Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Internet Explorer 6 has been a hot topic again of late. At Multipack last week we had the inevitable discussion on just when people will give up on it. We estimated six to nine months. But then we estimated that 6 to 9 months ago…
So now Digg won’t support it for certain activities and Youtube are suggesting heavily you upgrade. Last time round it was 37 Signals and Mobile Me. Same arguments turn up again.
I pretty much agree with Chris Heilmann’s thoughts on the subject. Companies that are still using IE 6 aren’t going to care about Digg or Youtube or hip new work-on-the-web stuff blocking them. They block that stuff anyway.
That last 10% will be painful and slow to get upgraded. With MS wasting money on adverts or Nickelback based promos (warning sound that plays automatically), the elephant in the room is that the majority of that 10% still on IE 6 are there because corporations, governments and SMEs are locked into it and have little intention of upgrading. Be that by IT policy, bloody minded-ness, complex dependencies or shoddy dotcom era, activeX-riddled web software that just won’t work in anything else.
Back when it came out a friend predicted IE 6 would be the Netscape Navigator of its day. Seems he was right. It just refuses to disappear.
All this creates an interesting dynamic on the web. As other browsers move faster towards new and shiny HTML 5 worlds, we’ve got a 2nd class internet of corporately hamstrung web citizens. They can’t access the better tools, or they run slowly on archaic javascript engines, they lack efficient tabbed browsing and generally take longer to do the same tasks…
With more and more commerce web dependent in some way this’ll have more of an impact as time goes by. I’d love to see somebody do a corporate whitepaper analysing relative productivity of IE 6 vs IE8/Safari 4/Firefox 3.5/Opera 10. Sure it’ll only cost you .5 seconds more rendering that Javascript intensive booking system, but over 100,000 employees, 365 days a year, 10 bookings an hour?
That hints at the real danger for the IE 6 laggards. A great opportunity for younger, more agile companies to run rings around them. In the end that’ll be the threat that convinces them to upgrade… Eventually.
Posted in thoughts | 2 Comments on The Browser That Wouldn’t Die and the Two Tier Web
Sunday, January 13th, 2008
So, a new year, a chance to look forward to things to come and re-assess what’s gone before. With that in mind, a post about the future in several areas:
Yesterday’s Multipack meeting was good. The core members all turned out to discuss future developments. Attendance had been slightly off of late, understandable for any group a couple of years old, so we discussed a few options for re-invigorating things. Communication, we agreed, was the key thing. Mainly in promoting ourselves, our events and making sure new members turn up and old ones are aware of developments.
To this end I’m taking over as editor of the Newsletter, which had fallen by the wayside, and we all agreed is a useful tool for keeping folks interested and bringing them back. If you’re a Multipack member and are up to anything interesting, let me know by the Friday a week and a day before the monthly meeting (next meeting is 9th Feb , so deadline for next newsletter is Friday 1st Feb). We’re also moving forward on the website reboot begun last year and focusing meetings more by advertising a theme for discussion. Meetings are now definitely the 2nd Saturday of every month in the Old Joint Stock, Birmingham.
2008 looks like being an interesting year for web accessibility and web development in general. We’ve got the development of the Accessibility Interoperability Initiative, which promises amongst other things WAI ARIA support in Internet Explorer. This’ll hopefully help with making heavy Javascript web applications more accessible, for some at least. This, combined with the news from Microsoft that Internet Explorer 8 passes the ACID 2 test makes for some very interesting developments. Of course we’ll have to wait for it to be released, and people to adopt it…
On the Mozilla side, I’m currently using Firefox 3 Beta 2, which seems a lot more stable and less of a memory hog than version 2, and also passes ACID 2. Although that said it may just be that the lack of compatible extensions to slow things down keeps it fast… Similarly I’m using Safari 3 at home, which has a few nice improvements (support for Wordpress’ TinyMCE for a start), though it has crashed on me a few times and Wordpress appears to lose the linebreaks on posting.
Posted in thoughts | Add the first comment on Looking Forward to 2008 : Accessibility, Web Browsers and the Multipack
