> There are countless standards in place for the
> reproduction of content on the web, and these days most
> popular browsers are quite good at supporting those
> standards.
In many areas of the world, IE is the most popular browser by a huge margin. Even in America, IE still has a 40% market share[1]. That's a huge number of users which will not be able to use modern web standards.
> When it comes to a commercial product like Google
> Hangouts, allowing users to use unsupported third-party
> clients is a big risk. People will conflate the client
> and the service; problems with the client will damage
> the reputation of the service, and so on.
This position flies in the face of both experience and common sense.
Any serious commercial site is will support ancient, crufty, poorly-functioning browsers. Hell, if I want to order something from Amazon in w3m or lynx, I bet it would work. A customer with a terrible browser is still a customer, and maybe they are too busy managing their investment portfolio to be bothered upgrading their old Windows 95 desktop.
And nobody is going to sign up for Hangouts, miss the official client, and accidentally download Pidgin instead. If a person signs in with a third-party client, they know exactly what they're doing. They're not going to go post on the support forums saying "help, I can't find the videoconference button".
Requiring all users to install some proprietary application out of a desire for a "coherent experience" or to "preserve the service's reputation" is user-hostile behavior.
[1] http://clicky.com/marketshare/us/web-browsers/
This position flies in the face of both experience and common sense.Any serious commercial site is will support ancient, crufty, poorly-functioning browsers. Hell, if I want to order something from Amazon in w3m or lynx, I bet it would work. A customer with a terrible browser is still a customer, and maybe they are too busy managing their investment portfolio to be bothered upgrading their old Windows 95 desktop.
And nobody is going to sign up for Hangouts, miss the official client, and accidentally download Pidgin instead. If a person signs in with a third-party client, they know exactly what they're doing. They're not going to go post on the support forums saying "help, I can't find the videoconference button".
Requiring all users to install some proprietary application out of a desire for a "coherent experience" or to "preserve the service's reputation" is user-hostile behavior.