Adrian, I did not mean my response to be foul mouthed, but we both got the same conclusion: if it is too much hassle let it go. We just got there through different routes. I did not mean to offend anyone with my response. I am fully aware of having to accommodate what I would term "legacy" systems, but unfortunately the web is not a case of lowest common denominator like some systems, but rather the most widely used systems, and IE5 on OS9/X is not it. If it is a case of "a few minutes and it will work on IE5", then I am all for people trying to support it. If it is a case that it takes 2 more weeks to push a feature, or design, then it really is a waste of time for all concerned when talking about the number we are talking about. Justin On 14 Nov 2005, at 22:52, Adrian Simmons wrote:
Justin Davies wrote:
In all honesty, I don't think you have to worry about old Macs. Well, maybe, maybe not. It really all depends on a particular site and what the audience uses. Macs are reliable, they often go on for years and years. There are plenty out there still in active use.
forcing people away from an old, non-standards based browser on a very old Mac is not going to loose too many users. I hate to be in the position of defending a Microsoft browser but lets set some records straight here.
IE5 mac is an entirely different product from IE5 on Windows. At the time IE5 mac was released it had *the* *most* *complete* web standards support of *any* available browser. Better than Mozilla, Opera, Konqueror, better than all of them.
90% of Mac users use Safari or a Mozilla variant, and those should be the people to concentrate on. 90% of *OS X* users. There are still plenty of people out there using OS 9. As a percentage of the web they may be small, but they are there. IE5 mac is remains the best browser available for OS 9. The last versions of Mozilla available on OS 9 were around Mozilla 1.3 IIRC, and at that point Mozilla was still bloated and buggy.
You have to bear in mind that IE users on the Mac are used to websites not working properly. Nonsense. I find most of them still work fairly well, its really only quite advanced CSS layouts that start to break.
Not because the designers do it wrong, but because the browser is sh*t. Not true. That's really over stepping the mark. IE5mac is a solid browser. So good that despite my antipathy to Microsoft it was my main browser on OS 9 for quite some time, and even on OS X when it first came out.
Yes it's a dead browser. Yes OS 9 is a dead OS. Yes it has some shortcomings in the CSS department. Yes it has other major flaws (can't control plugins with javascript for one). Both have been superseded by better things. But lets not reject IE5mac on the basis of opinionated foul-mouthed nonsense like this.
We're about building communities, and communities are diverse things.
There are workarounds if the problem is with CSS, eg: http:// www.premonition.co.uk/cssd/ie51-only.html
Javascript gets a bit trickier, but we try to make sure that degrades gracefully anyway.
It all boils down to this - IE5mac is decent browser used by people on an old OS, they make up a small and diminishing part of the webs population. If there is a simple and quick way of fixing problems with it then lets support it, and conversely if it's taking too much time to fix let it go. But at least make an informed decision instead of rejecting it out of hand.
-- adrinux (aka Adrian Simmons) <http://adrinux.perlucida.com> e-mail <mailto:adrinux@gmail.com> AOL/Yahoo IM: perlucida, Microsoft: adrian@perlucida.com