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Comment by kaycebasques | Hacker News Reader

Tangential idea: I worked on Google's Web DevRel team for about 6 years. Another core conflict I saw a lot is the tension between developer experience and user experience. An improvement in developer experience sometimes resulted in a degraded user experience.

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I guess it is a better developer experience to not need the software to work...

Can you give some examples?

One example is dropping support for older browsers. Dropping IE support is better DevX because debugging esoteric IE bugs is very time consuming. But if you have a lot of people using IE, dropping it is worse UX for them, especially if they are using IE6 from a very old OS and can’t get the latest browser.

So at that point, the balance becomes “ok, if less than 1% of requests come from this browser, we don’t explicitly support it.”

This is similar for Android developers.

How soon can we drop support for Android OS #? Because # doesn't have the easier to use animation API, or because we'll need to display an extra modal, or some such.

That can just as well be a business decision. We have X budget for this website, we currently have > X expenses so what can we cut. Then cutting the difficult browser is not a hard decision.

This is how it works and HN complains about it a lot, ie. when some service or program doesn't support Linux or Firefox.

Linux is very much understandable, but Firefox still has a considerable user base, between 3 and 5 pct depending on who's counting; Double that if you only target desktop. Considering the support burden of Firefox should be minimal, I can't really see those business justifications

Why should they prioritize support for a small browser that encourages you to block ads? Doesn't make business sense to me.

My guess is that the majority of web sites out there with any kind of custom dev work behind them are not relying on ads for revenue.

Eg Netflix doesn’t care about ads - they care about supporting their customers whereever they happen to be. Supporting (or not) Firefox is still a business decision of course, but it has nothing to do with ad-blocking.

A sports organization that I know seems to have bought a website that won't work with any browser, every User Agent that I have tried causes an error.

It still seems to download a fair bit of Javascript so I guess a developer had to write it at some point.

Have you tried faking user agents of different OSs?

Tried every combination of browser and OS.

Not the OP, but one came to mind quickly: developers like quick build times and easy to edit files, but end users need efficiently-packed, minimal builds - the more you do at build time to improve performance, the more time a developer has to wait for builds. This is especially true if E2E tests improve UX by reducing bugs but again devs have to wait. Finally, it’s convenient for devs if no API surfaces change but it’s convenient for users to have the newest features that will save them time. It takes work to make sure both UX and DevRel goals can align in the same solution… they’re different audiences, even if there is overlap.

That's why we have fast debug builds with logging, and slow, optimized, prod builds.

Electron?

This is a great example. Companies no longer wish to write performant desktop apps because it’s much easier to keep and hire cool young devs who think the syntax that you write your views in matters more than the experience as a whole.

I don't think that's why developers are writing electron apps. It's because it allows for more significant code reuse there's a much deeper hiring pool (IMO)

Disclaimer: I work for a company whose main product ships as an electron app, although I don't work on that part of the product specifically.

“Code reuse”. There’s your buzzword excuse for that project being a web view.

Edit: I also said it was easier to hire. Which IMO is an organizational anti pattern. Look at all the talks of Clojure shops, who despite having a small hiring pool, usually find passionate, practical developers who quickly pick up the language.

Electron allows you to hire devs who prefer code aesthetics over what the thing actually does to/on your computer.

It's not a buzzword, it's a very salient point. Code reuse, a consistent UI and a much greater development velocity across a much greater number of platforms (web, desktop, mobile).

It can be done poorly, and there are plenty of examples of that, but it's not a universal rule and the trade-off gives real benefits. At the end of the day you do need to ship and maintain _something_, and maintaining one thing is better than maintaining Web, MacOS Desktop, Windows Desktop, Linux Desktop, iPhone and Android.

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