You down with OCB?

[AbdulAlhazred]

IE6 usage is down to about 2% and that's counting enterprises (which isn't really a worry here) and IE7 usage is on steady decline (at around 10% now). That's the biggest browser hurdle. And it can be solved with Chrome Frame. Yeah, it's dirty and it's a plugin, but it works.

Dunno where you get your info, but I follow this fairly closely and the numbers I see peg IE6/7 combined at between 30 and 40% of all browsers, with IE6 in the 12-18% range. Granted it is presumed that a lot of the IE6 out there is corporate, but even so that puts home use of the 2 basically obsolete browsers at probably 25% of users. IE8 is coming along pretty fast now, but is still overall a lot less than half of all IE, and IE is around 59% market share according to the most reliable numbers.

As far as Chrome Frame goes, forget it. People that still haven't upgraded to IE8 probably don't know what a plugin is and wouldn't be able to install it if they did. If I've learned anything in 15 years of web dev it is that you simply cannot say "screw the people with old browsers" when dealing with sites intended for a large and fairly general audience.

Sure, there are always gonna be browser quirks, but there are JS libraries for making that easier, as well. There are also UI kits, maybe not as good as Silverlight's or Xcode, but good enough.

Yeah, I know all about them, trust me. First of all even when they work perfectly, which things like JQuery are pretty good about, there are vast differences in how IE renders things vs other browsers, and smaller but still significant differences between Safari, Chrome, and FireFox. All of these can be overcome, but that requires many man-hours of work that are not available for other things. UI development tools are a similar story, they exist but they are MUCH cruder than MSVS or XCode. Again this is a manpower issue, you can do whatever you want with them, but it will take 2-3 times longer.

They don't need to do an optimized version for phones or tablets, at least not from the start. Just as long as it works. And depending on the design -- on how flexible the layout is -- a tablet may not need a separate UI.

Using Silverlight is just short sighted and will probably bite them in the ass in the long run.

Well, sure, the existing OCB UI might not be totally unusable on a tablet, but it probably is a subpar experience at best. Obviously nobody can verify just how good or bad it would be at this point.

Here's the thing, for an HTML5/JS version of OCB to be worth the hefty extra chunk of resources required to develop vs SL AND the abandoning of as much as 20-25% of your desktop user base they would have captured basically the iPad market, at best. We'll assume an iPad friendly OCB would work OK on the desktop, that's plausible. They then have to weigh that extra gain vs the loss AND the extra work required, which effectively means less features and less quality. Then you also factor in that their dev team is already fully spun up on the MS technology. SL is a subset of .NET, so there are code reuse opportunities there, and just general familiarity with the tools and languages.

I agree, SL is in a lot of ways a stopgap, but given the HUGE impatience level of DDI subscribers to have stuff working YESTERDAY OR WE'LL UNSUBSCRIBE!!!!!!! it is quite understandable and there's a good business case for it.

Beyond that, if the client is designed correctly it should be possible to engineer the interaction between the front end and the back end so that 99% of the application logic is in the back end, so another team can come in and design the HTML based client pretty quickly and it is all pure UI. That would make adding new stuff or fixing bugs ALMOST all just back end work with maybe a few minor UI tweaks to get access to new options or whatever in a few cases.

Trust me on this, I'm not a big fan of SL. I'm sitting here on my trusty Linux box typing this and OCB is utterly hopeless to ever run even on my desktop. I have to fire up Virtualbox to even get to the thing and it is a PITA. For my personal use an HTML version would be way better. I just think it wasn't the most practical way for them to go at this time.

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

Or they could, you know, just write an offline version. Oh, but wait - then they wouldn't have their fans by the short and curlies, so it wouldn't be half as much fun, would it?

LOL, yeah, but that's a whole other discussion man. Personally I don't mind the OCB at all. I have the old CB already, and I can always get the 3rd party patches for that. There is at least a HOPE though that the OCB will eventually work on my system of choice, some day. There's really NO chance that the offline one would ever work on anything but Windoze, which I have not the slightest interest in paying bucks for. There are both selfish business reasons for WotC to go online and good practical ones in other words.

 

[Viking Bastard]

Dunno where you get your info, but I follow this fairly closely and the numbers I see peg IE6/7 combined at between 30 and 40% of all browsers, with IE6 in the 12-18% range. Granted it is presumed that a lot of the IE6 out there is corporate, but even so that puts home use of the 2 basically obsolete browsers at probably 25% of users. IE8 is coming along pretty fast now, but is still overall a lot less than half of all IE, and IE is around 59% market share according to the most reliable numbers.

I update my previous statement on IE6 to about 5%, I read it wrong.

StatCounter Global Stats - Browser, OS, Search Engine including Mobile Market Share is where I took those numbers, but most googlable sources seem to give similar stats. Microsoft has become really aggressive in the last couple of years to get people to update (IE6/7 makes them look really bad).

I looked at North American stats, since we don't really have to consider places like China.

But, y'know, fair enough. I'm sure WotC did extensive analysis on the whole thing and saw that Silverlight was cheapest and quickest. I still think they should've thought a bit farther ahead and HTML/JS is the better bet for the long term.

If they're moving D&D online, do it properly. Web users have gotten a lot more picky.

 

[Mapache]

I looked at North American stats, since we don't really have to consider places like China.

And if you do consider places like China, you realize you need to support mobile platforms; more people around the planet access the internet with their phone than with the desktop computer they don't have (though, admittedly, most of those people aren't going to be paying $7 a month for DDI).

 

[AbdulAlhazred]

I update my previous statement on IE6 to about 5%, I read it wrong.

StatCounter Global Stats - Browser, OS, Search Engine including Mobile Market Share is where I took those numbers, but most googlable sources seem to give similar stats. Microsoft has become really aggressive in the last couple of years to get people to update (IE6/7 makes them look really bad).

I looked at North American stats, since we don't really have to consider places like China.

But, y'know, fair enough. I'm sure WotC did extensive analysis on the whole thing and saw that Silverlight was cheapest and quickest. I still think they should've thought a bit farther ahead and HTML/JS is the better bet for the long term.

If they're moving D&D online, do it properly. Web users have gotten a lot more picky.

Internet Explorer share surges, Firefox wanes based on new CIA data

This is based on Net Applications' survey data, which is pretty much going to be the most accurate around, WAY more so than StatCounter, which for whatever reasons is pretty dubious.

They're pegging IE6 at 11.33%, IE7 at 8.06%, so we're right around 20% for both according to that. I've also seen higher numbers other places. The problem is different methodologies show VERY different numbers, nobody really knows overall, but individual sites vary a lot from the average as well, so for example WotC would be much better off using their own DDI numbers than anything else. We have no idea what those are, but you can see Ars Technica's numbers at the bottom of that article I linked, they're completely different (and have been for years, it is a tech savvy crowd they get). Point being there really aren't 'right' and 'wrong' general numbers, but any way you cut it IE6/7 are still not dead, though in the last 3 months they've faded a lot, thankfully.

The thing is, people may be more savvy/picky than before, but WotC gets no credit for things that aren't up and working. People are HIGHLY impatient about having stuff, and with SL they CAN deliver a quality product. It may not be ideal in every way, but the web really isn't a very ideal app delivery mechanism. They're doing the best they can I'm sure.

Frankly I think their real mistake was using .NET to begin with. That's just my opinion though, I never would have gone down the proprietary MS garden path from the very beginning.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

I think in this case, actual stats from WotC's servers would be more important than general usage trends. Your granny who is still using Win9x and IE6 is not really part of the target demographic.

I've done a little development for websites, though at a pretty amateur level, and it was basically my opinion to say "screw the people with old browsers" - but that's because I was a grouchy BAFH, neither a web developer nor interested in marketing, and resented getting "drafted" into that project. Heh.

 

[Lalato]

I work at a fairly large online retailer... and while we do have to worry about IE6, I don't see why WotC would have to. I would venture that gaming company sites tend to attract a crowd that is a little bit savvier with regard to the web than most. WotC's numbers probably reflect that.

Granted this is speculation on my part, but I'm willing to stand behind that. Once you see IE6/7 numbers get into the low single digits on a site, it's time to stop worrying about those visitors.

Just as an extra data point... last I checked on my company's site, we were still getting about 10% from IE6. But again, it's a common retail site. We get granny with her old Win 98 box and we also get geeks with the latest version of Chrome.

 

[drothgery]

I think in this case, actual stats from WotC's servers would be more important than general usage trends. Your granny who is still using Win9x and IE6 is not really part of the target demographic.

In North America, accouring to statcounter.com's numbers, WinXP + Vista + Win7 + Mac OSX = 97.5% of web users; another .7% is Linux. Pre-XP Windows (and Windows Server) is pretty much noise; virtually all IE6 users are running XP (since it won't run on anything newer without some trickery -- Vista comes with IE7, and Win7 with IE8).

On the other hand, a decent number of gamers have jobs and IE6-locked machines at work (and while your boss doesn't want you to fuss with your character @work, WotC is all for it). Having said that, especially after IE9 goes final (which should be very soon), I'd recommend dropping IE6 support if anyone asked me.

 

[Nemesis Destiny]

In North America, accouring to statcounter.com's numbers, WinXP + Vista + Win7 + Mac OSX = 97.5% of web users; another .7% is Linux. Pre-XP Windows (and Windows Server) is pretty much noise; virtually all IE6 users are running XP (since it won't run on anything newer without some trickery -- Vista comes with IE7, and Win7 with IE8).

On the other hand, a decent number of gamers have jobs and IE6-locked machines at work (and while your boss doesn't want you to fuss with your character @work, WotC is all for it). Having said that, especially after IE9 goes final (which should be very soon), I'd recommend dropping IE6 support if anyone asked me.

Fair enough; my point was not about the Win9x part and the reference was made to illustrate my point about obsolescence through hyperbole.

 

[Dannyalcatraz]

obsolescence through hyperbole

Sound like a perfect name for a Prog-rock band album.