For years the web design community has been forced to deal with incompatible web browsers that fail to meet the standards set out by the w3c, resulting in a huge portion of the web design process being devoted to "cross browser compatability" testing.
It's funny to note that I used to HATE Netscape (back in the NS4 days) and love IE, for its rendering. This has changed. Firstly because I now have my mac and as such have developed a disdain of all things microsoft. Secondly, firefox and webkit both do a much better job of implementing standards.
I know my XHTML and CSS really well, so my tried and true test of browser compatability has always been.. can I code a page for this browser and expect it to render correctly. I can only really answer yes to this question for FireFox and Safari (probably Opera.. but I don't really check), but IE is in a league of it's own (I will say, IE7 is a vast improvement - still a league of its own.. but improved)
So what's the solution to this problem we all face? Easy. No brainer. Get rid of IE6 and upgrade it to its slightly more effective cousin IE7.
In an ideal world we would all put a simple browser detection on our site and deposit all IE<7 users to an upgrade page. However we would likely lose traffic, offend people etc.
SO: what i'm proposing is a joint effort to upgrade the IE6 users out there.. unobtrusively.. and inoffensively. I know, WaSP have their Browser Upgrade Campaign pages, but for those of us who don't have a black, yellow and white website, redirecting a potential customer to the BUC page is tantamount to throwing away traffic. We need a more subtle, simple way to notify people that we want them to change browsers OR indeed that we are only targetting ONE browser. With the advent of web applications, it is becoming increasingly feasible to develop a web app that ONLY works in Firefox.
So the idea for update-your-browser.com is born. It's a service that will provide a small includable HTML snippet that will display a nice, unbranded, browser upgrade bar at the top of your page, the idea being simply that users who are unobtrusively notified of their browser innefficiency might very well click to upgrade. The service provides a simple page that allows you (the web designer / developer) to generate a small block of conditional HTML to place just before your
Obviously this is not a new idea, however I don't really think that the idea has been implemented effectively in the past. It needs to be:
I hear some people laughing at the idea that this is ever going to be used on websites other than personal blogs etc. However THIS is exactly what needs to happen. It's a well established fact that client education is the key to change in the web design industry. Clients need to be educated that providing a web site in IE6 is actually detrimental to the possible future of that web site.
For the web designer / developer out there, if there was consistency across browsers, it would allow us to push the boundaries and utilise technology to further enhance the user experience and further develop the direction of the internet as a whole.
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Subscribe to Site Feed | Get Email UpdatesPosted June 15, 2008 10 comments..
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Update your browser is a community initiative to encourage the users of the out dated Internet Explorer 6 to upgrade ... See pictures + details
I can tell you right now that the "pirate copy of windows" argument is a complete fallacy. Not only is it not true that you couldn't install IE7 on a non validated copy of Windows XP.. microsoft have deliberately lifted the restrictions they had in place: http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2007/10/04/internet-explorer-7-update.aspx
As for websites working across all browsers, so do mine. Until now.
Now I don't really care if they do, i'm not saying they wont work, just that I'm going to be encouraging people to upgrade.
AMEN! Internet Explorer 6 is the bane of my existence, I'll be supporting Update Your Browser. Let me know if I can be of any service. :)
I like this! IE6 is barely on the radar for any sites I've been developing, but, this will be very very useful once IE8 hits the market. I'll be keeping this in mind.
I've been working on large public website and IE6 was still the leading browser used at 65% !!
Unfortunately our role is to make website works not make people change their habits :)
The bad news is that even Firefox 3 breaks some layouts that used to work in Firefox 2 :(
@Ahmet: Who says your role isn't to make people change their habits?
As the professional in the field you should constantly be trying to educate your client, and the audience. In this case, IE6 is limitting the bounds of possibility for the client AND the consumer as well as your freedom to design.
But further to that, like i said before.. i think that EVEN if your site works in IE6 it is still the responsible thing to do to inform the (obviously quais-ignorant) user that he/she can easily upgrade to a better, standards compliant (or closer to it) browser for free.
Regarding FF3.. I've not had any problems at all with any of my layouts (that i've noticed anyhow..).
I think its a bit rich putting something like this on a clients site, but for your own websites, personal blogs, portfolios, industry related websites i think its a great idea. can't wait to see it in action!
i hate ie6 alot, but generally these days i don't get alot of ie6 inconsistencies as my code is getting better i guess. still hate the png fix crap i have to do though.
for myself ff3 is indeed buggy and has broken a small part of my personal freelance site www.michaelcoyle.com.au . I also can't watch streaming video or audio in it for some reason, it loads but won't play. have to use ie7 for that. but they've fixed up the memory leak issue from ff2 that used to bring it up to 500mb memory usage after a few hours.
@mooty: I suppose so. Although if a client is educated about the pros and cons of this kind of thing, then i see no reason not to implement it on a client site as well. I will be trying in the next couple of week to convince a couple of my clients that it's a good idea.
The thing about this is it won't use JS or anything obtrusive, just the notification bar at the top of the screen.. so it will be extremely un-obtrusive.
Now i just need time to throw together the app front end so people can generate the codes them selves... sigh.
Alex,
What about squeezing out ie8 users?
I am talking about, when you only have one ie8 user, you tell them to take a runing jump.
They upgrade, or come back using firefox.
You will always then only have one ie8 user.
Would you join such a scheme to stop serving ie8?
Right now is the only time we can pre-emptively block the adoption of an IE browser and cause people to move to another browser.
@Craig: ehhehe. really interesting idea.. in principle i like the idea.. i just don't think it's feasible.
Like a few people have mentioned, it's not really possible to implement really hardline schemes with actually production websites for paying clients, which is why the update-your-browser idea is a totally unobtrusive solution. Other people have had the same idea, however most of them implement it using a javascript that pops up a message or displays some alternate content. The idea behind update-your-browser is JUST to display a helpful toolbar at the top of the page that gives the user the option to update their browser. It's a passive solution.
So yeah.. while i'd love to get on board a more hardline scheme to prevent people from adopting ie8, it would be something separate that i would probably refrain from implementing with client web sites.. etc..
The issue is that a lot of people using IE6 are running pirate copies of Windows. The upgrade to IE7 requires a genuine Windows product. So this has prevented lots of people from upgrading to IE7. I don't know what your difficulty is with programming for IE6; my websites work the same on all browsers.