11–19 of 19 posts
Walmart is doing a terrible job. Progressive degradation has largely been forgotten because just about everyone is using a full-featured browser. Most web developers stopped caring and I'm one of them. Chrome won the browser wars. If you don't want to use it, enjoy your bad experience.
Amazon gets a lot of hate, mostly deserved, but if you told me 20 years ago that I would be able to sit at a computer, quickly search for and find a huge number of products, find a price that often beats regular stores, and have the item show up same day or next day, I would've never believed it. It seems like every move they make is insane at first, but it turns out to be a brilliant method of capturing more of the market. Paying a 'membership fee'? Insane. Running your own fleet of delivery vehicles? Insane. Yet, here we are. I see more Amazon vans in suburbia than Fedex and UPS combined.
- I could list 10 games I liked for each of Gameboy, N64, Playstation, Xbox, and PS2 (how spoiled was I?)
- every one of the amazon links from 19 years ago still resolve to the product in question, so I can still buy a copy of Ready 2 Rumble Boxing for PS2 if I so wish [1]
I was a little dissapointed in my younger self tho to find they were not affiliate links.
On the subject of compatibility tho, the fact that shopping and checking out on Amazon.com works without javascript inspired me to learn how websites work the “old fashioned” way
[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20020609084356/http://www.colten...
[1] https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/B00004U5VJ/qid=10127...
What are the 10 computers you have?
For the laptop/desktop, I try to stick to older time-tested front-end libraries such as jQuery and Bootstrap.
I read an article recently where a developer mentioned that he was very easily able to "port" his desktop web app to low-cost small form-factor mobile devices because he is using Svelte. I have not used it, but if developers want to target low-cost devices(though with modern browsers) then they could try Svelte. But to support old browsers/devices I think sticking to simple old time-tested libraries helps.
Amazon.com seems to still supports TLS 1.0 and 1.1, older less secure protocols. Newest operating system no longer enable TLS 1.0 or 1.1. Without three hacks an Ubuntu 20 won't allow any connections with those ciphers. While on the other hand older operating systems like Windows 7 don't understand TLS 1.2 and can't be upgraded. So apart from HTML when it comes to secure HTTPS connection all security advice is to no l…
Following security advice blindly is never a great idea. I don't think modern browsers will fall back below TLS 1.2 anymore (or at least not automatically), so offering support for TLS 1.0 doesn't impact them. Then the question is what do you want to do with older browsers? Do you want to give them a browser error that users probably can't understand or do you want to let them in and shop?
Software made by developers who don't care about the product. Willing to sacrifice thousands of people to eliminate a pain point from their dev workflow. That and resume driven development. It's not about the product, it's about your resume.
I do often see promotion-driven development, which too is an artifact of the challenges from leadership ultimately.