Recently I stumbled upon an interesting campaign website called SaveTheDevelopers.org. The aim of this website is to tell everyone in this world upgrade or change the web browsers to the latest version and dumb that evil Internet Explorer 6! So to make the campaign works, a small JS file can be installed in any website so that a message will prompt out for those who still using that evil browser “Upgrade or switch your browser now!”
Every web developers and designers knew that IE 6 is a nightmare browser, because a well coded website using standard CSS will turns out ugly in IE 6. So a lot of precious time and energy was spent just to make things right in that browser. Why care about the outdated browser? This is because there is still a lot of people using it. So born this website aimed to save the developer. But will this campaign successful?
Personally I’m not a developer but web designer and I do learn and code the web using standard CSS. I love Firefox, because it renders the way it should be, but when I force myself to test the website in IE 6, the whole website turns out broken and ugly! I’m not expert, so it took me several days to figure and solve it out, and still looks ugly but slightly better. Maybe because the website using heavy transparent PNG which is not supported by IE 6. I was totally exhausted and start to blame IE 6.
So when I saw SaveTheDevelopers, I was relieve because finally some one has stepped up and voice it out. But I do have a mix feeling on it because we have no right to tell people “hey you should change this, because this thing make me sick”. Plus, there is tonnes of non tech savvy people and they simply don’t care about software upgrades. Another thing is there is still a lot of PC using outdated Windows so IE 7 is not supported. And who cares about developers? JunJun from Sitepoint forum pointed it out very well “If it was ‘savetheuser’ I’d be all for it, but who the heck cares about the developers?”
Will I join this campaign? Maybe not, because only 17% users of this blog is using IE 6 (47% using Firefox, hurray jay-han.com users!), and it can be annoying too. SaveTheDeveloper is a nice move, but it sounds more like a developer’s rant. But I think it’s a good move to educate people that there are other alternative browsers which is good to use too. But if is me, i will spread Firefox.
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