Target browsers

There's been quite an interesting thread on this which I'd like to
comment on. Apologies for the somewhat belated post.

My sense of much of the discussion is that the approach has been
somewhat academic and technically oriented. There have been a lot of
comments on what 'we' would like to do, and what 'we' think is the
'right' thing. And that's fair enough. Without such debates there'd be
no progress.

I look at it from a hard commercial perspective. At BA we'll support the
browsers that our customers use. We have no choice. Irresepective of
whether those browsers comply with any given standard, that's what we
have to work with. To that end we continually track what people do use,
and pay attention to what people tell us that they want.

The debate only gets steamy where there are lower percentages of people
using browsers. At what point do we stop supporting an older browser
version. When only 5% of people use it (and declining)? 3%? 1%? In
principle, it should be a hard commercial decision. If we did support
those browsers, how many more tickets would people buy as a result? How
many calls to the call centre would be saved? And how much would support
cost?

In practice it's difficult to be definitive with such numbers, and it
becomes a judgement call.

I've found, interestingly, that there's a (largely technical)
popuplation who find it difficult to let go of NS4.7. Useage on our site
is tiny, and I have said that we no longer support this, and have had
some interesting discussions persuading people of this. On the other
hand we do support the latest NS v7. Not because this is justified by
current useage (again it's tiny), but because there's a chance that if
AOL switches to it big time it could become important, and if we haven't
maintained compliance along the way, we could incur killer costs in
catching up.

So if you've got the time and resource to maintain compliance for a wide
range of browsers, I wouldn't argue with you. If resource is
constrained, then you need to make a call. I wonder who those people are
though that using NS3? Are they geeks trawling just to see what still
works, and they'll switch back to IE6 in a couple of minutes? Are they
granny who just doesn't know how to upgrade?

*    Nick Gassman - eCommerce Manager - [email protected]     *
              * http://ba.com *

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