Posts Tagged microsoft
Say Goodbye to Internet Explorer 6
Facebook, now YouTube, twitter... IE6 is fading fast.
My morning news perusal (ANN IS on your list… right?) chanced upon this glorious little nugget on Slashdot from contributor OracleGoddess:
Oracle Goddess sends word that YouTube is presenting IE6 users with a banner exhorting them to upgrade to a modern browser, and TechCrunch is reporting that YouTube will be phasing out support for IE6 soon. This Twitter search reflects the jubilation breaking out all over the Net at the imminent demise of this most despised and non-standards-compliant browser. The market share for IE6 is now well down in the single digits.
I can’t help but convey to you the absolute horror that programming for IE6 is in the year 2009 while still trying to keep more modern browsers displaying our content here on ANN, and the other web properties of Rubber City Radio Group. I won’t go into all of the details, there is so much more we could be doing for our page designs and functionality on the sites, but while a still sizable minority of people still visit our sites using this old beastie, we don’t want to alienate them by presenting them with either a fully broken page or a scrapbook mosaic that looked like Walt Disney vomited on their monitor. If IE6 drops to a small enough percentage (and it will, Firefox and Chrome and over time increasing in use… they’re better in all regards, and they’re free. I’m not against the use of Internet Explorer 8, either, it’s a suitable replacement) then we will quit support for it as well and move on to bigger and better things.
Keep in mind that IE6 was first released in 2001, and as most people replace their systems in 4-6 years, it goes without saying that it’s time to get rid of it. Would you buy a new car and insist that parts from your old trade-in car be used? Didn’t think so.
Lastly, my compatriot Andrew reminds me that Facebook and Twitter are on board. Judging from the broad swath of users these sites cover, hopefully this IE6 drop will occur a lot faster than previously we’d hoped.
MS Office 2010: Free…?
In one of the unlikelier moves I’ve seen a large company make in a long, long time, but it looks like Redmond is firing a return volley at Google since the search engine giant announced the development of a full laptop operating system earlier this month. One of google’s mainstays beyond search and gmail was the Google Apps platform that is essentially an Office suite served over the ‘net. Millions of people use it, however Microsoft has a near-monopoly among professional and business users of the Microsoft Office suite of services.
Coming in 2010, Microsoft offers to release the Office 2010 suite free online to it’s (similarly free) Windows Live account holders. While details are sketchy and it’s not known spefically which features may be enabled or disabled, it’s likely that the Online 2010 suite will be delivered in either ad-supported and paid subscription tiers that eliminates the advertising and adds some services.
What makes this an interesting move is that while Google has always been proactive in engaging other companies on their home turf, Microsoft has heretofore not made moves that really focused on online “live” services in a serious way. Bundling other services to the MS Office online is also much easier and avoids (I expect, although I’m no lawyer) all of the legal hassle Microsoft has experienced before from US and foreign courts regarding such antitrust issues… as linking from one particular service to another when one can simply type in another company’s service in the URL bar seems to me like a decent defence.
If you’ll allow me the opportunity for a moment to go deep-geek in conjecture, I was wondering if Microsoft will want to rethink it’s position on HTML5 (HTML being the background of code support for information over the web). HTML version 5 supports native media (audio and video) file playback and manipulation, and I imagine that fully supporting HTML5 would make the whole process of developing an Office web service a heck of a lot easier for MS program for and faster for users on the front end. But in an article at Internetnews.com, an MS spokesperson said, “”We do not currently support the AUDIO or VIDEO tag [features of the news HTML5 specification /bryan] and are concerned about the patent issues that surround some of the codecs,” a Microsoft spokesperson told InternetNews.com. “We’ll continue to be involved in the HTML working groups around this issue and work to find a viable solution.”
So it remains to be seen if this move to grab (or at least keep) “live” users from Google will result in changing standards on the web, but on the whole it’s a good move.
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