Comments on: Marketing Geek Show 68

By: Elizabeth King

Elizabeth King — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 18:32:05 +0000

Internet Explorer 8 is very good because it is as stable as Opera. I hate the previous versions of IE like IE6 because it hangs frequently. |

By: 5 things to consider before podcasting as a small business. « MacInnis Marketing

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 04:04:45 +0000

[...] Marketing Geeks [...]

By: Introspective

Introspective — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 12:01:38 +0000

Wolfram Alpha is a good news in the area of search engines. It has some advantages compared to the other search engines. Still, it is not the competition to Google or other search engines, since it uses totally different approach. It is more like dictionary or encyclopedia than search engine.

By: Philip

Philip — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 03:09:38 +0000

Thanks for the comment Funky, (Mr Gorilla).
The reason I mentioned IE6 was that it is now worth checking stats to see how many of your users are still on it.
It seems a rapid decline is underway and as they fall below 10% there is a real chance to deal with it differently.
We do have code on the marketinggeek site that will disallow IE6 entirely. It throws up a screen and links to updates. The assumption is that users may be able to use Firefox or Safari.
If everyone did this there would be more rapid progress towards web standards.
Most of the problems are not styling issues which can be addressed, they are more coding errors so it is near impossible to support at times.
IE8 is an attempt to address the issues but the explaination was too “geek” for Ailsa and beyond the scope of this sites viewers I fear.
However this article may assist you in dealing with IE8.
http://farukat.es/journal/2009/05/245-ie8-and-the-x-ua-compatible-situation

By: funkygorilla

funkygorilla — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 02:57:08 +0000

Just a comment on IE6. As someone who does do website design and coding, I really don’t like IE6, however I do appreciate why people may not be able to upgrade. A site that I am designing at the moment is for the datacenre industry so are extremely high tech and security conscious. However the site still has 15% using IE6, neither high tech and the least secure browser.

The reason people are using IE6 is that they tend to have had developed internal applications based on the quirks of IE6 when it was by far the dominant browser. These people still have to use the same application and they can’t use any other browser but IE6 to access it. Microsoft in it’s wisdom also ensures that you can’t have multiple version on your system which means that they are stuck using an out of date browser (incidently all support is being dropped for it this year).

Sadly The people who have these applications and are using IE6 tend to be the corporates so are often the best customers which means that love it or hate it, we still need our sites to work with IE6.

There has been two approaches to handling older browsers recently. Graceful degredation ensured that on older browsers the content was still okay and the site was still workable. In a slight spin of this the latest buzz words are ‘progressive enhancement’ which means that you design for the low end, then add features for more capable browsers. Personally I think these approaches are actually just the same, as I don’t think anyone these days would start off with an IE6 design and add features.

Anyway, hope this is helpful. You are probably aware of all this and frustration has just set in!

btw IE8 is not without it’s issues. I have a problem at the moment where locally a site previews fine, but when I upload it the navigation breaks! Seems like from the web something is reinterpreting the CSS for IE8!?