Comment by eknkc
1 day ago
I agree the general premise but do not agree when it comes to browser support.
I feel like we should be building for the 98% or even 95% and force the remaining to upgrade their browsers. I've built for the IE6 - IE11 era for a painful and long time. I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.
This is very context dependent. It's 'fine' having such attitude when it comes to a hobby project or personal website – not so much for ecommerce site. And imo you are missing the key part of the article – graceful degradation.
Designing for the ideal (or for the <98%) is fine. As long as the experience is gracefully degraded for the rest.
Supermarkets often have so low margin that building for the 98% of customers means that all of the profit has disappeared.
Profit is often at the margin.
Some people are locked in old devices and can't upgrade. Basically you are doing class discrimination...
Which is perfectly fine for businesses. If I sell $10,000 suits then I don't care about people buying $5 undergarments.
Their inability to stay current does not constitute a responsibility for all of us to halt progress.
Progress, or constant churn for the sake of Google's stranglehold on web standards?
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I have a gripe with this attitude because it goes beyond browser use. Inserting the new fancy thing everywhere is often unnecessary and affects accessibility in a negative way for a nonneglible number of your users. And that was the point of the article, right?
Taking the conversation slightly outside the original context: if I go to a restaurant, should I have a phone and an app ready so that I can order food? If I go to the gym, should I have a gym app ready so that I can sign in? I don't like having to do that. But that's just another instance of this same attitude.
>> I do not give a shit if you want to use a 3 year old browser at this point. Go look at a blank screen.
And I don't give a shit about your site/content/whatever. If you don't work with Firefox or my old Mac browser, your whatever isn't worth my time. For "content" sites this is insanely true, even for "news".
Using a 3 year old browser eh?, let me dig up a link for you to click.
What you describe is not feasible in competitive mature markets like good part of e-commerce.
As of 2024 at one of my clients we were still supporting IE8 and as of 2026 I still have significant traffic at some clients from IE9 and 11 or ancient firefox/chrome versions.
The reason is quite simple when you analyze the data: it's concentrated between 8.30 and 5.30 pm.
Those are people sitting at their desk in a bank or some different office. They cannot install other browsers, they cannot update them. Their perfectly working computers (for their job) may not even support newest browsers at all.
Losing 2-6% of the office hours traffic of those well paid-stable job individuals has an outsized impact on revenue and margins that cannot be estimated by naive data analysis.
In other sectors many users are B2B2C retailers in machinery or carpentry using the same computer they bought 15 years ago and they need to provide a quote to the customer in front of them. Single orders can easily be 5 or even 6 figures.
Small numbers in many sectors not only matter they have an outsized impact and a compounding effect long term.
I get that some companies mandate IE11, they may have IE-first internal sites, custom browser plugins, MDM configs - actual systems that would need to be updated. And MS still supports it and releases security patches for it.
But being forced to use ancient Chrome/Edge versions? You are exposing your users to half a dozen sandbox escapes, and there's no big blocker from upgrading. Is their IT department asleep at the wheel?
> I still have significant traffic at some clients from IE9
It's been 15 years since IE9. Where do you draw the line?
Depends on the revenue they bring vs the cost of serving them. It's highly dependent on market/business/company.
Often you simply don't offer the feature. E.g 3d rendered previews may not be available but product configuration and cart keeps working on a shop selling custom showers (you fallback to dynamic static images).
In real estate a page displaying fancy maps with price statistics by area/neighborhood might be unavailable, but the core business of listings and search does.
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Why? There are no features which aren't supported by 10 year old browsers which can bring more sales or improve the user experience. So who are these new features good for?
My development comfort is worth more than the service for users with vastly outdated browser.
That spells lost sales if you're doing it as a job. Or at least lack of access for people with older devices if you're doing it as a hobby. Then it's of course your call.
Agreed - there’s a point where supporting old out of date browsers is simply an enabler.