Flashes of Panic

Still thinking about the problems with prioritizing browser support by current traffic.

One big one, which I have bumped my head on just recently here, is just who those numbers represent. The design I’m almost finished with for our home page worked well on nearly every browser, except IE/Mac, on which it was a train wreck. I whined. “Why do we need to support that piece of garbage? Who uses it?”

Well, the answer to that last question turned out to be, “Our entire production department,” who are still running Mac OS 9.x and for whom IE/Mac is still, sadly, the best available browser. So I sucked it up, found a few nifty hacks, and made it work.

So, say you’re doing a big, advertising-supported site. All you need is one advertiser who can’t reach your site with Safari, and either you’ll get an earful and start fixing things… or you just won’t get the advertising and never know what you lost or why. I don’t think that’s a chance I’d choose to take.

Anyway, it’s not the percentage of total traffic—it’s that one tiny segment of your marketplace which turns out to be really important.

Now playing: Mr. Right Now from If You Lived Here You’d Be Home Now by The Nields