Mathias Schindler wrote:
On Thu, Mar 5, 2009 at 9:01 AM, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
Andrew Gray wrote:
However, I also think the web should not be hostage to IE6/IE7 forever. Some designers have declared war on IE6 for this reason:
There has been a debate about this recently at wikitech-l:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-February/041587.html
And I think I remember that there were proposals earlier to add at least a infobox on wikipedia sites with text like
"It looks like you are using an Microsoft Internet Explorer. You can get better results when you use a web browser instead, here are some suggestions [link-ff], [link-op], [link-chr]"
I would find such a notice insulting, and so would a lot of users with minimal net sophistication. Sure, there's a problem with off-the-shelf computer systems that come with IE prepackaged, but many of those users approach this problem with the phobia that changing browsers will cause a complete system crash.
I can understand how the nationalistic and marketing interests of Opera's home country would want to wage war on Internet Explorer, but that doesn't change the fact that some form of IE retains a plurality of users. I'm using Firefox myself (meaning that I would not receive the message), and have no technical arguments in support of IE, but we still need to distinguish between serving Microsoft and serving Microsoft's users. It's not for us to suggest that there is something inferior about someone who uses IE.
Ec