I wonder if it is partly because nobody really wants to have to use Babel, and maybe people are starting to stop using it. Most people don't need to support IE anymore.
People constantly complain about Javascript toolchains pulling too many dependencies here in HN, and Babel is by far the biggest offender. A vanilla project made with create-react-app pulls 133 Babel packages, all of them under control of the Babel organization. A lot of those packages have only a few lines of code, and a lot of the real logic is in the core packages. It could be a single package, or at least a more reasonable number.
For this reason and others, almost everyone who knows deeply about the JS ecosystem is looking for different solutions. Everyone is dying to move to SWC and ESBuild. Or Rome.
With the amount of damage that Babel does to the image of the Javascript ecosystem, it's surprising they're getting as much money.
EDIT: With that said, if there was a plan to solve the current problems of Babel (package spam and slowness), I would be on board with supporting it. As of now, I'm supporting both Vite and SWC. ESBuild doesn't seem to have monetization but I would support it in a heartbeat.
Completely agree. Anyone who wants to support IE and Outlook astonish me. I'm going to be starting an email newsletter soon and I've not done one before outside of mail chimp but I am absolutely not fucking around using tables. Why are we indulging Microsoft on this and letting them think it's acceptable to use their shitty Word rendering engine for email? How much productivity is being wasted from people globally having to spend time working around their piss poor decisions? Newsletter makers should just refuse to indulge it and provide a plain text email alternative for Outlook users along with the reasoning at the top of the email: sorry this email isn't pretty for you but Microsoft need to sort this the fuck out. Please use a proper email client in order to view the nice version.
Let things die that need to die. I can understand it more with Outlook because it still has just under 5% market share according to this[1] (guessing this is a US centric survey and not global) but are you really going to be getting paying customers or even just the eyeballs you want on your site from people who are using IE? Internet Explorer makes up less than 0.5% of browser use nowadays. You have got better things to be spending your time and money on than supporting it.
> Anyone who wants to support IE and Outlook astonish me.
Welcome to large companies (who may still get more people browsing from IE than populations of entire countries) and government agencies (good government agencies cannot afford not to support a wide array of old, weird, and unsupported browsers)
> Welcome to large companies (who may still get more people browsing from IE than populations of entire countries)
Would like more info on this and examples of the companies you're talking about. How are they turning a profit from the 0.25% of the population using IE.
> and government agencies (good government agencies cannot afford not to support a wide array of old, weird, and unsupported browsers)
How can they not afford to support it? I don't see how they're raking in massive amounts of extra tax income, political goodwill, or providing a huge amount of value by supporting old browsers. I've not been in a local library, in the UK at least, that didn't have Chrome installed. The only people left using IE are boomers and last time I checked they're the segment of the population most able to afford a new laptop but, predictably, least willing to buy a new one or learn more about computers. Or just generally do anything for the greater benefit of society but that's a whole other conversation.
As others have pointed out, IE is a poster child. There are many, many outdated browser versions and devices beside IE.
If you have 200 million users, 0.25% is 500 000 people. You may think it's not much, but most cities on Earth have fewer people than that. And it's 0.25% IE, and 0.25% QQ, and 0.25% that Samsung browser from 2014, and... And suddenly you have 5 million people using outdated browsers.
And when it comes to government agencies, "afford" does not mean "profit" because you can't measure everything in terms of profit. And no, not every "boomer" has the money to upgrade their 2012 Android phone bought for them by their kids. And not every millenial sports the latest iPhone. Etc.
--- start quote ---
In the middle, a young woman sits on a hard plastic chair. She is surrounded by canvas-bags containing her worldly possessions. She doesn't look like she is in a great emotional place right now. Clutched in her hands is a games console - a PlayStation Portable...
Walking behind her, I glance at her console and recognise the screen she's on. She's connected to the complementary WiFi and is browsing the GOV.UK pages on Housing Benefit.
There's a reason ADA exists: it's because people only view everything through the lenses of "how much profit do I get from these people even if I am government"
> If you have 200 million users, 0.25% is 500 000 people. You may think it's not much, but most cities on Earth have fewer people than that. And it's 0.25% IE, and 0.25% QQ, and 0.25% that Samsung browser from 2014, and... And suddenly you have 5 million people using outdated browsers.
Yes but I’m still not convinced it makes economic sense for companies to support those users. Those users are signalling a clear aversion to technology and technology purchases. So how many sales or subscriptions are they getting from those 5 million people? Because a 0.5% conversion rate on 5 million people is 25,000 sales. Is that worth it for a company of that size and does it cover the development and management costs?
And I see what you’re saying about access for governments sites but the government routinely hires contractors for £500 or more a day and the cost of a new iPad is £369. You would probably save more money loaning people on benefits a bottom of the range ipad and just supporting safari and chrome rather than throwing manpower and money supporting old browsers. Everyone involved gets a better experience (other than the contractors who aren’t needed any more).
"I'm young and rich, and I can't understand why the rest of the world caters to other people than me" is a position, for sure.
No matter how amazingly technologically savvy you are, if your smart TV is more than just three years old, it's already running a deprecated browser that in all likelihood never be updated. And nearly all apps on modern smart TVs run in the browser, so yes, companies will have to support that (if their apps run on those TVs. Think Netflix, Spotify, even probably Apple's integration with Samsung).
As for governments, you assume that it's only "people on benefits" that use outdated or deprecated technology. And you assume that governments will run through acquiring and updating millions of iPads once every few years. Because iPads and browsers on those iPads also get deprecated (a 7 year old iPad Pro while fully functional is no longer supported).
> I'm young and rich, and I can't understand why the rest of the world caters to other people than me" is a position, for sure.
I'm certainly not rich. I've yet to earn a salary in any given year that was above the median in my country. I've had to start from nothing and claw my way to where I am today. What I did however see, was that technology was going to dominate life in the future so I invested the money I did have in good quality Apple products, starting with second hand products until I could afford to buy brand new. But you know, feel free to carry on making assumptions about the internet strangers you chat with.
> No matter how amazingly technologically savvy you are, if your smart TV is more than just three years old, it's already running a deprecated browser that in all likelihood never be updated. And nearly all apps on modern smart TVs run in the browser, so yes, companies will have to support that (if their apps run on those TVs. Think Netflix, Spotify, even probably Apple's integration with Samsung).
Not really. Said companies could just refuse to support them and only develop for Apple TV, Firestick and Chromecast. Which would make a lot more sense than spreading yourself thin and wasting resources on each crappy built-in browser made by every TV company. Every time Smart TVs come up on HN the general consensus is don't connect it to the internet, don't update the firmware and use a proper external device for Smart TV functionality. Because TV companies suck at software the same way car companies do.
> As for governments, you assume that it's only "people on benefits" that use outdated or deprecated technology.
No, but you implied that the reason why people couldn't access them was monetary. If people aren't on benefits, then presumably they have enough money to purchase a second hand iPhone or Android that can run chrome for less than £100.
> And you assume that governments will run through acquiring and updating millions of iPads once every few years. Because iPads and browsers on those iPads also get deprecated (a 7 year old iPad Pro while fully functional is no longer supported).
Yes, if it is economically cheaper to do. What do you think happens to the existing computers owned by the government? Are they just never updated or replaced? Are they all still running Windows XP?
The basic truth is that it is simply uneconomical to support everything.
> Not really. Said companies could just refuse to support them and only develop for Apple TV, Firestick and Chromecast.
See, your attitude screams "I'm rich, I'm young, I can afford to upgrade to latest technology whenever".
I mean why should companies support anything older than 3 years? Right? Right?
> No, but you implied that the reason why people couldn't access them was monetary. If people aren't on benefits, then presumably they have enough money to purchase a second hand iPhone or Android that can run chrome for less than £100.
You assume too much.
> Yes, if it is economically cheaper to do.
Again. Not everything is, or should be, driven by profit.
> Are they all still running Windows XP?
You'd do well to learn how long Windows XP was supported, and why (hint: released in 2001, supported until 2015, absolutely final end of support was in 2019).
> The basic truth is that it is simply uneconomical to support everything.
The basic truth is that:
- no one is talking about supporting everything
- depending on where you work and product you build, you may need to support obsolete and outdated devices for numerous reasons: from goodwill, to secondary and primary market needs, to the sheer fact that manufacturers abandon their devices just a few years after release while millions of people still use them.
Oh. And those "cheap Android phones" you're talking about? Pray that they don't run something like UC browser, the one of the most popular browsers in Southeast Asia, which is likely to be several years out of date and with weird support for anything.
And those TVs that companies souldn't support? 30% of TVs sold worldwide in 2017 were Samsung TVs. That's 30 million units.
> See, your attitude screams "I'm rich, I'm young, I can afford to upgrade to latest technology whenever".
Right. So I've specifically just told you I am in no way rich. In my country, I am statistically in the bottom half of all earners. In fact, my average income last year was equivalent to the average income of someone in Poland in 2020 according to this chart[1], despite living in a more expensive country with a higher cost of living. But according to you, my attitude is a rich person attitude.
> I mean why should companies support anything older than 3 years? Right? Right?
Did I say this anywhere? No. You've completely made it up and heard what you wanted to hear. I specifically invested in Apple products precisely because they have long term support. I'm currently running an iPhone 8 in it's seventh year of life. Last November I replaced my iPad Pro because it was 8 years old and I could no longer update to the latest iOS. The same with my MacBook Pro which was a 2013 model - 9 years old. I invested in these Apple products precisely because they had a good reputation for longevity and long term support and were recommended by developers. I then self taught myself how to code on them to escape being trapped in minimum wage hospitality and leisure jobs. It took me the majority of my 20s to do but I did it.
>> No, but you implied that the reason why people couldn't access them was monetary. If people aren't on benefits, then presumably they have enough money to purchase a second hand iPhone or Android that can run chrome for less than £100.
> You assume too much.
You literally quoted a story about a homeless woman being able to access government websites on a PSP as your justification for why we should support all browsers. What I said was in no way an assumption. Yet you assuming I was rich and continuing to assert I have rich person attitude is a fucking gigantic one.
> Again. Not everything is, or should be, driven by profit.
No, we should also consider maximising user experience and functionality. Something we can do better if we're not wasting massive amounts of developer time and funds so 2 people can access a website from their xbox.
> Are they all still running Windows XP?
Yes I'm well aware of how long it was running for. Doesn't change the fact that it has now been replaced does it.
> The basic truth is that:
- no one is talking about supporting everything
Well where are you drawing the line if not 0.25% of the population. How low does the percentage have to go before you consider it a waste of time?
> depending on where you work and product you build, you may need to support obsolete and outdated devices for numerous reasons: from goodwill, to secondary and primary market needs, to the sheer fact that manufacturers abandon their devices just a few years after release while millions of people still use them.
Oh. And those "cheap Android phones" you're talking about? Pray that they don't run something like UC browser, the one of the most popular browsers in Southeast Asia, which is likely to be several years out of date and with weird support for anything.
I very specifically said `or Android that can run chrome for less than £100`. Which are very easy to find. If manufacturers want to abandon their handsets after 3 years, let them. Customers will soon tire of it and will learn to buy products from manufacturers that don't. All you are doing by supporting these devices is enabling the manufacturers to get away with shitty support. They're offloading their work on to you because you're willing to put up with it. Stop doing it and watch them either collapse or start taking longevity seriously.
> And those TVs that companies shouldn't support? 30% of TVs sold worldwide in 2017 were Samsung TVs. That's 30 million units.
Yeah but how many people are running the Samsung Smart TV functionality and how many are running ChromeCast/Apple TV/Firestick through them. If you are being honest with yourself, do you really think that the SmartTV UX is better than the standalone sticks? Put a shit version of the app on the tv if you really want to but really we're better off encouraging uptake of the other platforms. And you can pick second hand fire sticks up off eBay for less than £10 so people are hardly priced out of it. If someone can afford a brand new smart tv they can certainly afford a fire stick to go with it.
