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by andai 1769 days ago
Been wondering about this, how many people are using old browsers? caniuse.com reports [0] 96% support for ES6 classes. The other 4% is divided between Internet Explorer, Opera Mini and obsolete versions of every other browser. So I'm trying to figure out what kind of people are using such ancient technology and why? What kind of unusual visitors would I be missing out on?
3 comments
blowski 1769 days ago
Anecdote: I know someone who has some antiquated games that he couldn't get working in anything other than a real install of Windows XP. The game has a forum, so he frequently uses IE8 installed on the computer to access it.

I guess there are lots of tiny edge cases that look like that.

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phh 1769 days ago
You're missing on visitors with disabled (or whitelisted) javascript. On HackerNews that'll be pretty common.
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andai 1769 days ago
It's true that people with JavaScript disabled won't be able to run any JavaScript, but once they turn it on it should have relatively good feature support -- I suspect the sort of people who know how to disable JavaScript aren't using software more than 5 years out of date.
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masklinn 1768 days ago
> but once they turn it on it should have relatively good feature support

How could they even know to tuen it on when all they get is an empty page?

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cdubzzz 1768 days ago
They are used to it? The number of users who have JS disabled is already small. The number of those users who lack the technical expertise to enable it as needed (and understand when that is necessary — e.g. with a blank or broken page) is probably many, many times smaller.
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masklinn 1768 days ago
> They are used to it?

And yet most site designers which require javascript turn out to be thoughtful enough to make a note of it rather than leave a completely empty page.

And public sites which absolutely require javascript to do anything turn out to be quite rare.

So there’s no reason to be used to it. “Some buttons don’t work”, yes I do expect i need to allow some JS. “Nothing shows up at all” is usually a network issue.

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judge2020 1768 days ago
The noscript tag is a thing.
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masklinn 1768 days ago
The noscript tag is something the page would need to use, and does not. Again, page is completely empty (or was, author commented that they fixed it, very nice)
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toxik 1769 days ago
Does anyone have a recommendation for a JavaScript whitelisting extension or method for macOS Safari?
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masklinn 1769 days ago
> caniuse.com reports [0] 96% support for ES6 classes.

Class fields are later addition to classes. And completely unnecessary here, it looks. The class fields are just duplicates of the instance fields, which are always filled.

> The other 4% is divided between Internet Explorer, Opera Mini and obsolete versions of every other browser. So I'm trying to figure out what kind of people are using such ancient technology and why?

Unsupported device which can not have recent updates for one reason or an other?

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