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?"

Re:Simple

[Kumkwat]

Opera: Give it a finger, no one is using it anyway

I just read that using Opera, you insensitive clod.

When Should You Stop Support for Software?

[GeorgeMcBay]

When Should You Stop Support for Software?


Whenever I feel like it. GOSH!

Re:Simple

[level_headed_midwest]

I say first off code good, w3c-compliant HTML code that any browser should be able to render. Try to keep your website simple, elegant, and to the point. Keep the stuff that requires plugins to view (Java applets, Flash/Shockwave animations, Quicktime movies) to a bare minimum as they will take much longer to load and to tell the truth, a bunch of flashy-blinky stuff gets very annoying very quickly. Also, not everybody will have the plugins to view them (for example there is no Shockwave for Linux) and the others might not want to have to go out and get plugins just to view your site.

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:Depends...

[netsharc]

This has come up in another article, but it's w3cschools, people who visit it are probably learning website design, they're not your average user. If it were a general website (Google? Yahoo?) the percentage for IE would probably be a lot higher. And then you can ask MSN.com for its statistics, if you want to see even more skewed results.

Re:That completely depends

[LostBurner]

Since when can the first post be modded 20% redundant?

Re:redundant != repeated

[gronofer]

Under those criteria, 99.9% of Slashdot posts should be moderated 'redundant'.

I can only assume that not enough moderator points have been allocated to cover them all.