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Comment by nirvdrum | Hacker News Reader

I've never really understood the outward hostility Web developers display towards their clients, audience, customers, etc. Your job is to deliver the best experience you can for people viewing Web pages. If given all the information at your disposal, the costs don't outweigh the pros for your audience, that's one thing. But not doing it because it's hard or you just don't feel like it is a bit childish (please note I'm using "you" to mean the prototypical Web developer here -- not you as in simonsarris).

We all have to do things we don't like in our jobs, that's just part of it being a job. I can even accept a certain amount of healthy advocacy. Encourage people to upgrade if you'd like. But outright refusal to do your best because your customer doesn't run the browser you wish they did is just a very odd tactic to take.

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I'd like you to dig a ditch for me...

Oh, and you have to use this garden spade...

Oh, and the handle is made out of jelly...

Oh, and the ditch is on the beach so the tide will be coming in any time now.

Hyperbole, yes. Web development isn't exactly ditch digging, but if you really want to understand why so many web developers are openly hostile toward supporting these older browsers, it's because the exercise is tantamount to digging ditches with jelly-handled garden spades on a rigid time table. When you get in to these much, much older browsers, it's a back and forth game of break/fix whack-a-mole. It's broken in one browser, so you try to fix it by using another approach, only to find that it's now broken in the current browser. That or you end up using ugly work arounds that just cruft up the application and make maintenance a nightmare.

Ultimately this comes down to a business decision. I consider each browser version as a market to be sold in to. I may find it an unrealistic business proposition to increase my developer hours by 30%, just to support a specific browser, when there's a big fat market of current browser users ready to use my application.

I've been doing Web development for a long time. So, I'm aware of the environment. Usually the costs of supporting older browsers are grossly exaggerated. Unless you're completely new to the game, you already know how to deal with older versions of IE because at one time they were the state of the art.

But, if you* really don't enjoy what you're doing, do something else. There are always going to be browser differences and they're not all IE-related. But you're getting paid to know those differences and handle them so your customer gets a good experience.

* Again, "you" == the wider population of Web developers.

Or if it is our own project simply decide not to support them and take a hit on who can see our website. For most things I've done I'd rather do this than properly support IE6.

I agree with you on one point. In a lot of cases, the cost of supporting older browsers (say, IE7 and newer) is grossly exagerated, but if we're talking IE6, I completely disagree. Maybe for simple websites, but the moment you start getting in to web applications with a moderately complex Javascript UI, the costs go up very quickly.

In the real world time is limited and expensive resource, and the more of it you spend catering to a small fraction of users, the less you can spend on improving your service in other ways – possibly more beneficial to the end users.

It's a matter of trade-offs that have to be made based on intended audience and information available. No need to be offended.

So price support for certain browsers as features. IE7 +5%. IE6 +30%.

Sure. Like I said, if you're actually measuring it, then that's one thing. But supporting older browsers usually isn't that hard if you know what you're doing. Obviously there are some features that you just can't backport and there's not much you can do there. But more often than not I read comments like "as a policy, I just won't support IE < 9."

In any event, the cost argument is the purview of the business owner perspective, not the Web developer. And it's hard to look at in isolation. I don't know that many sites that wouldn't love to have another 5% of traffic. Yeah, it may cost more to support older browsers, but driving traffic to a site costs money, whether through ads or spending time on inbound marketing. Trying to bump conversion rates on your existing traffic costs money and time as well.

There's obviously a balance to it. At the extreme end, I know of businesses that support anything with > 0.5% market share because at the volume they operate at, it's worth millions. At the other end, I see startups fight tooth-and-nail working on their funnels, while throwing away legitimate sources of revenue.

It's rarely all-or-nothing. For me "not supported" means that the site wasn't extensively tested on a given browser or it doesn't offer full experience, not that it doesn't work at all. Another issue is whether those enterprise IE6 users are really the target audience of your startup.

Anyway, it seems like we both agree that it should be a deliberate decision.

Do you remember Netscape 4.x? I sure do -- I was supporting it well into 2004 because I didn't have the nerve to tell my overlords that it was cost-ineffective. One day when the CSS (or, rather the JSS written as CSS) recursion levels got really deep, there was a small explosion (approximately one kiloStan yield), and we dropped support. (NS4 users got a usable app, but not the enhanced experience that other users were getting.)

Strangely enough, we didn't lose customers. It turns out that people were using NS4.x because we supported NS4.x. They will upgrade if they have a reason to do so.

If you've written the site/app well, it will work in Lynx, fer cryin' down the sink. It won't be pretty or slick, but it'll work. There is absolutely no need to make a site feature-for-feature identical or pixel-perfect across all browsers, as long as the functionality is there. And if users understand that their browser is holding back the experience, they will change the browser.

It's very similar to waiters complaining about their customers, or any job ever complaining. People bitch about work, especially the less fun parts, especially when they can put the blame on someone.

There are just a lot of vocal web designers on the web, go figure.

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