On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Sherool jamydlan@online.no wrote:
The argument is that the people who still use IE6 now are not likely to ever change on their own because "it still works".
That argument is evidently wrong, given the number of people still using IE5 and NN4 (i.e., basically none). Eventually people are going to be forced to upgrade to a new version of Windows because XP doesn't support the new-fangled something-or-other that everyone needs to have, and that means a new version of IE. It's not really possible to run ancient operating systems forever unless you're extremely fixed in your ways -- for instance, Windows 95 doesn't support USB. XP is still usable for the time being, but sooner or later almost everyone is going to need to upgrade to support new applications or hardware.
Regardless, it is not Wikimedia's business to tell people what operating systems or browsers to use. Telling people to switch browsers is self-indulgent laziness on the part of web developers who don't want to support IE6. MediaWiki is not going to nag people to change browsers, period.
I do believe that once IE6 (not to mention IE5) is dead and burried the web will be a better place, so IMHO we should not ask "what do we gain from this", but instead "do it for the betterment of humanity" (pompous enough for you ;P).
Wikimedia's goal is not to better humanity in some unspecified way. It's to disseminate free knowledge. Pestering users who probably can't fix the problem does nothing to advance that goal. If we're going to try moralizing our users, why don't we go ahead and nag our users to ditch IE entirely and switch to Firefox? IE7 is pretty bug-ridden too. Or hey, why not try getting them all to switch to Linux?
It's not our business.