
Ask HN: Does your organization still use old web browsers? - hoodoof
I&#x27;m doing some development and honestly despite the fact that it may reduce my target audience I&#x27;m just not going to bother supporting anything but latest browsers.<p>I got to wondering, &quot;how many organizations actually still use old browsers&quot;?<p>So, does your organization still use old browsers, if so which browser version and why?
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greenyoda
Lots of big companies (1) are still using Windows 7 and (2) don't allow users
to install their own software (no admin rights). So they'd be stuck using IE
11. (If these companies use Chrome or Firefox, they're also not likely to have
the very latest version, since they need a version that's been tested with
their internal applications. Auto-updating your software is very risky if a
bug could disable your business for a couple of days.)

I'd suspect that there are lots of smaller companies out there who are still
using Windows XP (IE 8).

Don't expect a company to change its IT policies just to be able to use your
software.

(I work in the enterprise software space, and my employer's customers include
lots of big companies. We only recently dropped support for IE 8.)

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hoodoof
So what browser and version does your company use?

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greenyoda
Developers and other technical people tend to use the latest Chrome or Firefox
as their primary browsers. Others (marketing, admin staff, etc.) tend to use
the default system browser, e.g., IE 11.

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Silhouette
In my experience, if you're only targeting the "evergreen" browsers, you're
probably not going to get much penetration in the enterprise space. Corporate
IT is maintaining PCs for anywhere from hundreds to many thousands of users,
and might well be supporting hundreds of different business applications. They
value stability and future-proofing over almost anything else, and they don't
care in the slightest that this policy is inconvenient for web developers who
want to use bleeding edge features or for browser developers who would like to
drop support for legacy functionality. The good news is that these kinds of
organisations tend to have lots of money to spend and often won't bat an
eyelid at spending some of it to get support for a product or service they
value on the platform they are already running.

In SME world, there is less of everything to coordinate, and that means there
is more flexibility and to some extent the standard software used in the
organisation tends to be updated more frequently. It's still likely that
anywhere big enough to have dedicated IT staff also has controlled software
deployment, but at least that's likely to be IE11, reasonably recent Safari on
macOS, or possibly something like Firefox LTS or a centrally managed Chrome
deployment.

~~~
hoodoof
OK so what is a pragmatic decision about which browsers to support....?

I want to make something usable by many, but I'm just not going down the path
of supporting everything back to IE8 - the resource is not there to do that
development.

~~~
Silhouette
I think it just depends on the market you want to aim for.

If you want to go for enterprise sales then you need quite a different
approach to most other development work, not just in browser compatibility but
in how you do things like marketing and sales and technical support. It's
tough for any small business to do this, but if you can pull it off without
the overheads of larger businesses then the profits can be substantial. Of
course, you do have to support whatever platform your big customers are using.
That could be IE11 these days; requests for compatibility with older versions
of IE do seem to be fading out, I suspect because support for pre-7 Windows
versions from Microsoft is now very expensive. But realistically, if you're a
small outfit supplying to enterprises, you're probably working on almost a
case-by-case basis anyway, and you just have to find out what each customer is
using.

If you don't have the resources to handle such a demanding customer, or you
just don't enjoy coding for the older browsers and want to work on projects
that can use the new toys, I'd suggest aiming for a totally different type of
customer in the first place. If you're writing web sites or apps aimed at home
users rather than businesses then in most Western countries the very clear
trend is to run Chrome on desktop/laptop and either Chrome or Safari on
phones/tablets depending on whether it's Android or Apple. Safari doesn't
update to add new features rapidly like the evergreen browsers, but Apple do
tend to push out updates along with new versions of iOS, and in any case
people tend to upgrade their mobile devices much more frequently than their
desktops/laptops so the lag is less of a problem in practice than it was with
IE.

Small businesses are somewhere in between, and the basic rule is that the
smaller the business, the more likely it is to be using individual PCs and
mobile devices rather than some organisation-wide standard, and so the more
likely it is that people will be running very recent browsers. As soon as an
organisation is big enough to have dedicated IT staff and central management
of IT systems, which I'd guess starts around the 25-50 person scale for a lot
of businesses, you're going to see much greater standardisation and therefore
somewhat slower updates.

So pragmatically, if you're aiming at businesses then you probably need to
support IE11 at least, but going beyond that is probably into enterprise sales
territory. For a consumer market, it's almost all about Chrome and Safari
these days IME, but you should probably try to support Safari as it was a
couple of years ago as a minimum standard and ideally a bit further back for
those who have older Apple devices that they can't/won't upgrade to the latest
OS and browser.

