One of the changes planned for Milestone Gallium – our next major upcoming release of Three Rings – will be a reduced level of support for Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. This follows announcements by YouTube, Google, and other major content providers that Internet Explorer 6 will no longer be supported for many of their services.
Internet Explorer 6 is almost a decade old – a lifetime in computer terms – and has, over the course of its use, been repeatedly and near-universally slated for its lack of adherence to web standards as well as the security problems associated with it. Users of Internet Explorer 6 can upgrade for free to a newer version of Internet Explorer or to one of a number of other browsers.
What’s changing?
From the launch of Milestone Gallium, near the end of March, Three Rings users with Internet Explorer 6 will be presented with a reasonably unobtrusive “yellow bar” – like the one pictured above – to remind them that their browser is now considered to be so far behind the times that it cannot be expected to work reliably on modern sites like Three Rings. If the user clicks on the bar, they’ll be taken to the Internet Explorer 8 download page, where they’ll receive instructions on updating their system.
If users don’t click on the bar, that’s fine – Three Rings will continue to work in Internet Explorer 6 for as long as we can possibly make it do so: this “warning bar” is just the advance warning – similar to the one now seen by Internet Explorer 6 users when they visit many other sites around the web – that the site may not work as intended and won’t look as good or run as fast as it would if they were using up-to-date software.
What does that actually mean?
What does this change actually mean for Three Rings? Not as much as you might think: we’ll still be writing code that obeys web standards, and we’ll still test the site in all of the most popular web browsers that are used to access the service, so nobody should have to suffer. But what it means is that if we ever come to develop new features which Internet Explorer 6 is simply to old to cope with; we won’t be downgrading the features to work in Internet Explorer 6 any more: instead, we’ll be requiring users to upgrade their browser. For the vast majority of Three Rings users, this means that we can provide better, more user-friendly features than ever before, without having to worry about how older web browsers cope with them.
Who will be affected?
We anticipate that fewer than 8% of Three Rings users will be affected by this change. And, of course, they still won’t have to upgrade their browser to continue using the service; they can simply dismiss or ignore the message, if they really want to, and carry on using Three Rings as normal, for now. We’d like to think that this is a welcome reminder to users who might otherwise have forgotten to take advantage of the opportunity to improve their Internet experience (even Microsoft are getting close to disowning Internet Explorer 6; by the end of the year, they’ll cease support for Windows 2000, the last Microsoft operating system to be incapable of upgrading to a newer version of the browser).
What isn’t changing?
Of course, our commitment to accessibility still stands: regardless of any special needs any particular user may have, Three Rings should be usable by everybody, all the time, without changing the way that you’re used to working. Three Rings is, and always will be, about working around the way you already work, not changing the way you do things.