IE6 drinks petrol for breakfast
Posted on November 20, 2008 at 5:11pm
I’ve seen quite a lot of IE6-bashing on Twitter today, including calls for web designer to boycott the browser completely, and as I was thinking about it during this morning’s shower, I came up with the following analogy.
Say Internet Explorer 6 is your standard petrol-run car, and Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc, are shiny new LPG-run cars. Most people would agree that a LPG car is better for the environment and more economical, but imagine if every fuelling station in the world suddenly decided that they were only going to supply gas — and were no longer going to supply petrol.
You’d get a standstill. Sure, a lot of people could probably upgrade their car and get along just fine, but what about all the others who don’t have the time, money or simply aren’t able to get a LPG-powered vehicle?
Briefly ducking out of the analogy, take Thailand, for example. The times that I’ve visited, I’ve been to many internet cafés where the PCs were struggling to run IE6 on a barebones Windows XP install, and those often at resolutions still as small as 800×600. Without a costly upgrade to their hardware, it’s quite likely that a browser change would result in their business going from barely usable to something akin to running a marathon on broken legs.
Don’t get me wrong, I really wish the case would be that everyone drives economically-friendly cars (…or uses properly standards-compliant browsers) as they got released, so that the entire industry could make massive leaps forwards — but realisitically, it’s just not gonna happen. Do bear in mind though, that the horse and cart is no longer the civilised world’s primary mode of transport — we’ll eventually get rid of IE6, it’s just unfortunately going to take a whole lot of patience.
A final word to those boycotters… No. Feel free to do so on your own sites and projects — in a rich and informed market (read, tech savvie), you can afford to serve only LPG — but when your clients’ customers roll up into town in their Robin Reliants, they’re going to get stuck. Yes, it’s a pain, but it’s something that we have to live with for the time being, as much as we hate to.
Title photo by tonylanciabeta
Categories: Web Design.
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Comments on IE6 drinks petrol for breakfast
Hehe, nice analogy there! It’s a daily grinding struggle:
“Let’s fuck IE6″,
“but no, we can’t – we’re good web designers!”,
“ahh so what, I’m sick of being a nice-guy accessible developer, I just wanna’ make things look cool!”,
“we can still make things look cool with progressive enhancement…”,
“screw that – I wanna’ throw up a site and go out for a pub lunch.”,
“well… that does sound tempting…”,
“ok then – so no IE6 stylesheet, no conditional comments, slap a load of transparent .pngs in there and let’s throw up some nice OBTRUSIVE javascript and then toddle off for a pint…”,
“No we have a duty to our users – the cold refreshing pint can wait. Let’s work overtime and ensure that all users can enjoy our work!”,
“Fine, I quit.”
Just a little extreme example scenario there.
So Rob, where do motorbikes fit in with the anology? :p
Posted by Nathan Beck (1 comments) on 20th November, 2008 at 6:01 pm.
Heh, yeah it’s a struggle alright. I, like 99% of web designers, would love nothing more than to see IE6 locked into a steel cage and dropped to the bottom of the sea, but with so many people still using it, I don’t see that it’s a realistic option just to say, “Fuck ‘em!”
Of course, it depends on your audience. I try to keep this site as IE6-friendly as I can (and I know there’s a few oversights I’ve not yet addressed), but in the end, that browser only accounts for a miniscule proportion of my visitors. For sites of less technology-oriented subjects, I’d expect many more visits from people with outdated sotware.
I don’t know motorbikes well ;-) Can you get ‘em gas-powered? I guess they’re just the same, but on a fibre-optic connection — they’re not subject to the same speed limits as the rest of us.
Posted by Rob Barrett (45 comments) on 20th November, 2008 at 10:57 pm.
Nice analogy, it’s a shame you can’t use an statement to put LPG in your old petrol car… I guess that’s the equivalent of an LPG conversion? Or is that when someone switched to Firefox, I’m confused.
Posted by Greg Findley (5 comments) on 23rd November, 2008 at 6:39 pm.
*an if statement
Posted by Greg Findley (5 comments) on 23rd November, 2008 at 6:40 pm.
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