Comments on: When is it Our Job to Educate People About Browsers?

By: Megan

Megan — Wed, 11 Jul 2007 16:48:15 +0000

Yes, exactly. What they should be doing is offering the update for free and not requiring people to validate their copy of windows. And they need to notify people that something is wrong – people like those you mentioned could go on for ages without realizing they don’t have the latest updates and why they need to have them (security mainly).

What I’m thinking is that there may be some role for us as web designers in educating people on software upgrades. They won’t know they’re using an outdated browser if nobody tells them. The question is: when, where, and how is it appropriate for us to act?

By: andyk

andyk — Tue, 10 Jul 2007 23:11:25 +0000

Remember… huge numbers of windows users are using PIRATE versions of windows and that means no access to windows update and therefore no access to IE7.

I’m sure some of those pirates will be using Firefox, but a lot of people using pirated versions of windows don’t KNOW that they are using a pirated version since they got it from a friend who setup their machine or on a second hand machine etc.

I work for an ISP and we quite frequently get people calling for support with Microsoft products like Frontpage because they don’t know how to use the software. When you suggest that they read the manual that came with it they usually claim to have lost or misplaced it and I reckon in the vast majority of those cases piracy is the cause.

All future versions of IE should have a built in browser update feature like Firefox and Opera have. It’s just common sense. MS are holding back the internet and it’s driving me insane!

By: Megan

Megan — Sun, 08 Jul 2007 15:32:51 +0000

Liam mentioned that too when we talked about it here. The site I posted about is mainly for students, so that probably doesn’t apply here. My guess would be that either they’re not able to run the updgrades because they don’t have a validated copy of windoze or they’re just ignoring the updates. Last weekend Liam spent ages updating my mom’s Windoze because she didn’t know she was supposed to run them. We got her using Firefox a long time ago so the browser thing wasn’t an issue there.

I think this is a larger issue of people not knowing how to use their computers. Yes, software versions change and yes, you do need to update it once in awhile! It would be like not taking your car in for an oil change or something.

And here we are, professionals being restircted by the problem and we don’t do anything about it. Who is going to tell these people that they need updates if we don’t? Not that we need to plaster it over every site we do, but there might be some cases where it’s appropriate. Many sites don’t have any problem with telling me I can’t use Opera (the jerks) – some won’t even let me into the site!

IE 5 – that’s awful! I occasionally hear about people still needing to support NS 4 too. Ghastly.

Jordynn – what are you trying to do? You can remove any icons by right-clicking and choosing “delete” (I think it says delete – not using Windoze here to check). You can also go into add/remove programs from your control panel and get rid of anything you don’t use. You should use a better web browser though

By: Brent

Brent — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 22:23:05 +0000

Remember too that a lot of corps have IT policies in place that will prohibit rolling out new technologies for a very very long time (since they may be incompatible with internal apps etc.

No excuse for the non-corp users though. I’m actually building an app now where I have to consider IE 5. If you do rally an angry mob, let me know and I’ll march them over to my client’s.

By: Jordynn

Jordynn — Sat, 07 Jul 2007 14:13:36 +0000

Ok…. how do I do that???

By: Jordynn

Jordynn — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 19:48:02 +0000

I was at RPI the other week and had to get tech support to help me access their wireless, and the guy commented on the fact that i have, like, 8 different browsers in the bar thingy on the bottom of my screen… thanks to you.

By: Adam H

Adam H — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 14:05:48 +0000

Overall (last month)
IE 1,207 65.38%
FF 559 30.28%
Opera 62 3.36%
Safari 11 0.60%
(IE break down)
IE 6.0 634 52.5%
IE 7.0 573 47.4%

My content is mostly ASP.Net stuff so a high IE percentage is expected. However of developers I would expect better.

I hope Jesse publishes the main site stats again soon.

By: ejcross.com

ejcross.com — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 23:45:25 +0000

This site best viewed with……

Ok, so the great part about technology is the rapid advancement that it is known for. Just picture a few years ago there was Netscape 4, Internet Explorer 3 and they were going head to head in the browser wars. Ahh, that was the day. But moving to …

By: Adam Kinder

Adam Kinder — Wed, 04 Jul 2007 20:53:59 +0000

Here is what it looks like for Kinderism for all of 2007 so far:

26.8% for IE total ( 19,105 visits )
22.8% for Firefox total ( 16,266 visits )
0.6% for Netscape ( 472 visits )
49.6% for all others ( 35,398 visits )

For other, “Unknown” racked up most of that percentage – 41.2% of overall visits. Mostly trackback spam, comment spam, etc

IE 7 – 7.7%
IE 6 – 18.2%
IE 5 – 0.2% ( thank god )

Firefox 2.0.0.4 – 9.5%
Firefox 2.0.0.3 – 5.3%

Believe it or not – Firefox v0.10 – 47 visits

Opera pulled in 4.1%, and Safari was 0.9%