Re:What’s new in Safari and WebKit
by Brajeshwar on Wednesday June 08, 2022 @12:05AM
(#31663063)
In 2015/2016, I led a 4-member engineering team to overhaul an upcoming eCommerce website for a pretty well-known brand in India. I think this was when an Indian unicorn, Flipkart, was going around town advertising their excellent Progressive Web App features for browsers (Chrome/Android).
We stole many ideas from that and implemented them for the client, including the notorious connection persistence when the Internet was patchy.
One of the biggest hurdles was convincing the CEO (for revenue) and CTO of the calculated risk of alienating a tiny fraction of users on iOS (iPhones) and pre-IE10s (I think). They will lose about 2% of the revenue from those if we go ahead with the plan and push those people away. Remember, 2% of a large number is still a significant number when seen independently and impacts their P&L.
I promised them that the increase in revenue would make up for that north of their expectation. It did. In fact, to my surprise, their revenue doubled in about 3-5 months of the new deployment.
I saw the internal email sent by the CEO to the whole company; it was all praises, big numbers, and such. The lesson was to look closely at the data and take big calculated bets. Based on usage, quite a lot of things happening in the Safari world was pretty insignificant.
By 2018/19, for another product decision, we were hoping that Safari will catch-up but didn't really.
Personally, I use Safari on all devices and would hate websites pushing notifications!
We stole many ideas from that and implemented them for the client, including the notorious connection persistence when the Internet was patchy.
One of the biggest hurdles was convincing the CEO (for revenue) and CTO of the calculated risk of alienating a tiny fraction of users on iOS (iPhones) and pre-IE10s (I think). They will lose about 2% of the revenue from those if we go ahead with the plan and push those people away. Remember, 2% of a large number is still a significant number when seen independently and impacts their P&L.
I promised them that the increase in revenue would make up for that north of their expectation. It did. In fact, to my surprise, their revenue doubled in about 3-5 months of the new deployment.
I saw the internal email sent by the CEO to the whole company; it was all praises, big numbers, and such. The lesson was to look closely at the data and take big calculated bets. Based on usage, quite a lot of things happening in the Safari world was pretty insignificant.
By 2018/19, for another product decision, we were hoping that Safari will catch-up but didn't really.
Personally, I use Safari on all devices and would hate websites pushing notifications!