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.
--
j.mp/ArunGanesh