Eli, On 15-Aug-08, at 10:16 AM, Eli Cochran wrote: > I can't speak for the Fluid project, but if Fluid's clients stopped > supporting IE6, I'd be lobbying for dropping support in a heart beat. > > <sandbox> > This moment reminds me of the moment about 6 years back when the > vast number of web sites decided to drop support for Netscape 4 and > IE5, even when there were still a fair number of people using those > browsers. We (developers, managers, marketeers, decision-makers) > individually decided that dropping support was the best thing for > the web ecosystem as a whole even if it alienated and annoyed a > minority of browser users who hadn't or didn't want to upgrade. > Dropping support meant that we could increase our productivity and > deliver better designs and user experiences, while (not so subtly) > encouraging the last stragglers to upgrade their browsers. The last > time this happened it was controversial, and it took time. But > ultimately it only took a few big players saying that they no longer > supported those browsers for others to start piling on. And we're > beginning to see a few of big players stop supporting IE6. The > stakes are high, but the gain in productivity is huge. I think that > the time has come. > </sandbox>
I certainly sympathize with your opinion, though I do think that interoperability is a huge goal of any open source community. As of July 2008, IE6 still represents 26% of the market. That's more than Firefox! It might not be prudent to alienate a quarter of the market at this stage in the game. In many cases, we may choose to put more pressure on a particular subset of modern browsers, allowing some IE6-related bugs to remain if they don't render our code unusable. Eventually, we'll want to let it go completely. So, here's an idea for a more positive way to influence browser support: graceful degradation. It will let us more aggressively deprecate older, annoying browsers like IE6 without completely excluding their users. Uploader is a prime example of the potential for this approach. Let's put some energy there, instead of sweating the pain of supporting sucky Microsoft technology. If you want a fairly cynical but very interesting picture of the current state of browser support, check out Alex Russell's recent blog posting on the subject: http://alex.dojotoolkit.org/2008/08/a-little-perspective/ My two cents, Colin --- Colin Clark Technical Lead, Fluid Project Adaptive Technology Resource Centre, University of Toronto http://fluidproject.org _______________________________________________ fluid-work mailing list [email protected] http://fluidproject.org/mailman/listinfo/fluid-work
