Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by armandososa 5783 days ago
With all due respecy John, I think we all should focus only on the latest-and-greatest WebKit platforms or on platforms that are comparably good. Mobile development is exciting precisely because it's a road to the future.

Look at the place we are in desktop web development because we have to support old browser. We are stuck 7+ years in the past.

I understand the intellectual allure of writing a framework that supports a gazillion different devices and I appreciate what you've done with jQuery for web development but frankly, I don't care about jQueryMobile.

Except that it scares the hell out of me the day some client starts asking me to support 5 year old Nokias.

1 comments

Jquery mobile is great because they will try to support as many platforms as possible. If you run a real mobile site with a lot of users you have to take small platforms into consideration, just like your website needs to support IE 6 if you have lots of users. It's not fun but it would be bad business not to do it.[1]

If a mobile framework can reach this goal it will make mobile development a heck of a lot easier, and I applaud that.

[1] You need some scale before development for platforms that maybe constitute 3% of your users will be a financially good option.

Youtube and other google apps don't support IE6, not to mention many other big traffic web apps and web sites (including 37signals apps).
IE6 has around 7% marketshare according to this: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

Not supporting it is like telling one in fourteen of your customers you don't want their business. This seems like a bad idea, unless of course you have non-financial motives, such as wanting to kill off IE6 by not supporting it and driving it into oblivion.

Those are general stats, you need to look at your personal stats which might be at 0.5% or 65% and decide from there, not based on these kind of sites. Making your site work on IE will require tons of hour of work and therefor money. It'll also just not work for HTML5 apps, unless you have a second version of your site coded in flash. Make sure it's worth it.
You can't get meaningful stats unless you start out supporting IE.