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Comment by ianbicking | Hacker News Reader

When sites break, people leave Firefox. No amount of explaining or media changes that: the number one (by far) reason people leave a browser is because a site is broken.

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Yes, this. Anyone who was around for the launch of Windows Vista could see this effect in action.

Vista's added security measures like UAC (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_Account_Control) broke a lot of poorly coded Windows applications that didn't bother to follow the rules of the platform.

Who did the users blame when those apps broke? Microsoft.

Why? "It worked fine until I upgraded to Vista!"

Sigh.

Further evidence: Windows 7 wasn't even that much of a change from Vista. The main differences were 1) software had adjusted to deal with UAC and 2) new laptops were more powerful. But most of the good new architectural features had premiered with Vista.

I think they did improve the UAC situation with Vista SP1, if memory serves.

MS changed UAC for windows 7 so much in an effort to stop annoying window's users that people complained that defeated the point

https://www.networkworld.com/article/2253987/microsoft--neut...

The main UAC change in Windows 7 was just that it didn't pop up for changing of settings. But UAC on settings wasn't the problem (in fact, macOS basically has this and it's a non-issue), UAC on legacy Windows apps only tested on Windows 9x or on administrator accounts on NT systems was.

> Further evidence: Windows 7 wasn't even that much of a change from Vista.

I seem to recall Vista was way more sluggish than 7 on the same machines.

W7 actually has lower minimum requirements than Vista. I've gotten 7 running on plenty of devices that Vista wouldn't touch.

Most of the anecdotal evidence was comparing a laptop running with years' worth of bloated software to a fresh install. No surprise that Windows 7 came out ahead.

I was referring to my own experience of fresh installs of both.

I second this. I had a secondary computer that I switched between Vista and 7, back and forth, for various reasons, and it was much, _much_ slower on Vista than 7.

I don't remember, did Vista let users turn off UAC, as Windows 7—10 does?

Yes.

I use this setting (blocking all 3rd party cookies) since years and the number of sites that are unusable is rather small. I usually go to another site when it happens. I think in the last 2 or 3 years there were only three occasions where i bothered to change the browser settings because I absolutely had to access the broken site. I think disqus is one of the notable services that is semi-broken due to this.

But then again I guess i'm not an average user.

Yeah, this exact experiment was already run. The user attrition stats were dire.

Yup. They don't have the advantage of being preinstalled and the default on all Apple machines. They really can't afford to break functionality.

Also, Apple can break sites and people can’t leave mobile Safari. Sites are forced to test on Safari. If a site doesn’t work with Firefox - oh well.

I don't like it, but there is another option, with its own set of trade-offs: force mobile users to download your app.

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