Media Lab Forums

[sportster55]

I hope this is the appropriate forum for commenting on this. I knew there were shortcomings on IE6 when it came to showcasing some nice effects that SG3 allows designers to leverage. When I design a website in SG3 and I have cool colored and transparent backgrounds behind paragraph text boxes and my clients view the design for the first time, many, using IE8 or below do not see these design enhancements in the web page. I have been directing my clients to use a different browser that has the capability to view the enhancements. Many will say that IE6 is fine for them, or that most everyone has an IE8 or earlier browser that is used by the majority of web visitors. What would be your advice as to how to approach a client when a designed website has been done with a tool such as SG3 and you know that what they will see with their IE browser does not look close to your original design? Is it time that the industry move forward and stop appeasing IE8 and below? I kind of feel like I'm in no man's land with this issue.

[Matt Jensen]

This topic has been something that has plagued web developers for the longest time. It is tough to have new tools like CSS3 that supports so many neat features, but then you have to build for the lowest common denominator browser.
Internet Explorer has always been behind the times for compatibility, but most people who are general users don't know that there are other/better browsers out there.
What kills me is that people are using a browser that is 11~ years old, and they think that life is okay. Sure most of those users don't care about what web developers care about, but once they start asking, "Why doesn't my internet look like their internet?" Then that's the best plug for, "Well, have you heard of this browser?"

Internet Explorer 9 is looking promising. It seems to have all the features you could need, it also has quite a bit of support for HTML5 - if that really does take off.

I guess if you want to have a plug at another browser, you can say, "site looks best in Firefox/Chrome/Opera/Safari and not IE."