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Are websites software?
The other day I had to optimize a website so it would work flawlessly in older browsers such as IE5.x (Win & Mac). Needless to say this is not the most creative task out there and one can get really frustrated really soon. When hitting a wall it’s sometimes best to just take a break from the task at hand so when you come back you can approach it in different and perhaps more successful way. That’s exactly what I did.
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The other day I had to optimize a website so it would work flawlessly in older browsers such as IE5.x (Win & Mac). Needless to say this is not the most creative task out there and one can get really frustrated really soon. When hitting a wall it’s sometimes best to just take a break from the task at hand so when you come back you can approach it in different and perhaps more successful way. That’s exactly what I did.
While taking this break it got me thinking: why do we keep spending lots of time and resources to support older browsers? While some might have the audacity to just say no, most of us still have to develop backward compatible layouts. Why spend extra time that eventually translates into extra costs either for the developer or for the client? I know very well that graceful degradation is a must and I always do my best in making sure I respect this rule, but I’m not talking about it here. I’m talking about fixing layout bugs that apart from ruining the looks of the website, have no major effect on the website’s usability and accessibility.
Let’s think about software for a minute.
Your favorite graphic editor just came in a new version but your old beat-up computer can’t meet the requirements. Your son wants to play the newest and coolest racing game out there but you have nowhere near enough memory on your computer’s video card. And the examples could go on and on. So what do you do? Generally, you’ll be making a visit to your favorite computer hardware store pretty soon and buy some upgrades for your machine. All this effort and all that money just to be able to use some piece of software.
Browsers, on the other hand, are mostly free. Downloading and installing them only takes a couple of minutes and you don’t even have to be to world’s most internet-savvy person to do it. Yet, lots of people will simply not make this effort.
So, in doing this comparison, websites stand to loose big time. You’re willing to spend money and time to upgrade your computer’s hardware, but you’re not willing to spend 5 minutes to upgrade your browser so you can properly enjoy the website you wanted to visit. This is mostly due to the nature of the internet. There are millions of other choices at a single click distance. The user will not think for a second that it might be worth the effort, be it a meagerly 5 minutes task.
So, either we want to admit it or not, it’s a cruel world out there. We create a drop of water that’s lost in a sea of others and want to make it so that everyone will enjoy it and ignore the other possibilities. And in order to achieve that, yes, we still must support older browsers.
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I keep on wondering why people even still use Internet explorer. I wish that microsoft would just get rit of it or make it compliant to the W3C Standards so if you are making a website that has Cascading Style Sheets and image rollovers Internet Explorer won’t quit on you when you open up the website or preview what you made in that browser. It’s a challenge already trying to make your website compatible with every other browser but unfortunately most people use explorer. I think that it’s one of the worst things microsoft came up with next to the undaunting frontpage wysiwyg editor. I mean you really can’t create much of anything in there but when you do you at least know that it’s compatible with internet explorer because, frontpage isn’t compliable with w3c also (go figure).
I also just found out that there are still people who use 15 inch monitors. I would recommend that these people upgrade to 17″ monitor so that they can have they resolution that they need to see things on the web with. I think that more people should have a better understanding when buying a computer or just general information about computers because computers will never be obsolete. I keep on saying that before too long the only thing that people are going to use paper for is to print things on. The digital revolution is here to stay.
Dan wrote, I also just found out that there are still people who use 15 inch monitors. I would recommend that these people upgrade to 17″ monitor so that they can have they resolution that they need to see things on the web with. I think that more people should have a better understanding when buying a computer or just general information about computers because computers will never be obsolete.
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Unfortunately I don’t think the regular users of the world will pay more for a big monitor when many times they are working not just with the web but with Word documents, crappy thank-you cards in MS Publisher and other low-level uses. Most people just don’t know and aren’t interested in unlocking a computer’s potential. Upgrading is the same way, at work I can’t use some of Acrobat’s newer tools because our PC users at work use Acrobat Reader 3 and so we build PDFs for the lowest common denominator.
Also, about computers being obsolete: the accessing of information and creation of documents may be here to stay, but perhaps not in the form of the “computer” as an instrument that sits in our home or office. Even in the ’90s some people (Larry Ellison comes to mind) scoffed at the idea of a box you have to go home to and turn on in order to have computing power. Perhaps in 100 years we will have minicomputers implanted in ourselves or our clothes (maybe our glasses or contacts?) and our computing power will travel with us. Remember, you heard it here first!
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