When Should You Stop Support for Software? 438
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?"
That completely depends (Score:2, Interesting)
A pure text website with some graphics can support lynx, whereas a flashier site will require more up to date browsers.
Re:That completely depends (Score:5, Informative)
I love broad statements (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:I love broad statements (Score:3, Interesting)
You are taking two different things and conflating them here. Lynx cannot provide real-time graphing. The fact that it doesn't support Java is irrelevant; it's perfectly possible to write a website that uses Java when it's available and falls back to altern
Re:I love broad statements (Score:3, Interesting)
If that is the goal is to provide real-time graphic monitoring of server software, then there is no lynx based alternative available. If live updates of information are important, the same data CANNOT be provided through lynx, period
The Automotive Industry (Score:5, Interesting)
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
Re:The Automotive Industry (Score:3, Insightful)
The only reason why there's a 10 year requirement for car manufacturers (at least in the US) is a safety issue-- you wouldn't want 10 year old cars rolling around on bad brakes due to parts being unavailable, would you?
Re:The Automotive Industry (Score:3, Insightful)
Disclaimer: Writing this after coming home from the bar and randomly having a look at slashdot
10 years is FAR too long for software development.
I'd disagree. I regularly write code in a language invented 20+ years ago for an interface defined 20+ years ago, using principles defined over a hundred years ago.
You'd either be limiting your functionality
Do you mean functionality, or do you mean "shiny things"?
particular old browser
What has writing HTML to do with software development? That as
Re:That completely depends (Score:2, Insightful)
--
Yes. I'm cynical, aren't you.
Re:That completely depends (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:That completely depends (Score:4, Interesting)
browser to support those standards. For free.
Re:That completely depends (Score:5, Funny)
Re:redundant != repeated (Score:3, Funny)
I can only assume that not enough moderator points have been allocated to cover them all.
Re:That completely depends (Score:3, Insightful)
1. Is it worth the time to develop it for release? (Return on investment, factoring in goodwill and brand loyalty, etc.)
2. Would it be a support nightmare after release? (If you can't reproduce problems, you can't fix/mitigate them very well, and the customers may end up being more frustrated than if you'd just told them "Sorry, use Firefox".)
Depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Depends... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Depends... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Depends... (Score:3, Insightful)
You miss the point. You must be in a 0.001% bracket of users who go significantly out of their way to shut out as much formatting as possible from their web experience. Certainly in all my years I've never heard of anyone going to the extremes that you do.
As such, you consign yourself to an insignificant minority. Why should the parent, or any other online service care about you or loosing your custom. From a business perspective you're so small that you just don't matter. And its all your own fault.
Re:Dependencies... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Depends on type of site. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Dependencies... (Score:3, Informative)
This was true for me about 5 days ago (and for the most part still is). Then I found a neato extension called ie tab [mozilla.org] which lets me quickly right click and open a broken page in ie, in a firefox tab. This comes in especially handy for those pesky ActiveX admin control panels (trend micro administration, shoretel phone administration, etc). Also my bank has succesfully broken firefox support very re
Re:Dependencies... (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Wow, thats the first time I ever heard of Windows Updates being refered to as bars of gold. <rant>Seriously, though, thats the only time I use IE anymore. Well, that, and when an application hard codes it as the web browser to open, but I am genernally not pleased with such behavior. Really, folks, how hard can it be to pass a URL to the ShellExecute call and let the OS ha
Re:Dependencies... (Score:3, Interesting)
Until I figure that one out, I with the GP, not going back to sites that are broken in Firefox.
Re:Depends... (Score:3, Insightful)
No, they haven't. There are at least 7% of all users out there which do not happen to run windows and have no IE. Do you really want to lock out 7% of your potential customers, and annoy another 10-20% or something which could use IE, but doesn't want to?
Re:Depends... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's like saying an underwear manufacturer is stupid for eliminating 40% of their market by making underwear that is designed for women. My god! No fetish free men will buy it!
If your target market is 'technically savvy and up to date', then supporting anything prior to IE6/FF/Safari is an absolute waste of effort, and you may even want to target Opera.
If the site is a Windows 95 user forum, on the other ha
Re:Depends... (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a profit decision, sure. Assuming those values, though - of the 2 groups of people who use alternative browsers, most of them are the geeks, the rest are Mac users, a generally more affluent and powerful group anyway. Not supporting alternative browsers also makes you more vulnerable to looking bad in the eyes of both of these groups - and while they're a small proportion of the marketplace, combined there's a disproportionally large share of power between them.
If you've got a website where you pot
Re:Depends... (Score:5, Insightful)
The choise of browser also is an indication whether the user is likely to buy something or not, at least if you sell software or some other computer related thing
A user that still runs IE3 may be less likely to change things, or buy anything new than a user that runs the latest version of IE or even have shown enough initiative to upgrade to Firefox or Opera.
So 10% user share for Firefox, would likely be of more business value than 10% IE5 users.
Re:Depends... (Score:3, Interesting)
Someone who is using Netscape 4 (as an example) is either 1) too broke to afford a machine that can run newer versions, or 2) technophobic, or 3) determined to make the world bend to their will. How much money do you want to spend herding any of those three to your website, assuming you're in a high-tech business?
Now, if you sell tractor parts, then you have a legitimate point. If you're selling music downloads or
Crazy idea! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
You should literally ask Slashdot (Score:2, Informative)
When the vendor no longer supports it... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:When the vendor no longer supports it... (Score:3, Insightful)
In the Federal space, things t
Re:When the vendor no longer supports it... (Score:3, Interesting)
This is Easy... (Score:5, Insightful)
The trick is determining the costs and benefits. But often it is not that hard.
Re:This is Easy... (Score:5, Interesting)
You don't ever stop supporting your customers. You just switch to paid support after your warranty or contracted support period has expired.
I'm still supporting the first commercial software I ever wrote (a refrigerator controller for a meat packing company) because it still does the job I originally wrote it for, and the company using it occasionally pays me to port it to newer hardware. I'm not making a loss, and it's not a huge money spinner for me, but I'll continue supporting it because it's mine.
Re:This is Easy... (Score:5, Interesting)
I'll disagree with this. The company I work for recently stopped support for some software we wrote in 1999. We provided more than 2 years notice, and a reasonable upgrade path.
Our entire code base was rewritten in 2000 and once again in 2005. Supporting 3 different code bases is not practical.
First of all, for front line support people, have them trained on 3 different products is simply not practical.(While the 3 pieces of software are similar in general functionality, they're are significant differences in how the achieve that functionality.)
More importantly, the number of developers that are familiar with the original code base is small. And these are the most senior developers and having them spend the their time looking at the old case base is not a productive use of their time.
I suppose we could have offered a support contract to the customers of the older version that represented the realistic cost of what it would be to support the older code base. But, the number would have been ridiculously high and would probably be seen as quite insulting by the customer.
It made more sense to announce the sunset of the product with a large amount of advance notice, and provide a reasonable upgrade path.
That is a business decision. (Score:3, Insightful)
If the company is willing to pay you to support old browsers/OS's because the company is getting something out of the clients with those browsers/OS's, then that is their concern.
Re:That is a business decision. (Score:2, Insightful)
It's likely that the article writer understands the problem better then 'the business' (even though he is asking for feedback).
Re:That is a business decision. (Score:2)
"It will require 33% more hours to develop and test for obsolete web browsers, which represent for 3% of our traffic. Are you willing to pay for that?"
(Hopefully you have access to logs from their current web page?)
Re:That is a business decision. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know how many times I've gotten a geeky project OK'ed by virtue of spending the time to cost it out so that I could show we'd either make money or not. The key to being a successful geek, I think, is trusting your own intuitions far enough to challenge them by testing them against other people's goals. If you can't do that, then you're stuck in the back corner of
Re:That is a business decision. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Stop support when it is not profitable? (Score:2)
Now try to figure out when it is unprofitable - figuring in ill-will, etc.
If cost is no consideration, you wouldn't be asking the question.
Does the vendor support it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Realistically speaking, it depends on your target audience. It's probably safe to ignore IE5 and older versions of Netscape, because your customers probably can update to newer versions, even on older OS versions.
Re:Does the vendor support it? (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:Does the vendor support it? (Score:3, Insightful)
Please? My SparcStations happily run Debian GNU/Linux "sid", with Firefox 1.5.
I don't see any point of supporting ancient operating systems for hardware on which you can install a very modern operating system without problems. Or supportings Browsers on platforms for which there are modern browsers freely available.
Of course, with "modern" I don't mean "has the latest graphical glitz" but "has a modern design and can work with xhtml/c
What we do (Score:2, Interesting)
Personally, I think that a lot of places upgrade more frequently than necessary, but even I think that anything over 5 years old should have been replaced by now.
Support only if it pays (Score:5, Informative)
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 [wikipedia.org].
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.
Re:Support only if it pays (Score:3, Insightful)
value of lost customers (Score:3, Interesting)
Who are your customers, and what are the demographics of their systems. Windows 98 is still a very prevelant system out there. I am writing this post from a computer that is still running windows 98. The big questions are
How many are you going to loose by not including their system?
how many can you afford to loose?
And how much would it cost to include them?
Simple rule (Score:2)
Take the lead from others.... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Take the lead from others.... (Score:2)
(Well, actually, I am. Had this computer at uni in 2003, used by parents on dialup since.)
Re:Take the lead from others.... (Score:2)
is that firm...Microsoft?
Re:Take the lead from others.... (Score:2)
Silly WYSIWYG developers...
Keep 98, drop 95 (Score:2)
The obvious answer (Score:3, Insightful)
For regular applications, you might ask yourself what the lowest level is that can reasonably be expected to do what's required. i.e. if you need a gig and a half of RAM for most operations, you might not support Win95 simply because it can't support you RAM-wise.
Then, even if you could do it in '95, would your userbase still be in '95? Really, it just boils down to "what's on the machines of the people you want to serve?"
Simple economics (Score:5, Interesting)
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!
What is your question? (Score:2)
Anyway, support depends on what the company is about. If the website provides an online service, then you would like to support a resonable range of technologies. However, if it's the site of a developmeny house that uses the 'latest technology', using table formatting instead of CSS just to support ancient browsers may not look too good.
If it's just an informational website, then pick the top 3 browsers for each of th
Depends on the audience... (Score:2)
If you don't make it easy for all your customers to use your product/service, then you are leaving money on the ta
Re:Depends on the audience... (Score:3, Insightful)
Supporting older web browsers means allowing 40-bit SSL for "secure" transactions.
Supporting older Microsoft OSes is basically the same in terms of authentication mechanisms, for example.
Re:Depends on the audience... (Score:2)
I would say, do all the easy stuff first. Supporting the last couple of browser versions is easy enough if you stick to standards. Stop when it gets too difficult/expensive.
You stop when it stops being profitable (Score:2)
When Should You Stop Support for Software? (Score:2)
Simple, when the market will bear it.
It depends on what you mean by should (Score:2)
Depends on the target audience (Score:2)
Look at the statistics (Score:2, Insightful)
The same principle goes for the rest of everything. Have a peek at the statistics, and if no one uses it, then don't support it. It's that simple.
Alternately, don't support it if it's just too hard/impractical to support it. If a minor change would do, then it wouldn't hurt.
Re:Look at the statistics (Score:3, Insightful)
"Oh, no one uses FireFox to visit our site!"
"No, 11.7% of our users are using FireFox, and have to fake it to get around our User Agent filtering."
Four years (Score:2)
I'd like to implement a policy where where browsers that have not had major changes to their rendering engine within the last 4 years would be unsupported.
Conveniently, this *would* exclude IE: last major version from 2001.
Realistically though, even 4.x browsers is a real stretch.
Re:Four years (Score:2)
Obsolete Software (Score:2)
Let the browser "try" (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Let the browser "try" (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Let the browser "try" (Score:3, Insightful)
That is so theoretical it boggles my mind.
"That's odd, a $200 toothbrush? Could it be that my 300 year old browser is displaying that number incorrectly just like how every single other site I visit is displayed incorrectly?"
When you start asking yourself theoretical questions like tha
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
Time horizon (Score:4, Interesting)
The aspect of where both you and your users WILL BE in 18 months is not examined and what it would take for continuing support.
Be forward looking, don't be like your 'whatdoyameanweranoutofcopiertoner' manager.
-or-
Bridges being built for tomorrow's traffic, not today's.
When Should You Stop Support for Software? (Score:4, Funny)
When Should You Stop Support for Software?
Whenever I feel like it. GOSH!
Supporting old tech costs money (Score:2)
One of our ColdFusion-based web sites has tens-of-thousands of authenticated users, but there's one user running MS-IE 5.2.7 (I think) on an old MacOS PPC who can't post a form back to a particular page - the browser sends the POST request, but no form data. It doesn't even have a file-upload element, the page works for everybody else and it would seem she has no problems with any other pag
Lowest Common Denominator (Score:2)
My current work situation forces me to do most of my browsing from a blackberry. I make purchasing decisions based on the information I get in this form. Even if Flash and images weren't a problem, because of speed I would prefer something that would actually work in LYNX (with pictures only used when the content REQUIRES it...not the "design."
LO-FI site options give you exposure to a remaining 5-10% o
Support what?! (Score:2)
I think Microsoft been telling developers for the last few years to forget about Windows 9x to focus on Windows 2000/XP (and soon-to-be Windows "I'm NOT Duke Nukem Forever" Vista). If Microsoft is officially ending support for a particular product line, that's a good indication to move along. Of course, Microsoft support solution for every problem is to upgrade to lat
Turn it around (Score:2)
Because the answer is, "When you can afford to".
It's all nice and good, but for a small organization with limited resources it doesn't make sense to take the extra effort to support Lynx, when 99.9% of your potential customers are going to be on the top 2.
From a business perspective it makes absolutely no sense to spend money on that. Then as you grow bigger and you are less resource limited, you can start being a "nice" citizen.
After
Stop when it isn't worth it. (Score:2)
You may think your (website / application / organization) is going to take over the world and needs to be relevant to 100% of the population, but it isn't and it doesn't. Have you tested it with screen readers? Have you made available a high-contrast, large font CSS fil
Free or paid? (Score:2)
I work for a company that provides contract system and network administration for small- to medium-sized businesses. They pay us on a quarterly basis to do routine maintenance on their systems and to be available on an on-call basis. We also host, manage, develop, and design web sites.
If a client has a Win98 system and they're paying us to support it, we do, even if Microsoft has end-of-lifed that product. We try to get them to upgrade to something more recent if the hardware can support it, but companie
Cost/Benefit (Score:2)
You should stop supporting older software when the cost is more than the benefit.
Note that "cost" and "benefit" do not *have* to be expressed in dollars, but that can often be a good proxy (especially in a commercial venture).
web logs are your friend (Score:2)
Make an educated decision on whether supporting that 1% (or whatever) of IE3.0 users is financially viable.
Ditto for the other minority browsers.
The decision is one only management can really make - give them the options (cost/design compromise vs % of visitors) and let them make the call.
Easy.
smash.
Definition of "Support" (Score:3, Insightful)
What you need to do is to make the page conformant to standards. Don't use yesterday's revised standard, use something that reasonably supported by a lot of browsers. And use only what you need, because the more odd corners of CSS you decide to use, the fewer browsers the page will render correctly in.
Dish out IE-specific pages to IE, because it whines if it doesn't get them. Then dish out standard HTML/CSS/Javascript to everything else. If you want to be thorough, dish out HTML 3.2 for older browsers.
You will want to *test* the page on a lot of different browsers at a lot of different versions. You should be doing this anyway, without having to ask Slashdot for permission.
Windows98 is going onto new systems today (Score:3, Informative)
Windows CE would be a much better Microsoft operating system for the job, or something completely different - and the software would be much better written in something completely portable. Porting old software and device drivers from MS Win98 would not be a trivial task in a lot of cases (the source code may no longer be possible to obtain in some cases), so there is still a lot of stuff on legacy systems.
Support (Score:3, Insightful)
That said, think a long time before you drop support, and only do it if continuing to do that support is hurting your company or the product in some way. Customers in that minority that enjoy your products, and especially long time customers who are in that minority, will be pretty vocal about their happiness that you've got a product they can still use. This can help drive further sales.
At some point, you might have to drop support despite the wishes of these customers, but until that time, continue to support 'em as long as you can.
We have a set of potential customers we'd love to be able to support with our products, but the platform vendor bailed on 'em a long time ago. We can't even get the development software for the platform any more. We've had a number of inquiries about that platform, and we know that if we could support those folks, they'd love to have our software, but there's not much we can do.
This question was asked too late. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Support what you need... (Score:3, Interesting)
Part of the problem is that every single site that offers user-agent statistics is in some way biased by its userbase. I really wish Yahoo and/or Google would publish user agent statistics; that would be probably as close to a proper sample of the world as you could get.
Right now, make sure you're turning on user-agent logging for your new site. Yes, the logs do waste some disk space, but they compress to nothing, and there's nothing better than seeing exactly what percentage of your users are using various browsers.
As an example, I made my life much easier when I stopped supporting IE 5.16 on Mac. There's a few very subtle differences between 5.16 and 5.17 when it comes to div's encosing other div's, and 5.16 rendering will break when every other browser is OK. I was able to end this nightmare when I showed my boss that he was the only user in the past six months who had accessed the site with IE 5.16 (which implies, of course, that every 5.16 rendering bug ended up at priority 1.)
And just a reminder that IE 7 is coming, with an, er, interesting collection of fixed bugs, maintained bugs, and removed hacks [positioniseverything.net]
Customer Needs vs Your needs (Score:3, Interesting)
Cuistomer Base
What's your target audience, is it kids, or early 20s (which probably all have newer machines), or are they anyone with low income - potentially elderly/disabld with restricted (library/hand-me-down pc) access. As many have said if you want to serve the blind and disabled you will have to factor that in though you can keep your site modern.
Business Plans
If you guys are planning on rolling out some digital content as a key factor of your business strategy, there is another line for you, some media may not even work on older machines, best to start the PR to let people know wqhat is coming down the road instead of an overnight fiasco as many are not able tro access your new features when they hit.
If you are doing it merely to capture more market atttention maybe you should do a market study by interviewing current and potential clients and seeing what they really need or expect to have in such a site.
economics (Score:5, Interesting)
By going for a multi-step solution. (Score:4, Informative)
The following three alternatives produces different result, and it may also depend on your browser:
<span style="font-size: 10px;">Hello</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 10pt;">Hello</span><br>
<span style="font-size: 10;">Hello (invalid - unit must be used)</span><br>
Validate the CSS you are using through the CSS Validator [w3.org]
Don't support the browsers (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Don't support browsers, support standards (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, that's the principle. Since 90% of the web surfers (less on tech-savvy sites) use IE, I suppose explicitly supporting the latest version of IE is a good idea. But other than that:
I'm sure there's a lot more that every webdesigner should know, but this is a nice start.
Here's what I do (Score:4, Interesting)
You don't have to drop support for any browser. HTML is backwards compatible and you can even write "AJAX" stuff that degrades nicely.
1. Code website that works with no JS and no CSS support. It doesn't have to be pretty (no <font>, just semantic HTML) nor work smootly (just use regular forms).
2. Add styling designed for modern browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and hide these stylesheets from junk like Netscape 4 (@import trick).
3. Add CSS hacks for IE (use HTML conditional comments, because IE7 breaks most hacks)
4. Modify document using JS and DOM to add handlers for all dynamic, ajaxy flashy stuff. That's progressive enhancement [onlinetools.org].
Re:Simple (Score:5, Funny)
I just read that using Opera, you insensitive clod.
Re:Simple (Score:4, Funny)
And as for testing- look at your logs and see what people use and use those browsers to test. One caveat to that is that lots of browsers can spoof their headers to appear as other ones, except for IE, which neither can nor would ever need to. Commonly, they will appear as IE 6.0 on Windows XP but the browser could actually be anything. So if you see more than the occasional hit by a browser other than IE or Firefox, you kind of have to assume that there is some spoofing going on and should test with those browsers even if the apparent share may only be 1% on your site. I know because I do it- my user agent string usually says Safari 1.2.3 on a Mac PPC or Firefox 1.0 on Windows NT 5.1 (XP) when it is really Konqueror 3.5.0 on i686 Linux. The rendering engine in Konqueror is very similar to the one in Safari so the pages that are for Safari will work with Konqueror just fine. Firefox's GRE is a bit different than Konqueror/Safari KHTML, but it usually works OK. Some web sites tend to have heart attacks when they see the real user agent string and scream "UNSUPPORTED BROWSER!!!" "UNSUPPORTED OS!!!" "DANGER, WILL ROBINSON!!! DANGER!!!" but with a fake one in place, it works perfectly.
Which also leads me to say- don't check browser/OS version for your site unless you are doing junk like using ActiveX that *requires* IE on Windows. It is a pain in the butt and as my user-agent string experience has proven, useless. Just don't do it.
Re:Statistics (Score:2)
The percent will change depending on who the website's target audience is. If you're a high end clothes site [appleseeds.com] you can support less stuff than say a computer shop.
From my uneducated guess, I'd say IE5 and 6, Firefox, Mozilla,
Re:The help you are looking for (Score:3, Informative)
HTML 2 does not support tables. It does support stylesheets. Read the specification for yourself [w3.org].