[thelist] Netscape 6 loads page twice

martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com martin.p.burns at uk.pwcglobal.com
Thu Dec 7 13:24:14 CST 2000


Memo from Martin P Burns of PricewaterhouseCoopers

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15% difference in response is often the difference between
a huge roaring success and a dismal failure in business terms.

And when you cut out self-identifying minorities they get *really*
upset and take it very personally. And then you get networked
customer effects a la http://www.cluetrain.com#manifesto

This is why going the extra mile for NS users, Mac fans, Linux
zealots and disabled users has surprisingly good ROI.

Further, I think it is a huge liberty for developers to decide what
to develop for. It's surely the client's decision. You need to put
to them how much work it's going to take to be compatible with
a heterogenous audience, and tell them that it's going to cut
out (say) 15% of their market, who are then going to be *really*
pissed off, and then let them do the cost-benefit analysis and
take the decision.

Always assuming it's more work, not less. If, as Adrian does,
you start from a standards compliant position, you'll often
find that it's not significantly more work. Coding for IE users
in ideal circumstances, then having to back it out to enable
other users to play sounds like going round the long way
to produce a worse result to me. Like the developers on one
site I worked on who wouldn't use <ul><li> etc for bulleted lists -
they coded it with HTML entities cos "Macs won't display the
bullets otherwise". Smell the bullshit...

Cheers
Martin



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Subject:  RE: [thelist] Netscape 6 loads page twice



> From: "jeff" <jeff at lists.evolt.org>
>
> according to thecounter.com they logged a total of 554,519,878 hits for the
> month of october.  approximately 13% of those hits were from nn4 users.  an
> amazing 81% of the hits came from ie4/ie5.  i'm not sure that less than 15%
> of an audience could be considered significant.  i'd rate that as a portion
> of your audience that you're you want the site to be usable for, but not
> enough to warrant the additional development time necessary to make all the
> bells and whistles work for.

i always wince when i read things like this...

if i told a client that we build sites that only cut out 13% of their
users, i don't think they'd accept that... do you tell your clients
that?  would they accept it?  especially e-commerce clients?

and if you're making bells and whistles that require the latest
browsers, you need to consider how those degrade to older,
alternative, and handicapped browsers... as well as those of us
with JS turned off...

so, that may be more than 15%, and for those users who are very
particular about which browser they choose, you may be pissing
them off, meaning that even with another browser, they may not
come back...

remember, don't build based on how easy it is for you, build based
on how easy it is for your users...

> on top of that, nn6 users accounted for less than 0.05% of the total hits.
> not only that, but i don't expect those numbers to change very much any time
> soon.  i think the damage to netscape has been done and it's too much to
> recover from.

that i agree with...

[...]
> personally, i used to be a die-hard fan of netscape and for good reason.  in
> the days of nn2 and nn3 what other options were there?  ie3 was laughable at
> best.  however, i am now quite content to develop exclusively for ie4+
> (preferably ie5.0).  while i applaud netscape for their efforts i think it

i'm always wary of that given IE's propensity to ignore bad code,
support proprietary standards, and make developers forget that not
everyone surfs in IE4+ on win95...


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