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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?"
Depends on if you consider x% of the interweb population to be valuable to your business.
// file: mice.h
#include "frickin_lasers.h"
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.
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 $100 laptops.
For non-web platforms: as long as it pays.
This may be cruel, but if you invest into older technology that will not generate any new sales, this money cannot be put into offering better service and features or price cuts for the new versions. It will be hard to determine how long something pays, e.g. customers may buy the newer version because they have learned from experience that the product will be supported for a long time, so not supporting W95 might actually be the wrong move. Try to determine how many support request you get from users with older versions and if they are returning customers. Determine the cost (in money and new features that cannot be implemented due to support for the old platform) for keeping the old version on board. If the costs are higher, kick it. Beneath other things you are responsible to stay in business, so you actually can support the current version for your customers.
memomo: free web based language trainer DE-EN-ES-FR-IT
I develop websites as well as part of a much larger firm. We stop providing support for older browsers (Like IE 5 and 5.5 Mac) when MS decides to stop supporting them.
:)
.8, and Safari (forget which version).
We will only test on XP, Win2K and win 98, but not 95... (that's just silly
Our browser support goes back to IE 5.5 Win, NS 6, FF
Take the hint from others and you will be able to justify your actions.
The Code Ninja is swift with his tool, precise in his delivery, and deadly accurate in his execution.
There's a formula you can use to help you figure this out.
A) Take the amount of money you're getting IN SALES of older product. Pull a number out your arse to represent the goodwill you get by supporting older products, and add it in.
B) Take the amount of money you're spending TOTAL to support older product. Include salaries, time estimates, etc. Add in the costs of anticipated sales you'd get by people upgrading to the newer version.
Profits=$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.
Yeah, what happened to "Degrade Gracefully".
I mean, if you're entire business is a web app which requires CSS and modern javascript... then support what you need to support. I'd personally support firefox 1.0+, netscape 6.0+, IE 5.5+. That will encompas more than 99% of people; after that I think it's really diminishing returns (pre-IE5.5 means pre-windows98).
I can't see supporting netscape 4.7 anymore. It was a good browser, but it was released in what, 1998? It's time to move on, folks - it's been 8 years. It doesn't support CSS and iframes properly and a whole bunch of stuff. Trade in your SparcStations and PackardBells for something modern, please.
Just attempt to make it degrade gracefully.
~Will
sig?
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."
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.
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"
The gold standard in this case is WILL IT MAKE MONEY. If supporting users on IE3 costs more money than you'll get FROM users on IE3, don't do it. Simple.
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PGP Key ID 0xCB8FF658
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.
NOT a good way of making that decision. That'll be 1% of the people using the site. Who the site already work for.
Anyone using an incompatible browser'll see the first page, then have to go away. It won't show up that many people are using the browser to view the web pages, even if a lot want to.
So that method'll be biased towards saying there's no point because 99.9% of your users use a browser which is already compatible.
Some people who can't will simply open another browser such as IE and come back. Others can't - it's pretty much impossible to use many sites designed for IE (especially any that require ActiveX) on anything other than Windows. *nix users are completely cut out of your user base, and Mac users too now that IE won't be available for that any more.
These users probably won't have Windows to load IE in and therefore won't use your site. Even if they do, having to reboot into Windows would turn them away from using your site. And probably to your competitors site, which does happen to work in their browser.
Most annoying I find are the sites that turn away anything that's not IE because they don't support 'Netscape' (I actually use Firefox), even though their website would work perfectly without any changes except removing that damn message.
Since when can the first post be modded 20% redundant?
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
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 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.
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.
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
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.