On Fri, Feb 20, 2009 at 9:36 AM, Sherool <jamydlan(a)online.no> wrote:
The argument is that the people who still use IE6 now
are not likely to
ever change on their own because "it still works".
That argument is evidently wrong, given the number of people still
using IE5 and NN4 (i.e., basically none). Eventually people are going
to be forced to upgrade to a new version of Windows because XP doesn't
support the new-fangled something-or-other that everyone needs to
have, and that means a new version of IE. It's not really possible to
run ancient operating systems forever unless you're extremely fixed in
your ways -- for instance, Windows 95 doesn't support USB. XP is
still usable for the time being, but sooner or later almost everyone
is going to need to upgrade to support new applications or hardware.
Regardless, it is not Wikimedia's business to tell people what
operating systems or browsers to use. Telling people to switch
browsers is self-indulgent laziness on the part of web developers who
don't want to support IE6. MediaWiki is not going to nag people to
change browsers, period.
I do believe that once IE6 (not to mention IE5) is
dead and burried the
web will be a better place, so IMHO we should not ask "what do we gain
from this", but instead "do it for the betterment of humanity" (pompous
enough for you ;P).
Wikimedia's goal is not to better humanity in some unspecified way.
It's to disseminate free knowledge. Pestering users who probably
can't fix the problem does nothing to advance that goal. If we're
going to try moralizing our users, why don't we go ahead and nag our
users to ditch IE entirely and switch to Firefox? IE7 is pretty
bug-ridden too. Or hey, why not try getting them all to switch to
Linux?
It's not our business.