Developing sites in the late 90s, it seemed that the basic platform for the web – browsers, the HTML standard, plugins – were constantly changing. Flash was beginning to come of age as a technology; designers were excited; users loved visiting sites just to ‘play’ with the novel navigation systems; our clients all decided that they needed Flash intros, splash pages, navigation.
But the problem, of course, was that it just didn’t work – at least not in enough users’ browsers. It was all very well for Microsoft and Netscape to be releasing new browsers, and for plugin developers like Adobe (not to mention those with other, less wieldy technologies like Java Applets) to continually roll out new versions every few months, but few real sites could rely on particular tools or versions. Sites built with Flash couldn’t be bookmarked. They weren’t accessible. And of course users encountering a site without the requisite plugin couldn’t be relied upon to know how to upgrade, even if we could convince them that they needed or indeed wanted to.
A ‘baseline’ seemed to have been established. The role for a developer was to work with the technologies that our users already had. We could monitor usage, and if a cool new feature was required and available to the majority of users, they key mantra was “graceful degradation”. What it meant, in practice was that users with Windows 98SE – with IE 5, and then Windows XP with IE 6 became the lowest common denominator – the fallback for us all. The best we could hope for was a gradual movement in the baseline – from IE4 to IE5, and so on. Flash was largely out of the question.
The sites push back: the YouTube effect
In 2005, a single website changed all of the rules. It turned out that while uers couldn’t be convinced to change their browser or install a plugin to access most services, nothing would be allowed to stand in the way of them accessing videos of a middle-aged man dancing or a baby lauging
YouTube relied on video features only present in Flash Player 9, and oversaw the growth of Flash support to a staggering 99% of users.
Business as usual for browsers
But in the world of browsers, even the re-emergence of the browser wars with new entrants (Apple, the Mozilla project, Google) didn’t seem to make an impact on getting the main bulk of users to upgrade. Joe Average, it seems, didn’t even know what a browser was
Google could wax lyrical about the coolness of HTML 5 and Google Wave, but the fact remained that two-thirds of users didn’t have a browser that supported it. We would have to wait for users to throw out their old computers.
The sites push back Part II
But then this past fortnight, it seems that a number of sites decided that sitting and waiting wasn’t going to cut it.
Digg got the ball rolling, suggesting that they may start by reducing the functionality (actually removing all interactive features) for IE6 users
Next were Facebook and YouTube, who didn’t so much postulate on developer blogs, as start prompting users to move.
So what does this mean? Can we as web developers now start being aggressive in ending support for IE6? Has the need for graceful degradation been removed?
I’d suggest that there are a couple of ‘take homes’ from all of this:
- If you’re running a site as big as YouTube, Facebook or Digg, you might be in the position to “push” your users to upgrade
- If you’re like me and that’s not the case, there’s hope that at some point in the not-too-distant future, your users might have a decent browser with proper CCS3 support… and perhaps some day, HTML5, but that’s another story altogether.
- If you deploy software into corporate or government environments, don’t hold your breath.
In the meantime, this is what I’m doing:
- I’m taking encouragement from the efforts of the large, social networking sites
- I’m doing my best to encourage the education, government, and corporate clients that we have to consider the cost of maintaining support for older browsers… and the value in other areas (particularly security) in running current-generation software.
- I’m making sure that I’m across efforts like Google’s HTML5 work
- I’m hoping that (although I’m unlikely to ever really use it) Windows 7 (with its baseline of IE8) is a winner.
These are certainly interesting times…