[thelist] Site Check - IE Explorer v5 anomaly

[Joshua Olson]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ian Anderson
> Sent: Wednesday, October 26, 2005 9:31 AM
> 
> Joshua Olson wrote:
> 
> > Unless you have some overwhelming and compelling reason to 
> > support IE on the Mac, I'd suggest you put your energies 
> > elsewhere.  IE/Mac is an outright shame in regards to compliancy, 
> > and has almost zero market penetration.  If I had to find a 
> > number, I may look at the numbers that the BBC published [0] 
> > for visitors to their homepage.  Mac represents only 4.4% of 
> > their visitors, and only 30% of those are using IE 5.  Overall, 
> > that's only 1.32% of their visitors.  I believe this to be a fairly 
> > representative slice of the general population.
> 
> Sorry, Joshua, but to my eye your evidence doesn't support your
> conclusion - quite the reverse.

Ian,

I appreciate your thoughtful response, so thank you.  Perhaps I should've
been a bit more clear--when I said "compelling reason to support IE on the
Mac", I meant visually... not in regards to basic site
accessibility/usability.  

This page suffers no usability issues on IE/Mac because of the CSS problems
encountered.  I just loaded it up on Mac/IE 5.2 and it actually looks quite
good, even with the buttons at the top.  So, the question boils down to how
much time tweaking the CSS to accommodate Mac/IE can be justified.  30
minutes, 1 hour, 2 hours?  What if a "hack" is necessary?  Does that hack
cause additional time to be spent in the future while performing standard
design maintenance tasks?  Will that hack conflict with the upcoming IE 7
that is sure to grab an appreciable market share?

> 1.32% of the bbc.co.uk audience is a bucketload of users. 1.32% of the
> general web audience is a truly staggering number of users.

A truly staggering number of users that are causing countless hours to be
wasted supporting their broken browser.  :-)
 
> In my experience, user audiences have to be below 0.5% of any group
> to be suitable candidates for the "oh well..." treatment.

Perhaps for issues that cause the site to be inaccessible.  This is not the
case here... the site is perfectly accessible.

> In any event, beyond the numbers is the issue of currency. 
> For many Mac users, IE5.2 is their default browser. Seems strange 
> to me, but it's a fact. They look surprised when you suggest they 
> could use Safari or Firefox - and often shrug and say, "och, one 
> day." It also offers some unique features that I think some people 
> would miss.

While I don't feel that we should completely blow off Mac/IE users (instead,
sites should be accessible by all browsers), I believe that extra energy
shouldn't be wasted making designs look pixel-perfect for them.  IMO, making
a site look "perfect" in IE/PC, Firefox/Moz, Opera, and Safari will
generally suffice.

<><><><><><><><><><>
Joshua L. Olson
WAE Tech Inc.
http://www.waetech.com/
Phone: 706.210.0168 
Fax: 413.812.4864

Monitor bandwidth usage on IIS6 in real-time:
http://www.waetech.com/services/iisbm/