And here's a list of the user agents of the visitors to my site at this very minute:
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6 (.NET CLR 3
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET
No, I'm not saying that. But why is it that SM is the only site that kills my systems? And I could understand if it was just one computer, or one generation, but come on. It kills everything from p3 to Athlons, 512mb ram to 3gb, xp home, embedded, and pro. At varying speeds, but kills them nonetheless. And with the literally hundreds of sites I visit a week, this is the only one? You know diagnosis of these type of problems as well as I do. And you still think it's the computers? The same ones that work fine for anything other than SM?
Ask Smugmug how common this complaint is. I suspect if they thought it was a regular thing, they'd do something about it. I've never heard the issue from any of my viewers or seen the issue myself so it's hard for me to say it's a common occurrence. That's why my first guess is that there's something in your configuration that antagonizes the issue rather than the other way around. It still could be all Smugmug's fault, but without hearing others complaining about the issue, that isn't the first place one would normally look.
I understand that SM is trying to be the cream of the crop, no argument there. But there's a difference between carefully advancing, and purposefully leaving people behind in the effort of advancing. SM is a careful adopter of technology, watching it proven on other sites and with other companies before implementing it themselves (except when it comes to i-anything, that's a different story). Why would SM assume it's users would be any different in their adopting of technology?
I don't think SM thinks they're leaving lots of viewers behind. They are leaving some behind (for example, my mom's mac laptop doesn't even have flash on it so she can't see my home screen slideshow). I wouldn't exactly say SM is a careful adopter of new technology. They were early with ajax support, early with Amazon S3, early with an important site dependency on flash, early with openID support, are going early on HTML5, etc... Sometimes early is good. Sometimes it makes thing adventurous.
And why not make a site backwards compatible with less features? When did that concept ever become a dirty idea in website development? Most sites can detect browsers/OS's/connections speeds, and more than just screen size. Why not use that to make the best visitor experience no matter what someone has?
Designing different versions of the site for different levels of computers is a very expensive proposition to design, code, test, support and maintain going forward. There are times to do it and there are times when that extra development burden means that feature development for the lion's share of your user base slows down a lot.
I don't think SM thinks they're leaving lots of viewers behind. They are leaving some behind (for example, my mom's mac laptop doesn't even have flash on it so she can't see my home screen slideshow)
No, she's got a Mac without flash installed and isn't interested in installing it and I'm not interested in forcing her since I'm remote. That table says 2.5% in the U.S. don't have flash. Those are the ones that are left behind. It shouldn't surprise you that any one with more than a few hundred viewers would find several that don't have flash.
I'm just surprised that there's a mac user with no flash. Takes about 1 minute to install it. Dead simple.
The stats say 2.5 out of a hundred don't have it. It doesn't mean they couldn't have it. It means they don't have it. You have zillions of viewers and 2.5% of zillions is still a reasonable number.
Hi Dave I tried to reproduce what you listed above and I can partially reproduce it. The part i cannot totally reproduce is after I have logged in and set the third party custom domain cookie I close Safari. Then I re-open it and go to my custom domain. I do not show as logged in but I hit refresh and after one or two times it does show me as being logged in. So it does need to re-add the third party custom domain cookie when it should already have it set. We're looking into this as it should already have that set.
I'd be interested to know if there's an update on this issue? I've been experiencing the same symptoms (except sometimes refreshing even multiple times still won't re-activate the cookie, and I have to actually log out then back in). I'm seeing this with IE7, Chrome, and Firefox. I think it started around the time the QuickShare feature was implemented -- although that may just be coincidental.
That table says 2.5% in the U.S. don't have flash. Those are the ones that are left behind.
I think this is missing the point a bit. Having flash is a requisite, but even with it installed, if the system can't handle it, the user will simply click away to somewhere else. My point was that leaving XP users behind hurts my sales and in the end hurts SM too.
I think this is missing the point a bit. Having flash is a requisite, but even with it installed, if the system can't handle it, the user will simply click away to somewhere else. My point was that leaving XP users behind hurts my sales and in the end hurts SM too.
Samir, XP is more than a decade old. In your mind, when should a business like SM leave XP behind and move their development ahead quicker on the newer versions?
Ask Smugmug how common this complaint is. I suspect if they thought it was a regular thing, they'd do something about it. I've never heard the issue from any of my viewers or seen the issue myself so it's hard for me to say it's a common occurrence. That's why my first guess is that there's something in your configuration that antagonizes the issue rather than the other way around. It still could be all Smugmug's fault, but without hearing others complaining about the issue, that isn't the first place one would normally look.
I agree with your logic, but most people don't complain to the webmaster of a site, they simply close it and go on with their day. I mean, how often do you refresh when you hit a "site not found" type dns error? Or do you just assume the site's gone and move on?
And I've tested with such a gamut of systems and even Internet connections that there's no way it's all of these pieces of equipment. It could be a regional ISP issue across every provider in the area, but that's also a little far fetched.
I don't think SM thinks they're leaving lots of viewers behind. I wouldn't exactly say SM is a careful adopter of new technology. They were early with ajax support, early with Amazon S3, early with an important site dependency on flash, early with openID support, are going early on HTML5, etc... Sometimes early is good. Sometimes it makes thing adventurous.
I know they don't. But they'll be leaving a lot of mine behind if they push hardware and software upgrades as the only way to view galleries quickly. No one is going to install a new browser that's a hair more recent to use a shopping cart unless they really, really want something (as just an example--I dunno if this is a real issue). And as you know, photo purchases are impulse and emotionally driven a good number of times. Get them out of the purchasing 'mood' with a technical issue and you've lost the sale.
SM was one of the last to get on the flash video bandwagon as well as a couple of other things that I can't recall right now. But you're right, they've also jumped the gun on a bunch of stuff too in recent times. So I guess there's no real pattern anymore.
Designing different versions of the site for different levels of computers is a very expensive proposition to design, code, test, support and maintain going forward.
I don't think it's as difficult as you are saying for an existing site that upgrades. Yes, it's terribly hard from scratch, but here there's already code that worked on say, IE6. If you detect IE6, run that code, no warranty. Whatever features don't work with that code version, remove them and don't try to make them work. What you see is what you get if you run something older and we don't support it. Youtube is doing that for when it detects out of date browsers, but you can still watch a video if it works. This way, people don't just get frustrated and leave.
Samir, XP is more than a decade old. In your mind, when should a business like SM leave XP behind and move their development ahead quicker on the newer versions?
I'm not saying anything about development. Just keep what works working if possible.
Here's a snapshot of my site visitors' user agents right now:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ve
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Me
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR
Still 50% of users on XP, and I'm not even on the list. As a business decision, when should I abandon these users or tell them they have to upgrade in order to look at and purchase photos?
I'm not saying anything about development. Just keep what works working if possible.
Here's a snapshot of my site visitors' user agents right now:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ve
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Me
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR
Still 50% of users on XP, and I'm not even on the list. As a business decision, when should I abandon these users or tell them they have to upgrade in order to look at and purchase photos?
That data doesn't tell me anything about how many of your users are on XP. If 50% of your users are on XP, that's highly unusual. Supporting old versions of stuff costs a lot of time and money and impedes development. You have to at least acknowledge that it is not free and slows down development of new stuff. Smugmug is still supporting XP.
That data doesn't tell me anything about how many of your users are on XP. If 50% of your users are on XP, that's highly unusual. Supporting old versions of stuff costs a lot of time and money and impedes development. You have to at least acknowledge that it is not free and slows down development of new stuff. Smugmug is still supporting XP.
Why do you find people using XP unusual? I still run into it regularly on other people's computers. In fact, I see XP more than I see Vista/Win7.
I agree that supporting old version does take time and resources, but just turning off what no longer works and keeping the rest running isn't as difficult. It's not that hard to remove items from the javascript menu that won't work on a particular version of a browser. I'm not saying to do any more than that.
Which question did I not address? I thought I addressed the development one.
Why do you find people using XP unusual? I still run into it regularly on other people's computers. In fact, I see XP more than I see Vista/Win7.
I agree that supporting old version does take time and resources, but just turning off what no longer works and keeping the rest running isn't as difficult. It's not that hard to remove items from the javascript menu that won't work on a particular version of a browser. I'm not saying to do any more than that.
Which question did I not address? I thought I addressed the development one.
This question is unanswered: "In your mind, when should a business like SM leave XP behind and move their development ahead quicker on the newer versions?"
I think SM is doing exactly what you asked for. They still officially support XP. They still officially support IE6 for basic viewing operations, but not for all site management options.
If you're a power user who wants the best performance, you probably aren't going to find that on a decade old OS that none of the developers run natively. Probably the only people who run XP at SM are people who have to specifically test and support XP (at least that's how it was in my development orgs for old versions of OSes).
Is there a specific feature that doesn't work on XP?
This question is unanswered: "In your mind, when should a business like SM leave XP behind and move their development ahead quicker on the newer versions?"
If implemented correctly, they'll never have to. Like I said, simply removing the features that no longer work shouldn't be a big development headache.
I think SM is doing exactly what you asked for. They still officially support XP. They still officially support IE6 for basic viewing operations, but not for all site management options.
And this is fine, except that it's still too slow for the more basic configurations of XP. If you're only going to support the upper end of a platform, is that really considered supporting the platform?
If you're a power user who wants the best performance, you probably aren't going to find that on a decade old OS that none of the developers run natively. Probably the only people who run XP at SM are people who have to specifically test and support XP (at least that's how it was in my development orgs for old versions of OSes).
Is there a specific feature that doesn't work on XP?
I'm a power user that has no ^&%^& money. My brother had a couple of thousand dollars to plunk down on a new power system, I have no such cash. Instead, I'm lucky to have hand-me-downs from people that are upgrading or hotel property management systems that go out of service. The only reason I have this Athlon system is because it was supposed to be a server in a business I had, but we got out of the business before it was put in operation. The 3gb of ram was added because it was recommended and I found a killer deal on it in CDW closeout. I've used win7. It didn't impress me. I've used OS X, and no one can still tell me the keyboard shortcut to move from one tab to another in Safari without the mouse. The one system I had that XP flew on had a northbridge fan fail and subsequently burn up.
And what gets me about all this, is that all these "pieces of obsolete junk" are good for over 90% of the Internet work I do on a regular basis. Yes, flash can be a bit slow at times, which is related to CPU/video power. Yes, app switching can be a bit slow if the system is fully loaded, which is related to ram. But it's rare, very rare, that web sites take too long or pause long enough for me to really notice. A few do it, no doubt, and they have heavy client-side scripting for ads and such. But should SM have this much scripting? You yourself pointed out an inefficiency in the way galleries load thumbnails. Don't you think these should be fixed instead of just saying "buy a faster computer"?
If implemented correctly, they'll never have to. Like I said, simply removing the features that no longer work shouldn't be a big development headache.
Samir, this is simply not true. Continuing to support a platform means continuing to invest in it every time you develop something new and every time you test a new software release. Every combination costs a lot and takes time away from other things developers and testers could do. It's all a tradeoff space. There are no free lunches. Even the level of support you propose above (which you are not actually happy with btw) costs money/development time. Just testing a release on an old platform to decide whether it works well enough or not and then deciding what to do with the features that don't work is even more work. What you are proposing is actually quite a mess if it's actually done thoroughly. Now you have N permutations of how your software behaves that expose different features depending upon the platform. That's not simple to code, test, document or support.
It sounds to me like perhaps we really have the bottom line now. You have older systems, don't have money to buy more current systems and you wish Smugmug would make all of Smugmug work awesome on your older systems. So far, they have not done that.
I can understand where your head's at with this. Adobe has forced me to upgrade my main desktop computer a couple times when it was a perfectly fine computer for everything else I did except the newest version of Photoshop or Lightroom. My choices at that point were: 1) Buy a faster system, 2) Live with the speed of my current system or 3) Convince Adobe to make it run faster on my older system. I figured there was no chance of 3) so I chose 2) for awhile and eventually mustered the resources for 1). I think you face roughly the same choices. You can pound away on 3) if you want and see if Smugmug will budge. If I were them, I wouldn't invest on improving the site management experience specifically on XP, but I don't have any say in that decision - you'll have to convince Smugmug (not me).
It sounds to me like perhaps we really have the bottom line now. You have older systems, don't have money to buy more current systems and you wish Smugmug would make all of Smugmug work awesome on your older systems. So far, they have not done that.
Actually, I only wish SM would work like all the other sites on the Internet. I don't expect miracles. I don't see any reason that www.6speedonline.com or www.youtube.com load quicker than my galleries across every system, every platform, and every Internet connection. And I've accepted the fact that I'm too little for them to care about me in this case.
But what bothers me is that a good percentage of over 10,000 of my monthly site visitors are still on XP. This is of concern. If I think it's frustratingly slow, and I pay for it and have to use it, what will keep the visitors around?
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Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.2.6) Gecko/20100625 Firefox/3.6.6 (.NET CLR 3
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1; SV1; .NET CLR 1.1.4322; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_NT#Releases
Look at how many users are running XP. And I took myself out of this listing.
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I don't think SM thinks they're leaving lots of viewers behind. They are leaving some behind (for example, my mom's mac laptop doesn't even have flash on it so she can't see my home screen slideshow). I wouldn't exactly say SM is a careful adopter of new technology. They were early with ajax support, early with Amazon S3, early with an important site dependency on flash, early with openID support, are going early on HTML5, etc... Sometimes early is good. Sometimes it makes thing adventurous.
Designing different versions of the site for different levels of computers is a very expensive proposition to design, code, test, support and maintain going forward. There are times to do it and there are times when that extra development burden means that feature development for the lion's share of your user base slows down a lot.
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Very few. http://www.adobe.com/products/player_census/flashplayer/version_penetration.html
She's got a Mac that won't support flash?
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I'd be interested to know if there's an update on this issue? I've been experiencing the same symptoms (except sometimes refreshing even multiple times still won't re-activate the cookie, and I have to actually log out then back in). I'm seeing this with IE7, Chrome, and Firefox. I think it started around the time the QuickShare feature was implemented -- although that may just be coincidental.
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And I've tested with such a gamut of systems and even Internet connections that there's no way it's all of these pieces of equipment. It could be a regional ISP issue across every provider in the area, but that's also a little far fetched.
I know they don't. But they'll be leaving a lot of mine behind if they push hardware and software upgrades as the only way to view galleries quickly. No one is going to install a new browser that's a hair more recent to use a shopping cart unless they really, really want something (as just an example--I dunno if this is a real issue). And as you know, photo purchases are impulse and emotionally driven a good number of times. Get them out of the purchasing 'mood' with a technical issue and you've lost the sale.
SM was one of the last to get on the flash video bandwagon as well as a couple of other things that I can't recall right now. But you're right, they've also jumped the gun on a bunch of stuff too in recent times. So I guess there's no real pattern anymore.
I don't think it's as difficult as you are saying for an existing site that upgrades. Yes, it's terribly hard from scratch, but here there's already code that worked on say, IE6. If you detect IE6, run that code, no warranty. Whatever features don't work with that code version, remove them and don't try to make them work. What you see is what you get if you run something older and we don't support it. Youtube is doing that for when it detects out of date browsers, but you can still watch a video if it works. This way, people don't just get frustrated and leave.
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Here's a snapshot of my site visitors' user agents right now:
Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_5_8; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ve
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; Me
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.6) Gecko/2009011913 Firefox/3.0.6
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 5.1; Trident/4.0)
Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.0; Trident/4.0; SLCC1; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR
Still 50% of users on XP, and I'm not even on the list. As a business decision, when should I abandon these users or tell them they have to upgrade in order to look at and purchase photos?
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And, you still didn't answer my question.
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Why do you find people using XP unusual?
I agree that supporting old version does take time and resources, but just turning off what no longer works and keeping the rest running isn't as difficult. It's not that hard to remove items from the javascript menu that won't work on a particular version of a browser. I'm not saying to do any more than that.
Which question did I not address?
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I think SM is doing exactly what you asked for. They still officially support XP. They still officially support IE6 for basic viewing operations, but not for all site management options.
If you're a power user who wants the best performance, you probably aren't going to find that on a decade old OS that none of the developers run natively. Probably the only people who run XP at SM are people who have to specifically test and support XP (at least that's how it was in my development orgs for old versions of OSes).
Is there a specific feature that doesn't work on XP?
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And what gets me about all this, is that all these "pieces of obsolete junk" are good for over 90% of the Internet work I do on a regular basis. Yes, flash can be a bit slow at times, which is related to CPU/video power. Yes, app switching can be a bit slow if the system is fully loaded, which is related to ram. But it's rare, very rare, that web sites take too long or pause long enough for me to really notice. A few do it, no doubt, and they have heavy client-side scripting for ads and such. But should SM have this much scripting? You yourself pointed out an inefficiency in the way galleries load thumbnails. Don't you think these should be fixed instead of just saying "buy a faster computer"?
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It sounds to me like perhaps we really have the bottom line now. You have older systems, don't have money to buy more current systems and you wish Smugmug would make all of Smugmug work awesome on your older systems. So far, they have not done that.
I can understand where your head's at with this. Adobe has forced me to upgrade my main desktop computer a couple times when it was a perfectly fine computer for everything else I did except the newest version of Photoshop or Lightroom. My choices at that point were: 1) Buy a faster system, 2) Live with the speed of my current system or 3) Convince Adobe to make it run faster on my older system. I figured there was no chance of 3) so I chose 2) for awhile and eventually mustered the resources for 1). I think you face roughly the same choices. You can pound away on 3) if you want and see if Smugmug will budge. If I were them, I wouldn't invest on improving the site management experience specifically on XP, but I don't have any say in that decision - you'll have to convince Smugmug (not me).
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But what bothers me is that a good percentage of over 10,000 of my monthly site visitors are still on XP. This is of concern. If I think it's frustratingly slow, and I pay for it and have to use it, what will keep the visitors around?
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