I was told that VB.Net could always call VB6 components. What is that now, but lies? If I were to meet the rumored CEO-to-be of Microsoft, I would whisper a suggestion that Vista come with not only an enhanced ntvdm.exe but a portable ntv31.exe, ntv95.exe, ntv98.exe, ntv2k.exe, and ntvxp.exe, etc.
Argumentum ad Probabilitum
"Internet Explorer 5.0 or better"? Sure, I've got better. Firefox.
Batou: Hey, Major... You ever hear of "human rights"? Major: I understand the concept, but I've never seen it in action
As many had said this is your descision the way I see it you have to look at two factors, your customer base and your business plans.
Cuistomer Base
What's your target audience, is it kids, or early 20s (which probably all have newer machines), or are they anyone with low income - potentially elderly/disabld with restricted (library/hand-me-down pc) access. As many have said if you want to serve the blind and disabled you will have to factor that in though you can keep your site modern.
Business Plans
If you guys are planning on rolling out some digital content as a key factor of your business strategy, there is another line for you, some media may not even work on older machines, best to start the PR to let people know wqhat is coming down the road instead of an overnight fiasco as many are not able tro access your new features when they hit.
If you are doing it merely to capture more market atttention maybe you should do a market study by interviewing current and potential clients and seeing what they really need or expect to have in such a site.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
If you write semantic markup and use CSS as it is intended, then you won't need to 'stop' supporting older browsers. The HTML spec takes this in mind and older browsers will degrade nicely (still seeing the content, but none of the fancy-pants layout and graphics). This is a win-win for both sides, as you keep your die hard lynx fans happy, and your modern browsers seeing the content and the more up-to-date layout.
Furthermore, you help improve your search rankings by making it easier for spiders to pick up on your page's content, make it simple for yourself to make pages printable and viewable on mobile devices, reduce bandwidth by removing redundant markup, and heck, with a small bit of work, you can even let people with disabilities navigate your site with ease.
Why support 'browsers' when you can write one set of markup that works everywhere?
Pokey The Penguin!
I teach econ at the high school level (besides, it was my major!!). Here's an economic analysis: when the marginal cost of support exceeds the marginal benefit. I know that sounds crazy, but look at it this way. If it require 5 additional hours of programming to support say IE3, and your time is say $50 per hour, then you'd better get at least $250 of benefit from it. If someone is running IE3, that means they're on what, windows 95. If they haven't bought a new computer in 8 + years, then I guess that they aren't going to be buying alot of newer stuff anyways. And if they are content with their poor overall web experience, than accomodating them is probably not worth it. In fact, testing for lynx, et al., is also probably a waste of time. For purely philosophical reasons, adhering to standards is nice, but might not make sense from a practical standpoint. I do my wife's photo web site, and all I use is all CSS2 positioning, no tables, spacer gifs, etc. Why? When she does a shoot, for it to be worth her while someone better spend a few hundred dollars minimum. Checking her stats, 75% of her visitors used IE6 and 16% used Firefox. (6.6% Safari) Do the math. Is it worth it to support 3% of her visitors? If they can't even afford a relatively new computer, $500 maybe, then are they going to spend that on the session and portraits? Now, it depends on also I imagine the audience your addressing. If your site say is for old folks, then maybe they're running their kids old computer and it might have win98/IE4. But overall I'd say just figure out what it's going to cost you, and then what you're going to get from it. Really, if you turn off someone who isn't going to spend anyways, they really weren't a customer.
My problem? I was perfectly gruntled, until some numbnuts came by and dissed me.
I'll second this... Once in a blue moon I'll find a site that just doesn't work in Firefox. However I hate IE for a variety of reasons & will just refuse to visit that site. I don't need to see the content of any website enough to use IE just to view it.
we are all invisible unless we choose otherwise
Mine is Good
w3schools.com is directed towards a technical audience that is more likely to use minority browsers.
For example, this page shows 85% IE, 10% Firefox, and 5% everything else. And, Web browser statistics are unreliable.
In the real world, design the site on Firefox, debug the site on IE6, and make sure there aren't any glaring incompatibilities in Safari and Opera. Minor unfixable incompatibilities (such as Opera's and Safari's problem with jumping centered content based on whether there is a scrollbar) with non IE/Firefox can be ignored.
We stopped support the moment our latest game shipped.
-Steve
Call of Duty 2 project manager
Infinity Ward
This is why IT people are always relegated to the kiddie table in business. IT people need to figure these things out for themselves in order to prove they're useful. Look at the statistics. First, find out what percentage of users will use the different versions of browsers. Set an acceptable percentage of users you are willing to alienate -- say 5%. So, you take the lowest browsers that add up to 5% and disregard them. So instead of asking "the business people" what to do, make some decisions on your own, and mention it in your report as a weakness that you feel is acceptable.
This is my digital signature. 10011011001
People should require having a license to use a computer.
/. crowd...
As much as I appreciate this idea from the "at least I don't have to fix it" perspective, you do realise that cheap commodity boxes are cheap precisely because they are commodities, right? Let's say 10% of the population qualifies for a license*: without the economies of scale and cut-throat competition, the price will probably rise towards what they were when only 10% of people had computers - I doubt quite that far, but enough to hurt.
Considering the idiocy I see regularly on the roads, I don't see a licensing system having any real impact on how people actually use their machines once they've qualified. Besides, the idea of putting overly onerous (read: effective) restrictions on who can or can't use computers would result in just about any government being handed its goolies on a plate - not least by the
*10% seems like a good estimate of the number of people who really understand or even care about the significance of basic security.
Blank until
Oh, hell, I'm a programmer, but even I know this.
It has jack shit to do with 'OMG IE 3.2A!!!!!1111111111111111 Winderz 95!!!!!1111111111111'
It's actually rather simple:
When the program makes you the money support costs plus only a modest to ridiculous (depending upon your greed) amount more, you drop support.
Age ain't in it.
Todays pda's that can surf the web have pretty good browsers, so why should you have to support lynx? Make sure your site does support blind input or at least some degree of blind input support ( use alt / title tags etc ).
Only 'flamers' flame!
Does slashdot hate my posts?
Just from reading the replies here, I think it becomes clear that opinions on which browsers and versions one should keep supporting are as varied as the userbase itself is.
EG. If I ask a Windows user this question, I'm far less likely to get an argument from them that support for browsers like Opera is worthwhile than if I ask a Linux user. By the same token, anyone still hanging onto to "legacy" Macs running MacOS 9.2 or earlier is going to be worried about pages rendering properly in IE 5.17 for Mac - a product that's largely misunderstood by anyone *not* using older Macs. (People tend to think it's equivalent to IE 5.x for Windows, or even IE 6 for Windows - and it's just not.)
Personally, I have real issues with companies deciding that "IE 6 support is good enough". *Maybe* that's true for an in-house package that relies heavily on Active-X components - but even then, you have to question the wisdom of marrying the project to a specific product.
A good example of this concept miserably failing is SBC's user registration site for DSL sign-ups. (https://sbcreg.sbcglobal.net/ They designed it to priamrily be auto-displayed by IE 6 when it's launched from inside their setup program on CD. But if that setup fails to complete properly for some reason, or a user has reasons not to sign up that way (like maybe they're a Mac or Linux user?), they get instructed to visit this site by hand in their browser and create their new user account/email that way. Unfortunately, I can't even get the "Next" and "I Agree" type buttons to display properly when I view this site in FireFox/Mozilla, IE 5.23 for Mac OS X, or even Apple's Safari browser! Last time I set up new DSL service for a client using all Macs, I had to bring along a Windows laptop just to get their user account created!
I've got IE6 and win98 (and firefox) on one computer and IE5 and win98 on another, and safari on another etc.
The banks work barely with the IE6 and Win98. The banks do not work with IE5 or firefox or safari. Not mine anyway.
Ebay will let you bid for stuff with IE6 but my combo did not allow me to leave Feedback - go figure. I had to use a friend's computer to do that.
I do buy stuff off the net, I just have a strong resistance to supporting Bill Gates' Megalomania.
And all the new rage is web surfing and shopping from phones. Does your system work with WAP or G3 or whatever is latest there? Good reasons to pare down the graphics, scripts and junk.
My scripts tend to be limited to making email addresses spam resistant.
It's also a good idea to assume not everybody can get broad band. I've just spent some time supporting a computer that couldn't get faster than 24kbps on a 56kbps modem and broadband is just a fantasy to them. Our monster phone monopoly has no interest in hooking up anyone who lives more than 3km from the CBDs.
-- it must be true, it's on the internet.
I think that it depends entirely on the type of site.
I like to give the example of a local company that was offering some sort of website video streaming software for smaller retail firms. About a year ago, I was forwarded an introductory letter with a demo URL. My default browser, Mozilla, did not load the page properly at all -- I didn't bother to see if it would work in IE or not. Simply put, if you are trying to sell web based software to technical users, you better have the site work in more than just IE.
However, if it's a website of a smaller organization (that isn't technically orientated) that doesn't have the resources to spend on extensive compatibility testing, I will often cut them some slack and try IE.
Part of my job is to test out the site in various browser/platform combinations, to make sure it at least looks ok and works for 99.9% of our users (until recently, those tests included Firefox/Win/Linux (therefore, also other gecko-based browsers), IE/Win 5/5.5/6.0, IE/Mac 5.x, Safari and sometimes Opera/Win and Konqueror/Linux; adding those up covers above 99.9% of our users, as other browser are barely a blip in our stats); we were then fairly certain that it just works.
The biggest problem with this selection is IE/Mac 5.x. Compared to all the other browsers I mentionned, it has, by far, the absolute worst CSS rendering. With just very minor adjustments, we could make our site look essentially the same on the other browsers, with problems with IE/Win 5.0 but not bad ones (essentially, the site doesn't look quite as good on it, but it doesn't look bad either; it also just works). Also, for reasons of bandwidth savings and general speed improvements, we decided to use AJAX quite extensively (boo! bad AJAX, not even a standard, evil buzzword, boo!), except IE/Mac doesn't support it. So, just for those users, we had to kludge together an ugly solution that used hidden iframes so the functionality could be the same (but far from being as efficient); it meant a lot of extra work for a browser which only represents 0.7% of all of our users. But, since a fair number of users were paying customers, we did the work anyway. However, since that moment I checked user agent stats on a weekly basis, looking forward to the day that it would drop under 0.1%, the point at which we might drop active development and QA (actually, we waited much longer for NS 4.x; we dropped support in 2004, when usage was at 0.02%; main reason was we wanted to use CSS and NS 4 was abysmal with it).
Then, oh happy day, MS announces it was dropping support for IE/Mac 5. Mac users, those of ours on OS X anyway, quickly switched to the many modern browsers available to them (Safari for 10.2 and up, normally firefox or Camino for the rest). Those on OS 8/9 had a problem, as the best browsers available to them were Mozilla 1.3.1 and Netscape 7.0.2; better than IE/Mac at least and they could display the site properly, however, they're not exactly new either. Still, the effect was that in a few weeks, we went from 0.7% usage to under 0.1%, also meaning way too few paying customers using it to justify the effort. We don't do any further development with that browser in mind, but we have not taken out the previous IE/Mac specific code already in place; as new features are added or when sections of the site are overhauled, we just won't make any effort to make it work for IE/Mac.
De gustibus et coloribus non est disputandum
I do not support windows. Not now, not then, not ever. Fuck that ugly piece of shit. The sooner more people agree with me, the sooner we can rid the planet of that bloated abortion of an OS.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
It takes just as much time to close the tab as it does to right click and click "View this page in IE Tab". YMMV
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
I just read that as "Oprah", you insensitive clod.
Here's a crazy idea:
Instead of coding for specfic browsers, write valid code!
That was the whole intent of the web in the first place.
I always find it ridiculous when a website talks about what browsers it "supports." Websites should not be browser-specfic.
Also:
USE AS FEW FEATURES AS POSSIBLE.
I can't count how many times I've seen things that could have been done in simple HTML, done instead in flash, java, javascript, activex, etc. The more different technologies you use, the more you'll get screwed up by subtle glitches in their implementation.
In short, pick a handful of good technologies and implement them properly. Support users by pointing them to software that is not broken.
Life is too short to proofread.
I use Firefox. I have ieview installed for when a site does not work properly in FireFox. It's not that rare that I have to use it.
Grandparent post:
Do you use java, javascript, CSS, flash, CGI, etc., or not?
Your post:
No, a flashier website will still work just fine on lynx, if it's done competently.
That's an awful broad statement to make in response to a post that gives five specific examples (some valid, some not). However, grandparent poster did not give sufficient detail, but I'm bored and will give some.
1. Java. I fail to see how a visually oriented java based website will work "just fine" in lynx, regardless of comptence. Let's take a good example of when to use java - I have a number of server software packages that use java based websites to provide system/software monitoring capability, specifically real-time graphing of various things. Lynx cannot provide that. If I'm in text only mode for whatever reason, I'll monitor the servers using text utilities.
2. Javascript. Moving into something I've written recently, I have a nice AJAX based based database front-end. It's meant to allow users on Windows, OS X, or Linux to graphically manipulate the database. It does so very nicely according to all of the users. Lynx cannot do what's required for the application. However, again, if I were trying to work the console, there are text based database front-ends. The key is to use the appropriate tool.
3. CSS. OK, grandparent loses some points on this one, as most things you do with CSS don't affect lynx, in that it simply ignores the CSS and presents the content in plain format.
4. Flash. I'll assume that the flash content is something that would be useful to the viewer and is, per your statement, "done competently." This eliminates sites that use Flash "incompetently" - doing things like using it for naviation and not providing html links to the same content and so on and so forth. This still leaves us with interactive meida, multimedia presentations, online tutorials that simulate applications, and various front-end software as discussed in points 1 and 2 that's also possible to do in flash. Unless you've convinced lynx to download the flash file and hand it off to flashplayer, none of these will work with lynx.
5. CGI. I'll give you this one, as whether a website is using CGI or not really doesn't have much effect on whether a page will work on lynx or not. I suppose maybe the poster was getting at the fact that many of the clever CGI programmers these days also integrate java, javascript, or flash into their applications.
So that gives you two points and grandparent three. I award the belt to him.
Really, what it comes down to is evaluating who will be using your site, what they're doing, and what their needs and expectations are. Most of what grandparent posted about aren't used in a *needed* way on public websites, but are extremely useful when done correctly. You also need to evaluate what portion of your site is reasonable to have higher requirements for. Are you simply presenting information or pushing the envelope into increased user interaction?
Google.com works with lynx, while google maps does not. Part of what google maps presents (directions, things near places) *could* be presented in lynx, but you know, doing so would take a very large amount of effort for virtually no payoff. I don't think google stockholders are loosing too much sleep over the issue.
Similarly, my main website supports and has been tested in IE 5.x for Windows and Mac, IE 6, Mozilla, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Konqueror, Lynx, and Links. It looks virtually identical in all of them, but doing so required some horrible kludges that make the code harder to read and understand.
On the other hand, my web applications (both internal and for public use) support IE 6, Moz/FireFox, and Safari. The code is clean and simple, and works in all three with the exact same code for the most part - there's very little that's coded based on which browser you're using (obviously, the AJAX calls are different). I could spend time devising wa
This was true for me about 5 days ago (and for the most part still is). Then I found a neato extension called ie tab which lets me quickly right click and open a broken page in ie, in a firefox tab. This comes in especially handy for those pesky ActiveX admin control panels (trend micro administration, shoretel phone administration, etc). Also my bank has succesfully broken firefox support very recently, and while I'm confident they will fix it again, in the interim I'm happy to open thier site in an ie tab until the problem is fixed.
If you're not somehow handing bars of gold through the screen, they won't stick around longer than it takes to close the tab.
Wow, thats the first time I ever heard of Windows Updates being refered to as bars of gold. <rant>Seriously, though, thats the only time I use IE anymore. Well, that, and when an application hard codes it as the web browser to open, but I am genernally not pleased with such behavior. Really, folks, how hard can it be to pass a URL to the ShellExecute call and let the OS hand it off to the prefered browser?</rant>
#include <signature.h>
Okay, I see many people are not being a lot of help. They are quoting statistics and all sorts of other things.
To answer your question: Just program in HTML 2. Its what I do. Supports tables, most of the stuff you want to use (except maybe style sheets), works with just about any browser except NCSA Mosaic and Netscape 1. You want flashy graphics? Just do an image map.
Truthfully, most of you users are going to have Netcape 4, Opera, IE4 or something newer. You could probably get away with programing in HTML 4 and hit 98% of your users.
As for developing apps, depends on who your target audience is. I mean, is there really a reason for designing something like Adobe AfterEffects and have it compatable with Windows 95? If you are running 95, it is most likely because you are running 8-10 year old hardware. Do you really want to do video rendering on a first generation Pentium or a 486 that is maxed out at 16 to 32 meg of ram?
Most apps I see now are for 98SE or newer. I know 2 people who are running 98 first edition, and noone running 95.
Many apps that I know of have seperate versions for 2000 and XP, then XP x64 and 2003 Server, then they will have a 9x version for 95, 98, and ME. Of course, those are internet apps. For most consumer apps, scrap anything older than 98SE. I mean, I am sorry, but 98SE is now seven years old. I am not up for the upgrade every year philosophy that Microsoft seems to have, but seven years is kinda pushing it.
Unless there's some feature of the site that cannot possibly be made to work in a past browser, it's silly to not support anything.
Now, admittedly, whne I do I site for someone, I don't test it with every old crippled browser that's ever been, but a well designed site should work (at least more or less) in any browser... unless you're using all that newfangled technology like Java... and then you've got to ask yourself, am I using this technology because it adds something vital to the site, or is it just the trendy thing to do?
Support everything from Lynx and Mosaic up. Someone with Lynx should be able to get some useful information out of your site.
"Support" only IE 5+ and Firefox 1+. Anything older has different rendering engines that will probably work but that you are not responsible for. There are no modern personal computers that can't run one of those two, and about 90% of computers already have at least one of those two, so if something breaks you can validly say "switch to one of those two".
On the other hand, if you care about getting more people visiting your website (as opposed to, say, online filing for the IRS, which is going to get all the tax returns anyway, web or not), there's no business advantage in telling a single person "Sorry, we don't support OmniWeb or iCab." Put your content in HTML 1 or 2 that every browser can read. Make it exciting by using features that the two aforementioned browsers support well. If the features are supported by other browsers, great! If the features break other browsers that aren't compliant, it's their fault. If the features simply aren't supported, you don't lose giving them any information.
Here's the website I maintain, and the plantext version. Note that all the information is still readable. The JavaScript spam armor has a noscript explaining what hasn't been done, for example.
For Windows ME - on the day it was released. 'nuf said.
You "support", as in fixing bugs, etc, the latest versions. But you
do your damnedest to "work" on everything.
And as a number of others have pointed out, if you're adhering to
standards, it's no longer your problem.
If you're in business to make a profit, you'll want to ditch anyone who isn't reasonably current. This means they should be at least IE6 on XP, Firefox/Mozilla 1.7, and maybe current versions of Opera/Safari. Beyond that, your customers are likely to be too cheap to want to spend money either purchasing your software or paying for ongoing support. We tried catering to the low-end client for a couple of years and found that they are just too cheap to spend money, period. Go find folks that think that technology investments are worthwhile, and then deliver a good value to them. You'll be a lot happier.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
If you write standard compliant software / websites / whatever, you don't have to care that much about software versions.
You've never developed a web site for older versions of Mozilla or IE, have you? It's a really nice idea for standards to make it so you don't have to worry about browser versions, and I (and a lot of other web developers) wish that was true, but it isn't. Unless you mean the standards that the browser was written to, in which case - given how a lot of browsers were designed - that's the same thing as saying eight year old technology at best, or no standards at all at worst.
I didn't want to support IE3 when it was brand new. It sucked then too.
~ radiographite: art by john shepard
*First* support the standards/specifications (eg, W3C) without detecting specific software or versions (or if you must detect, then follow the spec if you dont recognize what you detect, or the detection fails). That will automatically support anything that exists or that comes to exist in the future that is standards compliant.
Then, if you *must*, support any specific non-standards-compliant browsers which for some reason are still in popular use, in a 'bare minimum' sort of way - eg, so that someone using one can at least see and navigate the basic information on the site.
Think of it this way - tv broadcasters don't have to 'support' specific brands or models of tv sets - they transmit a signal in the standard, documented manner, and any tv set that can receive the standard signal works just fine. TV sets that are unable or unwilling to receive the standard signal, dont get much market share.
*Lots* of good info at anybrowser.org
Support the newest version of all browsers being currently maintained...
IE 6
NS 8
Firefox 1.5...
I think it's simple. You are making a website for the purpose of making profit (hopefully). If you support browser X, which is used by Y% of your visitors, then it will correspond to Y% of your profit (more or less). If that number is less that it would cost to buy enough developers' time (including yours) to support browser X, then there is no need to do it. Of course, you might have religious reasons to support, say, Firefox or Opera, even if those are not profitable by the formula above, but that's a different issue. The reality is - if you want a profitable website, then first of all, make darn sure it works on IE6 and IE5, only then should you worry about Firefox. I know this is a pessimistic view, but the same applies to operating systems. Firstly, make your program work on XP and 2000, then maybe OS X. Anything beyond that is charity work that counts for cool points with the geeks, but not much in the way of cash.
"If it require 5 additional hours of programming to support say IE3, and your time is say $50 per hour, then you'd better get at least $250 of benefit from it."
For major companies the question can become even more complex. Should I spend 5 hours and developing compatibility, or can I earn more by adding new features or working on new products?
For example: Is it worth Jon Carmack's time to develop Mac and Linux versions of First Person Shooter 3, or would he earn more money by working on First Person Shooter 4? (I'd be willing to bet the Mac and Linux support from ID is more about IDeology than it is about profit.)
The following three alternatives produces different result, and it may also depend on your browser:
<span style="font-size: 10px;">Hello</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Hello</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 10;">Hello (invalid - unit must be used)</span><br>
Validate the CSS you are using through the CSS Validator
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Let it be noted that windows update uses ActiveX controls to do its job, so even if it passed the URL to your pefered browser, there would be very little chance said browser would be able to handle the content correctly.
I know you can add ActiveX support to firefox, but I do not know if you can do the same to Opera, and even then, it isn't default. While I hate to say it, Windows Update launching IE is actually a good thing in the way that you know what the browser can do, and you know it can do ActiveX, so you know it will work.
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
If I actually have a need to use the site, I'll open it up in IE.
Considering that all the major browsers are free (as in beer), I would only support the latest versions of each browser. There's no reason the user couldn't upgrade, because for example he couldn't afford it. The only real limitation to this are companies where the user is not allowed to upgrade software, but if you have a big customer you could just add their version to your compatibility list. This still is a hell lot less than supporting ALL available browser versions down to 3.
Whilst direct return on investment is useful, there's one thing no one seems to be mentioning...
What else could you be doing with your resources (time, money, etc.)?
To take the earlier example: $50/hr total costs x 5hr would tell you that anything that earns you over $250 is a good investment - you make a profit.
On the other hand, most people work in a very dynamic environment without the ability to respond as fluidly. In an ideal world, you'd scale up and down, constantly maintaining the resource levels to do all the tasks that make a profit. In the real world, you'll have times when your department is understaffed and times when it's overstaffed and there's only so much you can do to change that as scaling up and down also carry costs.
Thus, assuming you're already doing the best you can to maintain correct staffing levels, the real question is how do you best utilize those resources?
The above theory tells you to do 5 hrs of $50/hr support if it makes you $250. But...
If you are briefly overstaffed, this is the time to do it anyway. Even if you only make $50 in extra sales, if you're paying a salaries employee $50/hr for those five hours anyway, at least you're now only losing $200, not $250.
Similarly, if you're understaffed, that $252 profit vs. $250 cost may tell you to do it - but there may well be another project that could also take those resources and would return an even higher return on investment. Just because you can earn $252 in extra sales by adding five hours of support for older browsers, you may be able to add $1000 of extra sales by adding five hours of work for more modern browsers.
So, overall, you should be looking at whether you can turn a profit with the work invested. The thing is, accepting that no business is perfectly responsive on resourcing, it's also always worth considering what else you could spend the resources on and whether that would return even better profits.
For example, I work in gaming...
Say I could draw an extra $10,000 in sales by supporting I.E. 4+ with a "light" site that'd take $8,000 in dev costs. Now say I could continue to support I.E. 6+, ignoring the older browsers, add a really cool new feature, and gain an extra $15,000 in sales.
In an ideal world, I'd spend $16,000 and return $25,000. Except I only have $8,000 in resources. Hiring costs me $5,000 and then the same $8,000 in salary again. Thus it makes no sense to hire extra staff for this short period, paying $13,000 to make $10,000 more.
So, with my $8,000 in resources, I'm going to accept that the "light" site would be a good investment too - but that the cool new feature is an even better investment and so that's what I go with.
At some point in the future, if I'm overstaffed, laying off and rehiring when we need the staff doesn't make financial sense either so I'm likely to be briefly overstaffed. At that point, if I have the $8,000 in resources again, I'll invest in the "light" project. Even if that project has missed its moment and can only return $5,000, I'll still invest that $8,000 if there's no better investment - losing $3,000 is still better than losing all $8,000 because I have no "profitable" projects.
In most web departments, the total budget likely isn't decided within the department itself - it's set from on high. So, accept that, accept you can't do every profitable project, and always ask the simple question, "Is this the best use of my resources right now." If the best answer is to support right the way back to Mosaic, go for it. If the best answer is only the beta releases of IE 7, given your company's business, do that instead.
I don't believe he was referring to Windows Update, but to applications who open IE to view web pages regardless of which browser is your default (Winamp does this. It's annoying when I'm using Firefox for the rest of my browsing, but if I click on any link in Winamp, IE opens).
I think the poster has got the wrong way around - you should support standards, and push the vendors to support the standards properly.
Of course, you need adhere to the standards as well, if you want to maximize compatibility.
I'm not saying vendors should not implement any non-standard function, that's anti-innovation. But while implementing new functions, it should not break the standard, and if it must, it's better to go the standard way (say, W3C) and provide fallbacks.
However, these only apply to things so large like the web, used by so many people. For smaller things it's another matter then.
is the time to stop supporting it for a website.
I don't think GP was complaining about Windows Update requiring IE, but about other (non-microsoft) products that launch IE by some hard coding (I'm assuming he's talking about such things as links to help files which upen up Internet Explorer with a web page)
I'll never make that mistake again, reading the experts' opinions. - Feynman
For some applications, like consumer-oriented web stuff, maybe you still want to use the flashy browser features, but if you're building a business application or online banking or something, make sure it can be run in a very minimal portable browser, like Lynx, so that they can download it to low-end machines if they need to. And especially make sure that business applications can work adequately on dial-up - my employer's CRM/timecard/project-mgmt system is this appalling mess of Javascript/ActiveX/whatever that only marginally works when I'm in the office on a LAN, and if I'm in a hotel with no wireless and lousy wiring that limits me to 28kbps, the system is almost totally useless, and it's always faster to drive to Starbucks than to bother trying unless I'm totally desperate.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Non-support shouldn't mean rejection - if you're detecting what browser they have and it's not one of your favorites, you should still give them the option of continuing anyway (ideally with a low-graphics low-features version of your web page.) Sure, there are applications that are way too cool to run on Lynx or a 160x160 grayscale screen, but they're surprisingly few if you give it a bit of thought, and most of that thought goes to leaving off all the features that your graphics-designer people thought would look catchy, and doing the same hard work you should have done anyway in thinking about what the user wants to do, what they need to tell you, and what you need to tell them.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
Given how much time and effort some companies take to make sure their page looks Really Good for their core users, I'm not sure many of them would even want to support a browser that gives users less than the CEO's vision of the perfect webpage. In the web world I've worked in at least, having a broad user base seems to be a lot less important than making a perfect impression on the users who can see it. (When I asked my boss if I should try and support Firefox, he stared for a few seconds, then laughed. And then I laughed too. And then I cried a little inside.)
if you are designing software or websites on a contracting base, this should be specified in the contract. Support and lifetime are specifications who should be listed.
I've read a number of comments talking about "is your customer base still on IE3" and the like. I would like to turn that upside down.
Do you want to deal with people who are still using IE3, or other eXtreme-legacy software? If your customers are retail, end-user types, home users who are still on Windows 95 with IE3 are probably broke, dumb, giant pains-in-the-ass, or some combination of the three. Even if you could sell them an initial product, your margins on that sale will probably go down as you are forced to provide extensive post-sale support, or deal with complaints, or have billing issues.
This is certainly not to say that you will completely avoid difficult customers, but I would hazard a guess that a larger percentage of Win95/IE3 users are difficult than WinXP/IE6 users are.
It may be nice on the surface to say, "Oh we want to serve everyone as our customers!" but that really can't be true. There are people out there who, if they become your customers, will cause you no end of aggravation and expense. Avoid those people.
In reply to those who will certainly smack me down for not having a good "customer service" outlook - whatever. This isn't about service. Those customers to avoid will be difficult regardless of what kind of customer service they receive.
Web 2.0 == Giant Blogspam Circle Jerk
Stop supporting IE :)
Seriously what do you expect from Slashdot???
Patents Drive Free Software as Hurricanes Drive Construction Industry
You stop supporting something when:
- An insignificant proportion of your user base is still using the product/version
- The cost of maintaining support for the obsolete product is not justified by any return (but you do have to consider how this will effect existing customers perceptions)
- There are significant technical restrictions imposed by continuing to support obsolete technology, such as the inability to introduce new features due to the fact that they would break on older configurations/systems. In this case, you must weigh up potential benefits, and how such design decisions now will influence future development. (ie. if you decide to support obsolete systems, and then in the future want to use new features - have you compromised your design)
- The product has severe problems, and the cost of support is to high. Better to cut losses and kill it.
My Web Sites only support Firefox (on Mac or Linux)!!
As other people have stated, think of what it will cost with what you will gain. However, there other things to consider. What _other_ features could you add to your website to improve its value? Supporting Windows 95 may not add as much value as some of these other interesting topics.
For example, how many web users would you help by supporting old versions of software versus how many people you would help if the site were translated in English, Spanish, Chinese and some other frequently used languages?
If you can support 95% or 99% of your users' environment, that should be good enough, and you can pay attention to other more interesting problems.
In my opinion, unless your website is seen by people third world countries, or by cheap skates, don't go with less than IE 4, Firefox 1.0, Safari or Opera 7. Even that is a little generous on web browser support.
A little offtopic,But if you haven't tried the new Seamonky beta you're missing out on a sweet browser.The roaming profiles are a godsend if you have a bunch of machines on your net.
Personally I'd vote for IE 5,6-Gecko based browsers and Opera-That should give you not only a broad base of users but would also allow you to put links on your website to FIVE free browsers(Firefox,Mozilla,Seamonkey,Kmeleon,Opera) which would show your customers that you really care about giving them choice and want to offer them a wide range of options.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
on whether you still claim copyright. If you claim sole rights to produce it, you should support it.
If you love your customers, let them free.
Counter-Struck has rotted away at your brain. Are you honestly admitting on Slashdot that you are using the only OS that the IETab FF extension works on?
:D
Heh, lamer...
-blister
If someone is using your software, let them keep using it. Keep the codebase going. Keep the machines around to build them new bins. Its not hard, it just requires you to change your mind about 'old' versus 'new' as a dominating ideology for how to organize ones life.
This notion of consumer-itis, wherein things get 'old' just because nobody else is using them, applies to all things, and particularly software. I detest it. It might be a 'reality' of the industrialization of human consumption that things change and shift, but just because of this is no reason not to continue to use technology which works.
If something is useful to a customer, let them keep using it. DOS isn't bad, its just passé
I know machines booting DOS that can carve a surfboard better than anyone! Under some circumstances, a CP/M based machine is a good idea!
Technology doesn't actually 'get old': humans get old. Technology is as useless as a rock, unless someone is actively using it, and in that case, if they're making dinner with it, let 'em use it
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Follow the webstandards, make sure it validates as HTML or XHTML.
The browsers should render the page correctly if you follow the webstandards, you done your part.
You cant support IE 1.0. Microsoft stop support 5 year old products or so. Some people still use Windows 98, but I think that almost nobody use Windows 95 or earlier.
People can also upgrade their browser for free to a newer version, and they should.
This is partially true. In my work place (a Microsoft shop) most of us use Firefox, but have IE for fallback and/or testing.
When I look for some product on the net and reach a random site that doesn't work with Firefox, I just ignore it. This *is* hurting those vendor sales, but hey, a broken site is not talking the best about your company.
We only use IE when we *must*, that is, when accessing Microsoft or some other well stablished provider whose web is non standards compliant.
...how many hoops you want to jump through. Last time I did a website, it worked in latest version of IE6, Firefox and Opera as well as being W3C-compliant. Why those? Because they were the browsers I could easily install and use on my Windows box. I included one additional CSS file with all IE hacks in a conditional comment, one of the nice things about using CSS for layout. That means even the IE page is W3C verified (though it would render like an ass on any W3C-compliant btowser).
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
That sounds like a great solution for Linux users who don't have a copy of Windows around...
What you need to be concerned about is whether all the types of browsers people might choose to use work with the site. Obviously Opera, Gecko based and IE are a given. You should also try to work with something like Lynx simply because if it works in lynx it'll work with accessibility software for the blind and that sort of thing, and accessibility for people with disabilities can be important. Anything else you want to support is fine, but if some idiot wants to use IE 3 and refuses to update to anything else the rest of their system is probably so crap they can't even get on the web.
Get a clue. Don't support the browsers. None of them. Don't support the IE series or the Firefox browsers.
Support to a set of standards.
Well, that's the principle. Since 90% of the web surfers (less on tech-savvy sites) use IE, I suppose explicitly supporting the latest version of IE is a good idea. But other than that:
I'm sure there's a lot more that every webdesigner should know, but this is a nice start.
When doing so would not negatively impact your company's bottom line.
It's a pain to develop for: we have tons of workarounds that don't work perfectly, it takes a lot of time to make sure everything we need is supported, etc. We're trying to sell NT Only to our PHParasites on the theory that, while there's a lot of 98 machines left, a high percentage belong to businesses (non customers) or cheap/broke/minimal needs users (also not likely customers, and with disproportionate tech support costs.)
Getting rid of MacOS9 was easier and a bigger priority, considering how hard it became to support when Apple stopped and how nasty the problems involved were (MS does a much better job at documenting what doesn't work, or works different.) Same argument, more focus on non-OSX people being less likely to buy stuff.
You don't have to drop support for any browser. HTML is backwards compatible and you can even write "AJAX" stuff that degrades nicely.
1. Code website that works with no JS and no CSS support. It doesn't have to be pretty (no <font>, just semantic HTML) nor work smootly (just use regular forms).
2. Add styling designed for modern browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and hide these stylesheets from junk like Netscape 4 (@import trick).
3. Add CSS hacks for IE (use HTML conditional comments, because IE7 breaks most hacks)
4. Modify document using JS and DOM to add handlers for all dynamic, ajaxy flashy stuff. That's progressive enhancement.
Firstly Opera is not a major browser in my book, even though I used to use it all the time. Web browsers change depending on the site so try and use browser statistics from your own site, any currently running sites for that company/business etc, anything that shows the sort of people that will be browsing your new site, then tweak things to work with whatever percentage of those browsers you feel is necessary. Next don't forget that just because the site won't look good in an old browser doesn't mean it shouldn't work on some basic level. You should have a text/unstyled/mobile etc version of the site, it should be set up so that this can be generated from the real site totally automatically in whatever way you choose so you always have at least one absolutely up-to-date second version of the site for 'crap' browsers. There's not really much excuse not to do this, modern websites should be encapsulating pretty much everything and that means storing things in XML and damn well using XSLT or at least storing things in a way that allows flexibility.
Don't forget that commercial sites are run on the premise of profits, your boss will understand that in order to have a complex website with lots of design and interactivity, some people just won't be able to access it. People will tell you that its blasphemy to break any of the web standards, they are hippies who have never worked on a commercial website in their lives. There's no one way to do it as long as you understand and accept the consequences and plan the site in a way that maximises support for the target audience that you personally plan for, the plan will be different for different websites but as long as you think things through you will have a good time.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Why not simply keep it to accepted Web Accessibility Standards? NOTHING should be done explicitly to make webpages compatible with any version of Internet Explorer.
http://www.w3.org/TR/WAI-WEBCONTENT/
As far as NN4 goes, I think the biggest problem is just its hideous abortion of an attempt at CSS support. Where that's all that's stopping you from supporting NN4, simply trip it up.
The easiest way is to write valid HTML and CSS that work with IE5.5, IE6 and Firefox, and then put a media="all" into the stylesheet declaration. (Any media will do, I usually use media="all" so as not to affect anything else.) NN4 sees media= and goes home in a sulk, leaving your user with an unstyled document. Your document is usable unstyled - right?
Heck, my MP3 player's (DRM'd to hell) software only supports Windows XP. And that's even with a sticker on the box that says it will run with Win2k! So the answer is: Support whatever you feel like, you can even lie about it on the box.
On a related note: Anyone know how to hack a Creative Zen so it can be accessed as a universal mass storage device?
Coding with assembly is like playing with Legos. Coding an application in assembly is like building a car with Legos.
It's a quality control issue. They know things will work correctly in IE, so they force IE to open instead of the default browser.
Democrats or Republicans. They are both taking us to the same place and they are not afraid of us anymore.
That's funny, only because I'm having a heck of a time getting IE to run on my SuSE Linux 10 machine, the one I use to do all my web surfing.
Until I figure that one out, I with the GP, not going back to sites that are broken in Firefox.
Glonoinha the MebiByte Slayer
...their target audience is different than yours. Instead, record browser stats yourself for a month or so by logging the USER_AGENT environmental variable for a few of your most critical web pages. Then, make a decision based on your observations.
The bits on the bus go on and off... on and off... on and off...
OS X users too.
Program Intellivision!
Requiring Mozilla is not always a good plan, because although it works on the most platforms, there is a large amount of users who are required to use IE at work, and by not checking your code against IE's non-standards-compliant rendering engine, you potentially lock out a large portion of customers.
1) for 99% of websites, worrying about the small group of people with opera and lynx and windows 95 is pointless; so, you should be replaced by someone with more judgement, or less time on their hands
...) all the time, and that is their problem.
2) If your website caters to that small group of users among whom lynxs is actually a significant %, then you have to support them, but you should know this already, so your org needs a more savy web master.
I mean, jeez, give me a break. No organization can afford to support all the platforms, unless you are more interested in how good your website is then in actually communicating with your users. People make wrong choices, or wrong choices get made for them (betamax, DEC rainbow,
Grow a little thicker skin, and say screw you to the wankers who use opera or lynx or whatever. Life is to short.
So far as I know, there is no reason anyone should use anything other then ie or firefox, other then their personal psycho problems about software. draw a line in the sand, and show some backbone.
reason to use = it does something important. last time i checked, opera did not do anything i or anyone else actually needed
In particular, firefox and IE render the 'padding' CSS attribute totally differently. You can write a valid webpage using great coding style and have the width of any given element _undefined_ because you used the padding property of a box. (In Firefox it includes the padding in the width and in IE it adds the padding to the width).
Then, nest these elements inside a fixed width box and watch the fireworks in IE when your page layout collapses because an element is larger than you think.
This is all valid code and it uses as few features as possible. The way around it that I use actually uses _more_ features (I nest the div tags within another div tag and set the margin instead of the padding).
I have a feeling you haven't developed too many web pages in your day. Or at least not too many large projects where you need to use the "features" of CSS to get a properly formatted webpage.
Why are you trying? Opera/Konquerer/Nautilus/FF are all free on Linux, so why even bother. There's just so much FREE choice. If the site writer does not have competance to write for a portable, compliant world then the rest of the content probably is micky mouse and not worth the read.
Why UNIX?
Link to Windows Automotive news item
Slashdot: Dealing with Outdated Automotive Software?
Both are interesting for different reasons
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
I can't let this common misconception stand. Most farmers are more advanced in their use of computers than the average person. A very popular online forum for farmers published their browser stats recently and something like 95% were on either IE6 or a current version of Firefox or Opera.
Man Holmes
i'm using the OS that supports my hardware and software, newbernutter.
I can name dozens of stuff that won't run on linux without emulation, and plenty that won't run with it. Try the same for linux, where most apps compile fine natively, or under cygwin, or if not run at near real speed under colinux.
nt.
Pain lasts, kid. Its how you know you're alive. Sometimes I think this growing up thing is just pain management-TheMaxx
redundant
adj.
1. Exceeding what is necessary or natural; superfluous.
2. Needlessly wordy or repetitive in expression: a student paper filled with redundant phrases.
3. Of or relating to linguistic redundancy.
4. Chiefly British. Dismissed or laid off from work, as for being no longer needed.
5. Electronics. Of or involving redundancy in electronic equipment.
6. Of or involving redundancy in the transmission of messages.
I quit supporting it when the original creators stop supporting it. Windows: 2000 and XP only - no NT, no Win9x - Browsers are the same. If the guys that wrote it give up on it it, far be it from me to continue to support it's arcane functions.
"Straddling the sword of technology..."
The simple answer is:
If you're talking about software that is needed internally for business functions, you stop support of the older software when *ALL* the users have been migrated to the new system. As new technologies get introduced, it's the systems group's responsibility to plan the migration and work with the admins to do it in a timely fashion.
If you're talking about public facing content distributed over the web, you stop support for older features when freely available technologies exist within your target market to replace them. You provide links to the newer plugins, etc. and transition the users on an ad hoc basis.
Obviously, there are concerns with timing and you will never be able to make every public visitor to your website happy. You aim at the middle two-thirds of your market and move with them. However, it is not difficult to make websites that are asthetically pleasing and functional for most browsers on most platforms. I hate web designer/developers that only develop for one platform. It's completely stupid and is the sign of a really poor (i.e., lazy) web designer/developer, or a management structure that is not very technologically savvy.
That's nice. I live in rural Nebraska and know more farmers than usual, and I can saw with confidence that most of the aren't interested in cutting-edge computer technology unless it directly relates to their work.
That doesn't mean they're stupid, or backward, but that the ones I know are more interested in getting the job done than the minor details. If Netscape 4 lets them do what they need, then so be it.
Also note that I'm not saying all farmers, but in my personal experience, that seems to be true for most of them.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?
Acrobat does this too, at least as of six point something... What a dumb thing to hard-code...
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
If dropping support means some of your customers think you're an asshole, and they tell two friends, and they tell two friends, and so on, then you might not think dropping support was such a hot idea.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
If you display HTML content in your application using the Web Control, that's IE running. So when you code external links in your HTML content (with target=blank) another IE window opens.
If you want those external links to open in the preferred browser, you have to jump through hoops and write non-compliant HTML.
When I take a look at Tech Evangelism bugs I can see that theres a lot of websites that user proprietary technology to a page render well. I'm one of those users that don't try to test the same webpage on another browser (IE for example).
http://www.michel.eti.br
That's funny, only because I'm having a heck of a time getting IE to run on my SuSE Linux 10 machine.
Try crossover office. It works really well. Well worth the price. Seriously though, linux on the desktop is a pretty small minority. ReactOS is the key to an open source desktop for the masses.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
It's really not that hard. You can stop supporting something when the interest in it's continuation is sufficiently low. This is nessesarily not an objective measure, and therefore you can't make a "list" of what to support.
For commercial software, this means when profits are too small compared to investment in continued support.
For non-commercial software, you can stop support when the main developers of the software are no longer concerned with supporting the outdated code. If someone gets concerned about the support, they can always contribute a patch that re-establishes support.
SLOGEN [ http://ungdomshus.nu : Sebastian cover music]
Yeah, more and more the signal to noise ratio is asymptotically approaching the abscissa.
Slashdot entertains. Windows pays the mortgage.
Those that spend money regularly and upgrade their systems and buy your products, and those that don't have money and don't regularly upgrade.
Which kind do you want for your customer? Those are the ones you supprt. The other kind are known as "ex-customers."
I officially quit supporting 95 systems in late 2004 though our software will run on 95C if need be. My web applications are IE5+ , FF 1.0 +, & Netscap 4.9+. Don't know, Don't care about the rest of the browsers. 95% of our users are IE based anyway.
Just make it compliant with the standards. A lot of comments out here make it sound like you can't directly make it compatible both with Mozilla and IE from the start, but depending on what technologies you use, like ascii, it can be read in every browser ever invented (I might get a "-1, Dumb" for this), or HTML, or Flash, etc... I mean, mostly anything you see is meant to work fine with stuff like Firefox even if it's not meant to be supported, and with any recent browser that supports stuff like CSS, mostly anything works fine.
You just got troll'd!
Wow, thats the first time I ever heard of Windows Updates being refered to as bars of gold. Seriously, though, thats the only time I use IE anymore.
Wasn't there something posted about Microsoft starting to support Firefox for its own websites including for Windows Update? Yeah...here Firefox Windows Update Article
So yeah - even Microsoft is supporting more than one browser for some of their most lock-in tying websites (e.g. Windows Update).
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
I completely concur. The only time IE gets used on my machine is when I do windows update. I have to REALLY, REALLY need something from a site that doesn't support Firefox that I know I can't get elsewhere. I did it once when getting something from the USPTO, and once when my wife was using a university's online registration system (and yes I complained to the university tech support.)
I've given up on dozens of websites that weren't critical to what I wanted. I'm not usually this picky (I use lots of design software on Windows at work), but this really bugs me because it's SO unnecessary in most cases.
It's not wasting time, I'm educating myself.
And if whatever you need IE for is just a one off kinda thing then you can use the crossover office demo.
You are so boring that when I see you my feet go to sleep.
The simple way to answer the question of to support or not to support a software product is easy. Is the version of the software product used by your target demographic, and Does the company who makes that software version support it? So if the answer is no to both questions nix it. As in example Microsoft provides no support for any OS'es 98 and older. Funny thing though, although they dont support it, its not public domain lol.
Using CSS, you simply link in your stylesheets using:This solves all your issues. Why? Because you can specify the media device that you wish to apply the style for, so, use "print" and specifiy your print styles, etc.
IE can be handled nicely by using conditional comments to link to seperate stylesheets.
All old browsers will get usable, unstyled content. (Which will proabably load faster for them at any rate)
In 2006, you should not call yourself a web developer unless you know these things. Let's get with it already.
See here
How about when the websites don't complain?
With the new BofA Sitekey business, Omniweb (Safari/Kongqueror) stopped working. Confused, I fired up Camino and it worked. So I went back into Omniweb and told it to send Safari as the user agent. Problem solved. WTF!
If I alter my user-agent string, then these bozos won't know that people actually use another browser. But I need to alter it to use the website. Damned if I do, damned if I don't.
Use what other webdevs use statistics. You should always try and make sure your users can access your website, without users what sense is there to even bother making a website? Whatever the majority of your important users are currently using for software is what you should be coding your site for.
m
You could also analyse your visitors along with the statistics found here.
http://www.upsdell.com/BrowserNews/stat_trends.ht