Sylf's rants

Browser Wars is the wrong forcus

There once was a holy war between Netscape (Navigator) and Microsoft (Internet Explorer).  Opera was on the sideline, along with bunch of others.  Since then, Netscape has died, but other power house have come up.  The focus of the war has shifted this time.  The original war was fought on the basis of proprietary feature richness.  This time, it’s fought on JavaScript raw speed and Web Standard compatibility.  It is a great example of the competition creating very healthy environment for progress.

However.

There are significant number of users on the internet who are still using the ancient browser from Browser War I era, namely Internet Explorer 6.  I can’t discount the users of this blog—I checked out that IE6 can’t even display the text of this web site.  (I lol’ed)  Besides, there are less than 6% readers who use IE on this site—15% out of them being IE6.  Some of those are probably me checking this site.  But there are other sites I take care of, where there are much larger number of IE6 users.  And those are the sites that I can’t really push the use of more modern browser for various reasons.  In the business world, there are so many companies who are still hanging on to their good ol’ (ick) IE6 because of their legacy web apps compatibility.  The war needs to be fought on this front.

The tenacious survival of IE6 is making my life, and thousands upon thousands of web designers’ lives much harder than they need to be.  And here is my little push: I will not officially support IE6 (or any IE for now) on personal and semi personal sites I build.

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