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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?"
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
Indeed. In fact to pad that out further, go here (or a similar stats site) and read off the percentage of users that you want to reach. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.a sp
If you're happy for just 61% to be able to use it, then just support I.E.6.
If you want to hit 85%, then you better support Firefox too.
If you want to bump that up to 90% support I.E.5 as well.
If you want to mop up some of the last 10%, then support Netscape, Opera etc.
No, a flashier website will still work just fine on lynx, if it's done competently.
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Friends don't let friends enable ecmascript.
The web is different from the notion of traditional software because of the possibility for graceful degradation. When I write standards-compliant pages that look great in modern browsers, they also degrade so that older or limited browsers are still able to use the site, albeit without the exact same presentation.
As a professional web developer, I target all current browsers for identical rendering (or at least very similar). This includes Firefox 1.5, Safari 2, Opera 8, IE 6. For previous-generation browsers such as Firefox 1.0, IE 5.5, and Opera 7 an effort is made to achieve identical rendering, but this is secondary. Some variance is tolerated, but major rendering issues must be fixed. Going back even further to Pre-1.0 Firefox, IE 5, and IE 5 Mac even more variance is tolerated, and by the time we get to Netscape 4.x I'm pretty comfortable with simply showing them an unstyled page.
Really, there is a formula which can represent the browser support for a project, and it's simply not worth spending much time fixing sites for minority browsers which have been discontinued. Of course, if support for a particular browser is requested by the client then I am happy to oblige. But they don't usually want to pay extra for that service, and for good reason. The web has moved on from HTML 3.2, and there are simply too many benefits to developing with XHTML+CSS to ignore.