31–40 of 367 posts
Pragmatically, often users without new browsers and OSses are not the best clients. In ideal world, sure, I want to support everyone. In a world with limited resources, I would better spend my time elsewhere.
Hmm, it could be fat enterprise clients with locked-down software versions (legacy, security etc.) That's where most of the money is, isn't it?
I tried to purchase tickets for an event last week. I had to go through Ticketmaster as it was the only official way. They forced me to verify my account using a phone number, but whoever they were using for messages wasn't able to deliver a code to my number. I tried a few numbers from our household and they all failed.
Searching for this issue yielded a bunch of results, so it was definitely a known issue, but there wasn't anything I could do, really. To them, it's simple math. Another SMS provider that covers my (tiny EU) country might be more expensive. They might be avoiding scammers that used my mobile operator in the past. Whatever it is, it would probably cost them more than they lose in ticket sales.
Without some government entity to force them, they don't give a shit about me being able to see an event.
Websites are surprisingly hard to maintain long term, specially for a broad audience of devices. Developer Experience can lead to better UX, the easier it is to build/maintain, the more likely we're to do it.
Given how bad AI is at design plus all the unstoppable slop train, I expect websites to become much, much worse.
If it's uptime it's definitively not much!
I think either you argue for regulation, or you argue more honestly: asserting that the extra cost will likely never directly pay for itself, but it is some of the secret sauce that can a good product into a great one.
Reminds me of the Meat Loaf song “Two Out of Three Ain’t Bad” which was released in Japan as 66%の誘惑 “66% is Good Enough” etc https://www.discogs.com/release/8303076
I think this single fact is a major source of enshittification in large software products, especially in the era of ML/AI. If your quality is 99%, it sounds like "you have solved your task", but in reality there is a long tail that over time affects nearly every customer. I've seen this so many times. 99% of search results are good (so within 100 queries you'll hit at least one bad result with p≈0.63), 99% of dashboa…
What about those 30% of audience to update their browser? On our web platform, the team currently displays a message along the lines of: 'Please update your browser; this site relies on features incompatible with your current version'.
https://www.redbubble.com/i/t-shirt/Best-Viewed-with-Interne...
Alternatively, 98% is plenty . If your business plan requires you to capitalize on more than 98% of the market, it's already a failure. It'll never happen. As always, it's an "it depends" situation. If your userbase is largely luddites, then maybe you need to support 10+ year old browsers that can't be updated. Otherwise, you can probably just worry about people who are using computers new enough to actually update t…
It's just mathematical expectation. Don't look at the simple probability - look at probability * value.