When Should You Stop Support for Software?

Posted by Cliff on Friday January 20, 2006 @02:30PM from the limited-resources-and-hard-decisions dept.

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?"

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Re:Depends... by BasilBrush · 2006-01-20 14:48 · Score: 5, Informative

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.