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Comment by troupo | Hacker News Reader

> People build web apps for an array of browsers and huge ranges of versions.

en masse they don't. They just target the latest Chrome

De facto they do because functionality built three years ago and tested then is running along side functionality they built yesterday and tested on today’s Chrome.

People also do seem to test on iOS Safari because that pain in my ass needs special care on my software. So if a site works on it they either got lucky or tested on an iPhone. It’s generally only other people’s weird tech demo stuff that doesn’t work.

I agree and disagree, you can't target everything, but most (not shit) devs will target at least Safari - 1 or 2, simply because the iPhone market is too good to miss out on. And Safari being, well, Safari, means targeting that is a pretty safe bet for anything else.

Depends on the region, no one where I work has an iPhone or a current Mac, so stuff gets tested on FF and Chrome, and Safari gets thoughts and prayers. We would test on Safari if it were simple, but alas.

Skipping testing on 15% of all devices to save $600? Sounds like a poor business decision.

15% of devices is not 15% of users. From my own experience having a web app that is 99% desktop windows users, why would I care about safari?

Maybe for your app, it doesn’t make sense. And if it’s a pure enterprise app, fair enough (assuming it’s an enterprise that was started more than 15 years ago and only targets regulated or very specific markets). But a good way to guarantee that your app will never go beyond Windows desktop users is to ignore the most dominant mobile platform by users who actually pay for software.

Well, if your app doesn't run on Safari, you're not going to have any users on Safari.

My logs tell me what they try to use. It’s not safari. Also they are paying users and would tell me if it didn’t work on their browser. The demographic I target is 99%+ Windows users.

We are a very small company, and have always had far more Firefox than Safari users. And though they get by via dominance, IE style bundling of the browser to the OS is toxic, so good riddance.

I target IE6 and it just works everywhere

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