Comment by mewpmewp2
1 day ago
There's likely always a line somewhere where effort becomes way out of proportion compared to getting that last mile effort.
Arguably, if you only have a website, that won't work for anyone without access to the Internet. So then you should have a physical presence in each of those people's location, and arguably you shouldn't provide any improvements that give me more than physical presence does, so you should not have the website in the first place, since people without the Internet can't use it or you have to keep your website without any improvements over the physical office.
If you only have a website, arguably 2+ billion people currently wouldn't be able to access it.
And it seems odd to bring 150 mil people as an example, when the baseline should be at least 2+ billion with website only.
Not using bleeding edge web "standards" is also hardly comparable to the office of having a physical presence in every locale though. Software developers seem to be uniquely good ad overvaluing small convenience gains for themselves compared to the pain inflicted by breaking compatibility multiplied by the set of affected users.
Most websites are glorified rich text or forms. And most of the rest should be that. This is even more true for the kinds of websites people need to use rather than some designers art experiments. They don't actually need all these fancy features except to make their developer's work slightly easier.
A lot of the time it's not software developers who define it and it's about the budget. Usually it's the product decision. E.g. an agency who has constant recurring experience with it might indicate that supporting N% browsers costs this much with cost increasing the higher the percentage. E.g. you want to use CSS flex you might get 97% to 99% of all World users, because there's going to be certain percentage for which it won't work. If you claim to support those old browsers you will need to test with them too and be able to easily spin up etc It's not just knowledge of what you can or can't use, it will be extra permutations of testing everything.
In my experience usually it's the software developers trying to push blame onto other people. Sometimes it's a total rewrite or a new product and you actually have to ask how far back to bother supporting (devs are still the ones who ask this). But most times when support is dropped from an existing product it's because a dev brought the question up first.
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