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Comment by RussianCow | Hacker News Reader

Without hard data, this is pretty meaningless. If I were to visit a site that didn't work correctly in my browser, I would close the tab and never give it another thought. I would certainly not take the time to write a complaint.

> I doubt this is the case since the users are keen and vocal. I get messages almost daily from them telling me the features they want to see.

Maybe existing users (and even for that, I'm skeptical), but how many potential users did you lose because they couldn't even open your app?

I'm not saying you are wrong, just that "users didn't complain" != "users weren't affected".

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>If I were to visit a site that didn't work correctly in my browser, I would close the tab and never give it another thought. I would certainly not take the time to write a complaint.

And I wouldn't miss you.

I can make the service better faster if I don't support the lowest common denominator. I'm sure I'd lose more users if the website was bloated with fallback code and my development speed was such that features are a year behind where they are now.

But dropping support for certain browsers/clients without having data on how many of your customers would be affected is silly, IMO. You might decide to drop support for IE 11 because you want to use CSS Grid without hassle, but then it turns out that 10% of your users use that browser! As with everything, you have to weigh the tradeoff, but you can't do that if you don't have the data to begin with.

> without having data on how many of your customers would be affected is silly

You're making the assumption I don't have and use data like that? That's an incorrect assumption.

Sorry, you are correct, I made that assumption. It seemed implied by your use of user complaints as a metric of success—I assumed that was the case because you didn't have hard data, so I apologize if that's not the case.

Not a problem at all. I place high value on being available to users of my website. I reply to each and every message. Perhaps it's a bit unusual for someone to talk about that before the numbers.

It has been my experience that I've gained more valuable insight from talking with users than I have from the numbers.

But, as a little Latina girl once said, why not both?

I think the other person was talking about quantitative data (e.g. from Google Analytics), not qualitative data from customer conversations / complaints.

Yes. That's also what I thought. I'm not sure why you think I thought otherwise.

I completely agree with this sentiment.

I absolutely hate the "does it work on ie6".

The time you spend dealing with old browsers is never returned in profit. I had one customer (ie10) in 4 years, and losing him cost me and made me nothing.

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