Most expensive javascript ever

Re:Most expensive javascript ever by mbreese on Monday July 20, 2009 @11:28AM (#714528)

"cost them millions of NOK in lost sales"

So, yeah, I'd call that a big loss. According to the article, this was in an evaluation period with several different vendors. This one little piece of Javascript seems to have been enough to remove that company from the running. I don't know if Opera would have liked that company's offerings otherwise, but that would probably be enough to remove them from consideration.

I guess if you're trying to sell something to a browser maker, you might want to make sure that your admin interface works with their browser.

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by slig on Monday July 20, 2009 @11:48AM (#714565)

> This one little piece of Javascript

Not just that. The little piece just acknowledge the fact that the browser isn't supported, so removing it doesn't magically makes things work.

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by mahmud on Monday July 20, 2009 @11:58AM (#714582)

"Enterprise Software" deliberately insists on IE or another pet browser just because it can. Half the time they're not even doing anything browser specific.

Millions in lost sales should teach them to take standards seriously.

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by gaius on Monday July 20, 2009 @12:12PM (#714607)

Not true. When a customer calls with a problem, if they're using some hoky browser (no offence to the Opera folks, but even they have to admit they're a tiny niche), then that's one more factor to eliminate before the problem can be understood.

I would be very surprised if the profit on that one sale would cover certifying the product and supporting it going forwards.

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by tokenadult on Monday July 20, 2009 @12:23PM (#714624)

I would be very surprised if the profit on that one sale would cover certifying the product and supporting it going forwards.

What technical reason would a server company have for NOT supporting a largely standards-compliant browser like Opera? Isn't the whole point of serving up content to the World Wide Web to be able to communicate with multiple devices all over the world?

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by mahmud on Monday July 20, 2009 @12:40PM (#714657)

Not to mention that IE, the corporate standard, had to masquarade as "Mozilla compatible" just to get its foot through the door. Spyglass was actually a decent piece of software.

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by gaius on Monday July 20, 2009 @12:38PM (#714654)

Well, for a start, it would mean rolling out Opera to every developer, tester and support rep's desktop, and it being someone's job to make sure it worked on every PC they had, to keep it up to date and apply any patches. It also means doing any manual QA cycles again with Opera, and/or rewriting automated tests to use it too. All of those things have cash costs associated with them.

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by tokenadult on Monday July 20, 2009 @01:25PM (#714734)

Is it impossible to write a Web application that simply doesn't test the limits of most browser implementations? Again, I'm asking an informational question to follow up on your interesting response. What actually happens in the typical case of a server vendor's application that is supposed to run on an arbitrary browser if a browser the vendor hasn't considered is used? Does the whole application crash? Or does it just look a little bit less pretty?

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by akeefer on Monday July 20, 2009 @02:40PM (#714871)

It could be practically anything; sometimes it's a little less pretty, sometimes it's a lot less pretty, sometimes a few little parts of the UI don't work as intended (maybe changing field X doesn't update field Y like it should, maybe button Z doesn't do what it should when you click it), and sometimes it just starts throwing exceptions like crazy and completely blows up. CSS is kind of sort of standardized, so you sort of have some hope there that all standards compliant browsers (not that any of them really are 100% compliant) will render the page about the same way, but once you get into Javascript land the myth of standardization quickly disappears, and multi-browser support becomes a never-ending nightmare.

Unfortunately, you don't know which of those end results you're going to get until you actually try the thing out, and the answer could be wildly different on different pages of your app.

It's still generally poor form to straight up disable a particular browser unless you know for a fact that it doesn't work properly (generally in the sense of you-can't-use-the-site, not things-look-kind-of-funny), but perhaps in this case they did in fact know that their app didn't work with Opera.

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by ErrantX on Monday July 20, 2009 @06:19PM (#715355)

> Millions in lost sales should teach them to take standards seriously.

Your assuming that value amounts to a large portion of their revenue.

I'd venture it doesn't, and they wont be too worried.

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Re:Most expensive javascript ever by eds on Monday July 20, 2009 @02:49PM (#714896)

So as little as $300,000? Unless the amount was much greater, I'm betting there've been far more expensive Javascript mistakes.

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