Forum Moderators: open
(Browser / Hits / Visitors / Percentage)
1. Internet Explorer 6.x / 28,587 / 842 / 68.07%
2. Internet Explorer 5.x / 2,070 / 97 / 7.84%
3. Netscape 4.x 211 / 60 / 4.85%
When can I realistically stop coding for Netscape 4? When it reaches only 1%? Is 5% still too high? I mean, it's the third browser listed!
I will continue to monitor these stats, though I feel many of our users will carry on using Netscape until their IT department finally changes it. Some users cannot install programs on their PCs (being universities) so what to do but wait...
Hester, is there any way you can add a "poll" type thing to your site-group? You can just bluntly ask people to select which browser they use, and put NN4 at the top. You might consider giving a small consideration of some sort just to get people to respond - don't know why, but folks sometimes have bad feelings about replying to polls....
If people would answer the poll, you might have a better idea of how many "real" NN4 users you actually have.... of course, that's a BIG if. Couldn't hurt to try it though!
Edit: but I think you'd want to phrase that more kindly. It's a REALLY BAD IDEA to alienate people over stuff like that.... which might happen if phrased as you suggest....
Poll: Why the heck are you using such an old version of Netscape?
a. It's old? Man, no one ever tells me anything.
b. What's Netscape?
c. The older browsers are more secure because dynamic-this and auto-that aren't supported.
d. other: (LET THEM WRITE THEIR OWN ANSWER)
heh
Whether a browser is new or old, good or bad, stable or crash-prone, compliant or non-compliant, supported or not supported - none of these issues have the slightest bearing on whether you should support it.
encyclo, you're absolutely right, pages written in 2004 should still be readable and function properly in NN4.
But why for heaven's sake should they be styled with all the extra hair tearing that involves?
I use pretty much lowest common denominator CSS which works in every browser after NN4. It does not work in NN4 by quite some margin, because NN4 does not understand CSS properly. I will not a) use table based layouts or b) remove CSS styling elements that every other browser can understand, just because NN4 can't.
My solution is to structure the information in a logical order and import the external CSS file, so that NN4 users get a simple, usable , unstyled page and everyone else (Moz, Opera IE) gets the normal CSS-P version.
It works in NN4, which, to my mind, means that the browser is supported. The only argument for writing a page which is styled for NN4 would be a "universal display" argument which would make it indefensible not to also style the page for IE3, NN3, NN2, NN1, NCSA Mosaic etc.
Isn't there a public awareness thing to get people to move on from NN4 or something? It just seems like defending continued use of NN4 goes against all the principles of open standards, separating style from structure, platform independence etc.
I think what it boils down to is this;
If your site is trying to sell something, your customer is king, period. As was said, you don't design the site for you, you design the site for your customer to get a sale.
If you are doing anything else, you are losing sales.
If the site is not commercial but personal, do whatever tickles your fancy. In this case you are designing it for you and maybe your friends and family.
I believe that the marketing studies and web usability studies have shown that if you make it in the least bit hard or confusing for your prospect to use your site, they will be gone in just a few seconds.
WEll, that is my rant about the subject.
robert
Virtually nobody uses NSCA Mosaic now, or for that matter NN2. Why not? Because it was second nature to the generation who did to start using a new browser when the old one was superceded.
But why did upgrading stop after Netscape 4.79?
If you replace the browser, you need to replace the email client as well - they are not just bundled together, they are tied together. Click a link in an email and the navigator opens. What are you supposed to do? Ask people not to click on the links, rather to copy the link and paste it into another program?
Current browsers should be able to choose which email program they open in. In theory you could keep Netscape 4 just for email. I'd advise a separate email client such as Eudora, or whatever the user would like to use. If they upgrade to Opera, then they get a built-in email client.
I didn't see anyone in the past having a problem when upgrading to IE and then having to use a separate email client, Outlook Express.
We simply used our webstats to determine when to stop supporting NS4x.. Once it fell below 2% of all users, we stopped supporting it... It's made a world of difference for all the new sites we have done.
It's not that NN4.x is five or six years old that's the problem. It's the fact that it doesn't work,
Encyclo, don't get me wrong, I've cursed netscape 4 almost every day I've worked with the web, I avoided learning advanced javascript because I refused to code for d.layers and d.all on every script, and am this year finally giving up on supporting it except where I have to, using @import rules now for the first time, which I don't like doing because I hate raw html's look, but 1-2% is not worth spending time on.
Go to the biggest sites, amazon, google, with ns 4 and you'll find they work fine, they stuck to tables with background colors, those always work, no css compatibility problems.
Then go to say espn.com, read the code, they are delivering I think 5 different versions of the page, check out macromedia, they are doing at least 2 maybe 3 versions of the page css and html. That in my mind is a very bad solution, horribly unmaintainable, as bad as the dual pages I used to do for ns4 / other browser compatibility.
There has to be a better way than to always play the browser support game.
But why did upgrading stop after Netscape 4.79?
the answer is simple. Technology reaches points that are 'good enough', you can stay there a long time. For example, a 300 megahertz pc with 128 megaBytes ram will be good enough for probably at least 5 more years, especially if it has windows 98se/ie5x. When those exist in small offices, manufacturing plants, and so on, and they are doing their jobs, there is no reason to replace them with something that takes almost 3-5 times more electricity to run, and which only adds some slick glitz to the functionality of the machine.
I work for a small company that deals with manufacturing plants, our site's ns4 stats usually were around 2-3 times higher than for other sites, only this year did they finally drop to around 1%, not one of which we can afford to not deliver a good site to, since anyone of them could be the operations manager who is going to buy our product, currently I haven't been able to find a browser detector that can alert me to the presence of this person. Unlike web workers, people in the real world don't care about standards, browsers, etc.
Since you can't test for processor speed/ram you always have to assume a certain percent of your visitors are on older pcs, and older pcs do not handle complex css well, to put it mildly, something you will never see mentioned by our friend's in the css forums. There is no reason at all for the average pc user to upgrade from a box like that, it emails and browses fine, I've set up a bunch of those for about $50 or so for friends.
[edited by: isitreal at 5:41 pm (utc) on May 7, 2004]
If your site is trying to sell something, your customer is king, period. As was said, you don't design the site for you, you design the site for your customer to get a sale.
If you are doing anything else, you are losing sales.
I strongly disagree with that mentality. Being unable to take advantage of features that have been "standard" for YEARS makes your site look outdated compared to other companies who are taking advantage of new technology. I mean really, if that's your mentality then why aren't you designing sites that work in 2.0 browsers? Or 1.0 browsers? There is a certain outdated look to sites from the 1996 - 1998 era, and frankly it's a turn off and I don't want to buy from those sites. But that could just be me.
If my customers decide they would rather shop somewhere else they are welcome to, just like how I have the right to decide whether I want to sell to them or not. If a guy walked into my store wearing a klan uniform and wanted to buy 10 of my most expensive products, I would refuse to sell to him and kick him out. That's my right as the owner of the business - just like it's my right to refuse or limit access to my site because the visitor is using a browser that doesn't support features I wish to have on my site.
I understand that means a small percentage of people may never buy from me - and I ACCEPT THAT. That's my decision to make, not yours, and not the outdated browser owner.
This is like saying programmers should make all of their software work with Windows 3.1 because there are still people out there using it. Get real!
Being unable to take advantage of features that have been "standard" for YEARS makes your site look outdated compared to other companies who are taking advantage of new technology.
Who says you can't take advantage of these standards and support 99.5%+ of all browsers visiting? The inability to do this reflects on the site coder, not the standards, css, or anything else.
It's all in the numbers, the reason you don't support ie 1-3, ns 1-3, or mosaic is that nobody uses those browsers, as anyone's stats will show. Modern browsers starting with the 4 series are still used, much less by the month, that's why there is a debate about whether to still support them or not. The decision to support them is purely individual, if you need to, you should. If you are doing academic sites, older pc markets, you probably need to for one more year or so, although I've thought that since 2002.
These things have not been standard for years, they have been somewhat supported by browsers released starting in 1999. The CSS standards are very new, and are still something of a working draft. See for example the specs on floats, the problem is the specs are too vague, and give browser makers room to interpret them.
Given that most users a: don't upgrade anything ever, about 90% don't ever upgrade or install service packs from what I've read, and b: probably only upgrade their hardware every 4-6 years, we are currently in the very first year that you can actually begin to make a site using these techniques on a commercial level and expect it to work without doing a lot of custom css fixes, especially for ns4.
<edit-added>and that's not even including mac ie 5.1x and 5.2x, browsers that have really huge css bugs, especially with floats, bugs that are either not fixable, or require a very high level of css skill to diagnose and repair. Current stats put those plus or minus 2% of visitors, so with ns4s 1-2%, mac ie's 2% or so, you're up to possible 2-4% of visitors on average that can't deal with complex css, last year that number was higher, maybe 4-6%.
I don't think we've ever discussed this issue in WebmasterWorld before
That's why it's important to keep this thread going to the bitter end and settle this. We wouldn't want to have to have this discussion all over again in say, a year... or a month... or tomorrow.
And in that spirit...
Should I expect game developers to only release games that will run happily on my Celeron 400 and nVidia TNT card?
Should I expect book publishers to only publish books that will work if I've gotten new glasses in the last five years?
You can always find analogies to make your point.
Poll: Why the heck are you using such an old version of Netscape?a. It's old? Man, no one ever tells me anything.
You think that's a joke, but it was only about a year and a half ago that a friend with a Ph.D. in science, working on projects with DARPA etc etc etc said "Oh, is there something newer than Netscape[4.5]?"
Tom
There needs to be a distinction here between supporting a browser and styling for a browser.
AH! Light thickens! That's a brilliant point actually....
Partial support means most styling and layout works, albeit not perfectly, and any javascripting that older browsers don't support is correctly escaped so it simply doesn't run on older browsers.
Keep in mind also that it's not just styling we're talking about here, an endless stream of javascript error messages also doesn't tend to do much for anyone. To get rid of all js errors you have to have every function run a basic test then exit on failure, ie, if!dom, return false.
After that, it's a toss up between giving them an 'update your browser page' which is necessary if page functionality depends on modern js etc, or giving raw html, personally I would rather give them something, like raw html, than nothing, like an update your browser page.
You can always find analogies to make your point.
True, but it's still a good question and you still didn't answer it :) Games are typically always trying to be on the "cutting edge" so it's really a different ballpark, but typical desktop software isn't always like that.
So the better question is should a software developer have to write applications that work with Windows 3.1 just because "some people" still use it? NO - the developer (or the person who hired the developer) gets to choose what platform to write their software on and how far back they care to make it compatible. When I write a program I am fully aware that people with older operating systems, MacOS users, or Linux users WILL NOT be able to use my program and I fully accept that.
A website is no different - as the owner of a website it is totally your decision whether you care to support older browsers or not. You may be turning away an audience if you choose not to, but it's still your right. The people who don't care to upgrade their browser have their reasons for doing it and that's fine - but don't expect ME to bend over backward, I would rather kiss your business goodbye.
This whole argument seems to have very liberal "politically correct" undertones to me, and frankly that stuff is a bunch of crap. It's like the guy who wants to have "under God" taken out of the pledge just because HE doesn't like it - If you don't like it, don't say it - but don't tell me I shouldn't have the right.
No one tells me how to run my business, who I can sell to, what color I paint my building, etc. If you don't like the way I do things you have the right to TAKE YOUR BUSINESS ELSEWHERE - I have the right to choose who I want to do business with and what platforms they will NEED to do business with me. It's not the other way around.
It's one thing when a business is losing revenue because the webmaster doesn't give a damn or their code is sloppy, but it's a completely different animal when the business or website owner has made a conscious decision to use a layout, style, or features and they KNOW they are blocking out a certain percentage of users - if they're OK with that, who the heck are you to tell them otherwise? It's their company, their decision whether they want to turn business away or not.
This whole argument seems to have very liberal "politically correct" undertones to me, and frankly that stuff is a bunch of crap.
Probably somebody who remembers what the web was before business got into it, but business is into it now, and business will always make the decisions that are best for business, obviously. Hard to see what got your goat here, nobody has the power to make you do anything on your websites, if they display for the percent of users you are going after that's all there is to it, flash, pdf, buggy css, whatever you put up, if it works and brings in the money you are looking for, that's all that matters, when it's a business site. Same goes for 'accessibility', standards, etc. Your decision, or should be, unless you live in the UK.
Shouldn't we be aiming for elegant degradation rather than universal display - especially when a browser such as NN4 is detrimental to the propagation of open standards in the first place?
Your decision, or should be, unless you live in the UK.
If you are the webmaster for your own site. If you are designing for someone else who wants the site accessible, you should know how to do it. I think that websites for governments, for example, need to meet a high standard for accessibility. An online gaming site? I see no reason why anyone but the market shoudl dictate how that site is built.
I think the other key in your post is the word "decision". If you site is inaccessible as the result of a decision, I would say that might be a very reasonable decision. If your site is inaccessible because of ignorance, I think that's a problem.
As for the pledge of allegiance, please keep comments like those in the Foo forum. They have no place here.
Tom
[edited by: ergophobe at 8:07 pm (utc) on May 8, 2004]
what you're talking about, isitreal, seems to refer to functionality and accessibility... not display.
I'm not sure I understand the question. Using CSS that crashes ns4, causes a page to fail on IE 5x mac, these are display, functionality, and accessibility issues, all in one. I recently made a complex full div/css site where a mac ie 5x bug collapsed the navigation bar into itself, making the navigation problematic. Are you saying that this is not an accessibility issue?
Say you have a fixed width/height div, that's a display issue, right? Now a visitor with bad eyesight comes to the site, with font size set very large, and the text runs off the div and vanishes. That's an accessibility/functionality problem as far as I can tell, pretending that css doesn't have anything to do with accessibility, and is purely a display matter, that's debatable, especially when you use floats that pull stuff out of the document data flow.
The question I think digitalv was asking was this: is it his problem to support that unique visitor with their unique need, even though doing that has little or no direct benefit to the digitalv site? And I would agree with him completely, if you don't care about them as a visitor, then why should you have to support them?
For example, I don't care at all about geeks who think surfing on cellphones is cool, so I offer zero support for handheld devices, that's my choice, helped greatly by seeing I believe 1 single handheld os in my stats over the last few years.
If you want to use flash for your site, that's your choice, same for positioned divs, tables, excel documents, anything, the second the web became linked with business was the second that the initial ideals of the web, which came out of a major military research project, so they weren't particularly ideal anyway, went out the window.
I don't think I'm saying anything different than what you're saying as far as I can tell, all I'm pointing to is the range of options available in getting graceful degradation, from zero in the case of pure flash, to partial, to full.
<edit, added, posted at same time>
If you are designing for someone else who wants the site accessible, you should know how to do it.
Ergophobe: Who's saying otherwise? You should meet the requirements set, obviously. But the requirements of the site should dictate that, nothing else. Is it some project like the project gutenberg text thing? Then you are obviously going for absolutely 100% accessibility. Is it your friend's bands website, then maybe a full flash thing is just fine.
[edited by: isitreal at 8:47 pm (utc) on May 8, 2004]
The question I think digitalv was asking was this: is it his problem to support that unique visitor with their unique need, even though doing that has little or no direct benefit to the digitalv site?
I think I already sort of addressed this, but to take it head on, I would say
- if you own the site, it should be your choice and let the market decide.
- if you are desiging for commercial clients, you should know enough to offer reasonable choices (cost/benefit) to a client
- if it's paid for by tax payers and includes essential public information, it should be as accessible as possible. There's a limit though. I live in California. Must I translate my site into every language in use by every tiny minority in California? If that were the case, we would only be able to afford a few hundred pages for all of state government.
This whole argument seems to have very liberal "politically correct" undertones to me,
That's doubtful (speaking as someone who both agrees with your fundamental proposition and is what you would undoubtedly call a 'liberal'). I think it's more of an "engineers versus mathmeticians" thing. Engineers think if it does the job, it's okay. Mathmeticians think that if it's not elegant, it's not okay no matter whether or not it work.
if you own the site, it should be your choice and let the market decide.
- if you are desiging for commercial clients, you should know enough to offer reasonable choices (cost/benefit) to a client
- if it's paid for by tax payers and includes essential public information, it should be as accessible as possible.
If I want to visit a site that showcases flash or cutting edge design, I will be willing to wait for it to load, or to install plug-ins or whatever it takes.
If I want to buy a widget, I want to know why your widget is the one I should buy and how much does it cost and how can I pay and where is the order button. Oh yeah, and I want it RIGHT NOW please.
Now, to give me all that , you don't even need css, you just need a couple of pictures and some text and an order button. IF you get much fancier than that, I am going to the next page that loads faster and gives me the order button I want.
If you don't want my business ( check out some of the sites that have the highest sales conversions, you won't find much more than a sales letter), that is fine. If you do, you need to pay attention to your customers and not your ego.
luck,
robert
Now it's clearly good business sense to do this. The manner in which Google and Amazon etc stick to tables and background colours, not pure CSS, leads me to wonder if we can ever fully embrace a table-less web. (Note however that early browsers such as Netscape 1 did not even handle things like paragraphs and frames! So there will always be something in our code that a certain browser falls foul of.)
The idea though that you can do a site for a mate's band, or one requiring lots of Flash, and somehow forget about accessibility, enrages me. Why shouldn't every type of site be accessible? Since you don't know your exact visitors, how can you discriminate against them? What if someone with poor eyesight loves your mates' band but can't read the tiny text you've used, or the purple on green colours? What if that person wanted to sign the band but gave up because the site wasn't user-friendly?
Regarding games, they do have a level of backwards compatibility - the latest DirectX 9 games will still play on DirectX 8 cards. But to make them impressive, they have to have a cut-off point where really old cards simply won't work (as they don't have enough memory or processing power).
As for ignoring handhelds, please..! Another irritating view. In places like Japan, mobile phone browsing is all the rage. To ignore it (when your site can be accessed globally from any country) would be stupid. How do you know your web stats are listing all handheld devices? They might just say "Opera". Well that browser is also available on mobile phones and televisions.
The future is clearly an increase in mobile devices as the internet spreads away from purely desktop machines. If you're smart, then why not plan for the future today? Make sure your site works at small screen sizes (if possible).
Luckily Opera have a solution here with their "Small Screen Rendering" technology. It can process an existing site and convert it to display on small screen sizes.
Too much emphasis is given to browsers and methods from the past. We should also be looking at the future. Yes, that means keeping an eye on things like XHTML 2. By careful use of the existing XHTML 1 (and even HTML 4) we can easily make a site today that will scale for small screens (and large ones), have styles turned off for older browsers, so they still get the content, yet will work in the near future as well, as far as we can predict. Basically it boils down to the same old argument: make your code clean and semantic, use CSS in ways that doesn't cripple the user if it's turned off, and check for other things like images turned off as well. Whatever you do, don't take a ridiculous stance that "my site is only for X, Y and Z". There should be no such sites.
Does anyone here capture browser info with sales/conversions or sales dollars? It just occurred to me that on a commercial site, that would be critical information for making a good business decision...but I don't currently capture it.
yes i capture browser info (and more) with completed shopping carts and since i have started doing this in march of this year i have not had a nn4 sale (btw my site works with nn4 before anyone makes a smart comment)
this may have no relevance to others in different industries, i am consumer driven and sell mostly during 'office' hours to users using IE 5.5+ (and aol variants)
there is no general answer to the original question on this thread, you must collate your own statistics, all i'll say is that since i have tracked all kinds of info over and above my stats package (faststats) using custom code, it has been enlightening to say the least.
The idea though that you can do a site for a mate's band, or one requiring lots of Flash, and somehow forget about accessibility, enrages me. Why shouldn't every type of site be accessible?
and also the handheld comment.
Why does this thought enrage you? Are you enraged that blind people can't read the newspaper? Should newspapers be required to be printed in brail? Can deaf people listen to the radio? etc. Why does the idea that the web can cater to different needs, and fulfill different requirements freak you out so much? Speaking for myself, I like that part of it, and have come to appreciate more and more the value of the range of display choices you have as a web designer. As Ergophobe says, as long as you are making a conscious decision, with awareness of the results, that's all you can really ask.
Re the band flash site: what convinced me of the value of flash sites was looking at a friend's friend band site, full flash, features nice little slideshow stuff, pretty self contained. Would I ever do it? No. Would I make him a non flash site, then take over maintainance for him for free? No. Pay me to do that and you're talking at least 500, but he has it up, a friend probably did it for him. Are you going to pay to have this stuff done for people? That's very generous of you if you are.
I know when I am deciding to support technology x or y what the consequences are, more or less. When I said I've seen probably a total of 1, maybe 2 or 3 handheld os's on all my sites, I'm not going to waste time catering to them. I know the opera small screen emulator. If you would like to pay my development time to do so, feel free, and I will. (although my guess is that all my commercial stuff more or less works fine on handhelds, it's just that I totally don't care about them, I'm not into geek toys)
Personally, I used to go for 99.75% support for visitors, full support too. Because CSS tends to drop full support down a bit, I now accept around 99% full support, with degraded support for the rest on my commercial sites, which gives you about 100% support. Can you say the same? But just because I know how to give this support doesn't mean that I always think it's the best option. Sometimes people want the tv thing on the web, so they use flash. That's their right, the web is still open and somewhat free. Othertimes somebody needs to put a pdf file up, which excludes handhelds more or less, that's fine too. Sometimes I will put up a photo gallery, which doesn't do much for blind people. Sometimes I will put up audio, which doesn't do much for deaf people, but it does do something for the other 99.9% of the site's visitors, which are the ones I care about.
If I were marketing a japanese, finnish, etc audience my sites would offer full handheld support, but I'm not, and neither I would guess are most members of this forum. Handheld surfing just hasn't caught on in the USA for the very simple reason that people would rather see big web pages than tiny little ones, and they can, since they tend to own pcs. In Japan, people don't tend to own pc's, so the handheld market is much more important.
And this IS NOT CALIFORNIA - which might have had some form of logic going for it....
Do they care whether it's usable? Give me a break. All they care about is "keeping up with their peers" by having the latest and greatest. Period. Teenagers are idiots by definition (yup - I DO remember 40 years ago when I WAS JUST LIKE THEM.... but I managed somehow to live over it....), but they ARE the ones whose parents seem to have unlimited disposable income.... I don't care about that (no, I'm not envious - I have literally all the money I need....) so much as I care about the salient fact that THESE VERY YOUNG COMPLETELY IMMATURE LIVING-IN-THE-MOMENT PEOPLE SKEW THE STATS THE REST OF US NEED TO MAKE DECENT DECISIONS REGARDING OUR BUSINESSES/LIVELIHOODS.
Um. Okay. Rant off....
I should have known, I actually worked during school for a long term study project of human IQ a long time ago, one key finding: IQ drops 10-15 percent during adolescence.
[edited by: isitreal at 1:46 am (utc) on May 11, 2004]
