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Comment by itake | Hacker News Reader

Unfortunately some business are critical where is not an option or very expensive for someone to not use it.

For example, Uber, a Visa immigration website, low cost air carrier booking site, etc.

Yeah but as long as they’re not public services, the business can just decide to not serve these clients. There’s no recourse possible for these clients.

That's what a lot of people would call a "bad business decision"

Generally most people would consider a viable option to exist even if it’s multiple times the cost…

As long as it’s credibly offered without too many caveats.

uber's website already requires JS to book a ride. Fortunately taxi companies still exist and can just be called by phone.

For public services you can tell people to use another device, or provide a way to schedule an appointment in-person that is accessible using old browsers.

You you can make a law that requires such businesses to use perfectly good technology standards that are widely supported instead of whatever EEE crap the latest Chrome comes with.

I remember years ago when websites would have buttons "best viewed in Internet explorer 4.0". We're past those days, but only because it's implied "use chrome, maybe webkit, we didn't test on Firefox"

I agree, but one thing is to demand all your users to be on the latest Chrome, and another one is to support browsers that are no longer maintained and contain security issues (IE). If we discourage people from driving old insecure cars, we can also discourage people from using old insecure browsers.

Ideally we could section off some minimal baseline functionality that could be implemented more securely than the whole modern stack. Just HTML and a little CSS or something. Then mandate that, at least, services provided by the state should be accessible in this baseline functionality mode.

Seems like you’re getting hate but this is how the world works. Uber just has to support the devices that their market uses. And especially for visas the government is free to make the public bend to whatever arbitrary requirements they develop for using their byzantine systems.

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