Absolutely not. We have debated the "show notice to broken browsers"
thing multiple times--and the answer is always "it's annoying as hell
when sites do it and it's not our place to do so."
The stance on "supporting crappy old browsers" has largely over time
turned into--continue supporting all browsers with at least 1% of our
readers (roughly,I don't believe that number's ever been set in stone).
Once they are less than 1%, continue supporting unless it's a burden
to do so and/or makes support for newer browsers impossible. And lastly,
never purposefully break a browser if you can help it.
Chad, in a couple of years when this number does touch 1%, would there be a notification for users of such browsers beforehand? I expect there might be some sort of alert, so that the unsuspecting users are aware that the problem might be the browser and not the website. So you would still have something annoying, but seen by 1% rather than the 6% today.
My main point of contention is that the number of people using IE7 without an alternative option is minuscule and with some awareness, the current 6% number would touch 1% sooner than later, which is a good thing for both developers as well as users. On the other hand, the developers can continue to spend effort at backward compatibility for browsers that do not work as they should. And there will continue to be users of such browsers, because everything seems to work fine for them. Is it worth sustaining this cycle longer than it needs to be?
PS: I will admit, I am a newbie here and probably missed the most exciting IE7 threads :) I'd appreciate if you could link me to the archives off-list so I can read up everyone's arguments. My selfish interest in this is less time spent to check compatibility and more to try out new stuff.
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