That are astonishing and interesting statistics and i very well understand that you must be cautious which technologies you adapt. On the other hand - being an open source developer for more than 10 years - i very well understand Robs' argument. Especially if you try to move things forward it's hard to get everybody on the train without loosing a lot of speed and momentum.
However i support your statement that we should look for 'cheap' fallbacks so old browsers degrade to something meaningful. E.g. take the simple 'no script' of HTML - if there are users no having javascript active for some reason i at least can tell them that the site won't offer its whole functionality (if any at all). This already makes a big difference as most users today have an alternative - they don't need necessarily connect with their aged smartphone browser but can go to their desktop. On the other hand i think developers today need to put some pressure on users to upgrade if they want to offer the latest and greatest. Backward compat can become a too big burden sometimes and hinder innovation. Maybe you should probably have a look into how much profit these 'minorities' actually bring. Wouldn't it be possible that you can raise your profits by offering a much better (and more fun) interface for all the others? Just my 2 cents, Joern Am Sonntag, 29. Juni 2014 16:15:43 UTC+2 schrieb [email protected]: > > Thanks Rob and I understand that the Polymer is advancing the future of > the web. I am just wondering if the best way to reach the future faster is > not to find a somewhat elegant way to deal with the past (and that's what I > understand has worked best in the past to advance the web...) > > When HTML5 new input tags was introduced I thought it was great how older > browser would just treat these fields as text input. It really helped adopt > HTML5's new inputs. Couldn't there be a similar way to achieve this with > Polymer? > > We still get around over *15%* of our traffic coming from older versions > of major browsers, 2,5% from Opera and Opera Mini, and a little under 1% > from browsers that I don't know how they would behave (Opera Mini, Opera, > Ovi Browser, Blackberry, Maxthon, Amazon Silk, Dolfin, PS3, IE with Google > Frame,...). > > So despite my huge enthusiasm to discuss with my team adopting Polymer for > YouFoot, we can't just cross out 15% of our users and it will probably take > 3 years for this 15% to become less than 5%, and 5 years to become less > than 1%. > > It would have been particularly great to adopt it to create a more > consistant look across web and mobile devices, make interfaces more > beautiful, code leaner... > > --------------------------- > > *Internet Explorer:* > Speaking of IE which amount for 15% of our sessions: 33% of these are from > IE 9 or previous (almost half is from IE9 and and half from IE8, with a > small amount from IE7). Fun fact: we even have a few users connecting from > IE5 and IE4 apparently! > > *Firefox:* > For us Firefox represent 22% of browser usage. While you are right that > it's generally better, you'd be surprised to see we get 205 different > versions of Firefox. While 80% of it are from Firefox 30 and 29 we also > have almost 1% on version 12, 0,5% on version 11, etc... There might be 5% > of Firefox users on versions below version 10 (with version 3 and 4 being > pretty popular still). > > *Chrome* > Chrome sees the most usage with 48,8% but while 79% are using version 35, > the next version that is most used is version 1,5 with 2,4% of Chrome > users. There are more than 1000 different versions being used although 990 > versions probably amount to less than 2% > > *Safari:* > Safari is only 2,9% of our usage. Among that 7% are using Safari 5 or > older. > Follow Polymer on Google+: plus.google.com/107187849809354688692 --- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Polymer" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/polymer-dev/fc229dc8-7f22-4c1a-8154-9b798517d2a5%40googlegroups.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
