

Ask HN: How do I convince my boss that we don't need to support Chrome 14? - oldbrowsertaway

I work for a small, early stage startup. Our main product is a consumer-facing website targeted at US consumers only.<p>I&#x27;m a web developer there. Our director of engineering is a C++ guy with 0 web dev experience. However, he is in charge of all the developers and setting our engineering roadmap.<p>Anyway, he is very stubborn about supporting as old versions of browsers as possible. He is of the opinion that all old or poor people use old browsers and by not supporting them we will be losing customers. No amount of browser statistics will change his mind. He keeps saying things to the gist of &quot;real software should be cross-platform&quot;, etc.<p>I proposed we only support IE9+, Chrome 36+ and Firefox 30+ because those were the only versions we found to still have marginal usage in the US..and I can maybe understand IE8 for people with old computers, but Chrome and Firefox self-update now adays..<p>He completely rejected my proposal and insists on supporting Chrome 14, Firefox 17, etc.<p>I think he&#x27;s smart enough to change his mind if presented with the right arguments, but right now Idk what those would be..<p>So HN, what arguments or data can I present to our director of engineering to get him to change his mind?
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gamedna
Send him this link and ask him how many releases back from stable he wants to
spend resources on?

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_release_history](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Chrome_release_history)

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epalmer
If you collect analytics you should be able to see the volume of usage by
browser version. We make rational decisions where I work based on the
analytics only.

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csomar
Are you going to support Chrome 14 only, or Chrome 14, 15, 16...?

Maybe if you tell him that we should support 30 different versions his opinion
will change.

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oldbrowsertaway
as far back as Chrome 14..so he expects anything in between current and 14 to
work..he doesn't seem to care that that's some 30 versions, he has 0 web dev
experience.

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NicoJuicy
Explain how much extra work it is, tell him about the auto-update process in
Chrome and that practicly no one uses it...

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oldbrowsertaway
I already have, he keeps insisting that there are people out there that turn
that off..he's willing to push back the development of new features until
everything works in the older browsers..

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yuhong
Reminds me of the olden days where it was actually true.

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VOYD
Because you telemetry that supports your stance?

