Screenshot of new Microsoft campaign.
In an almost bizarre twist, Microsoft itself has started a marketing drive to get people to leave their old browser where it should be: in the trash.
The “You wouldn’t drink 9 year old milk” tagline might not hold up under too much scrutiny (IE8 is by now several month old milk, at least) but we appreciate the sentiment. We also notice that they couldn’t help putting a dig in against Firefox, Safari and Chrome, but I guess that was to be expected. Komosion has long advocated to its clients that they should not use IE6, and in fact we had to issue a special note letting clients know that if they did use it after this month’s upgrade to Komodo CMS v6, then not all of the features and improvements that we had built in would be able to work properly. That’s not because of any omission on our part, but simply because IE6 is so old there are just things it cannot do.
Still, it does say something: when a software company is so embarrassed by people still using its most outdated offering that it actually campaigns against it.
May 17th, 2010 2:46 pm
Hi,
Valid point on IE6, but if visitors using this browser still account for a fifth of traffic is it not realistic to accommodate this? Your thoughts?
Additionally, if your usability/persona mapping picks up an ‘older’ demographic where an assumption can be made on IE6 utlisation – how would you prepare or mitgate this both from a front end and CMS perspective?
May 17th, 2010 3:21 pm
Fair enough points Ryan.
All Komosion’s websites are still coded to present perfectly to IE6. Our stats tell us that it is more like 10% of people using it, but that is still a statistically significant amount. And as we work with councils, government departments and the like, accessibility is a major factor that we do work hard to maintain.
When using Komodo CMS, however, we have now had to let people know that things like our In-Line editing will not function for that dinosaur of a browser, because the AJAX involved just can’t be handled by IE6. Or software is going to continue to develop and advance, and we cannot let the limitations of the oldest browser on the market limit the kind of features that we offer to our clients. Just like Google (as we mentioned a few blog posts down) we are going to get better, while that browser version will not.
So in answer to your concerns: Komosion website will still be as accessible to all audiences (and we make sure it is absolutely right for the target audience) no matter how much we improve the CMS behind it.