Do you block or support IE6?

Saturday, May 16th, 2009

With the recent launch of Internet Explorer 8 and recent campaigns to block IE6, kill IE6 and end IE6 (this one is even by a .Net magazine), and pleas by countless bloggers (like this one here by me) have people finally relented and either installed a new browser or started supporting IE7 in their corporate environment?

Well…there was 1.6% drop of market share in April 2009 from 17.0% to 15.4%, but unfortunately 15.4% of users is still a significant percentage (see all stats here).

So this begs the question. Web developers – are you helping bring about the demise of IE6? Are you allowed to at your business / corporate environment?  My answer is yes and no. I don’t support it here, I use the pop-up, and I don’t support it on our spoken whirred blog. But I do degrade using hacks for IE6 on Spoke’s main site.  Love to hear your comments about this as well.

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Cufon – An Alternative to SIFR?

Monday, May 11th, 2009

Cufon looks promising:

Cufón aims to become a worthy alternative to sIFR, which despite its merits still remains painfully tricky to set up and use. To achieve this ambitious goal the following requirements were set:

No plug-ins required – it can only use features natively supported by the client
Compatibility – it has to work on every major browser on the market
Ease of use – no or near-zero configuration needed for standard use cases
Speed – it has to be fast, even for sufficiently large amounts of text
And now, after nearly a year of planning and research we believe that these requirements have been met.

I like these ideas and I’m going to test it out on a site soon. I’ll probably do so here, before I attempt this on Spoke’s site (which is comprised of SIFR).

The two things I like about Cufon (and SIFR for that matter):

• The ability to use fonts regardless of them being installed on the web machine (less images)
• Easily degrade to specified fonts (instead of your site not working on a mobile client like an iphone).

One thing that has bothered me throughout the examples of Cufon is double-clicking on a paragraph of text doesn’t just highlight the text, it highlights the text near it as well.  Like this picture I snapped of highlighted text, it messes up just a bit. Something to work on, but if it degrades gracefully and works without flash installed, this would be an annoyance and nothing more. It looks promising.

Dear Corporate America,

Wednesday, November 19th, 2008

Please stop using Internet Explorer 6.  It came out in 2001, is riddled with bugs and forces developers that want to use cool tools like MooTools write CSS and HTML hacks that make me cringe.

I understand you are fearful of change.  I get it.  Don’t upgrade to Office 2007.  Doesn’t bother me at all. Don’t upgrade to Vista.  Heck that OS compelled me to switch to a Mac. I also understand that your IT support staff is not prepared for the onslaught of calls due to the ribbon replacing menus in Office 07.

But the whole goal of Internet Explorer 7 was to be more secure (i.e. less for you to worry about).  Especially now that it’s been out for 2 years.  Also, it’s a browser, so it won’t crash your network or cause a flood of calls to your IT support center.

In conclusion, this is my plea to you corporate America, to do what’s best for web developers everywhere and upgrade to IE7 already.  The world of tab pages and standards based CSS support awaits you.

Sincerely,

Brian Schwartz