On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 1:38 PM, Aryeh Gregor
<Simetrical+wikilist(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Sun, Nov 29, 2009 at 1:00 PM, Marco Schuster
<marco(a)harddisk.is-a-geek.org> wrote:
So what?
I'm not sure how to respond to this. Is our goal to make a
high-quality encyclopedia for everyone, or only for people who don't
use IE6? Do those people count less for some reason? Should we
ignore people who use text terminals or screen readers too, because
they're a (much smaller) minority who are (much more) annoying to
support?
Where it's better for our overall user base to not support IE6, then
we should do that. And we do, in plenty of ways. But that's clearly
not the case here. Transparent math images would provide zero benefit
to virtually all non-IE6 users, so there's no possible justification
for significantly degrading display for IE6 users. The cost-benefit
analysis is crystal-clear.
Sometimes this is necessary though. Many people
today still don't know that
IE6 is dangerous. Wikipedia should warn those users and tell them how to
upgrade.
If anyone has managed to successfully avoid upgrading to IE7 or 8
despite all of Microsoft's campaigning and attempts at auto-update,
then it's very likely that they know exactly what they're doing and
have made an informed decision to stick with IE6. We are in no
position to second-guess that.
In practice, rumor suggests that the large majority of IE6
installations are on corporate sites, where IT is unwilling to spend
the money testing and deploying a major change when things work well
enough already. IE7 breaks a lot of sites that were coded to work
only in IE6, particularly corporate intranet sites that ignored
compatibility because they knew everyone would only run IE6 (since IT
required it).
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The last point is key. Every so often (this list, elsewhere) I see
people suggesting
that IE6 support needs to be dropped, and users told to upgrade. The problem is
that the vast majority of people who are still on IE6 are in
situations where they
cannot upgrade--exactly the scenario Aryeh outlined. I know with my current
employer, financial services with approximately 31k employees, IE6 is still
considered the company browser standard. Working in local government before
that, the same situation applied. IE6 continues to have a market share, as much
as it sucks. And as long as we're trying to be accessible to as many people as
possible, we cannot ignore a 15% browsing audience.
Now, if people want to start plastering their sites with "Optimized
for Firefox and
Chrome" banners, lets break out the "Under Construction" pages too, since
we'll
be visiting websites reminiscent of the dot-com boom.
-Chad