Google celebrated PacMan's anniversary with a playable application as their logo last week. According to the Metro newspaper this morning, people spent an average time of 36 seconds more on Google's home page. Full story: http://www.metro.co.uk/tech/827766-google-pac-man-game-eats-up-5-million-hours-of-work-time
May 2010 Archives
The 2012 London Olympics mascots have been unveiled. The controversy over these new mascots is comparable to when the 2012 Olympics logo was introduced a couple of years ago. I think that they look a little more like something from Teletubbies, and the organisers stress that the mascots have been designed to appeal to children. Here are some examples of mascots sent in by the public, some of which I think were very good but did not make the 'cut' to be the 2012 Olympics mascot: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_pictures/7460852.stm
I've just been on a weekend break to Amsterdam. Amsterdam is built on a series of canals with townhouses towering along them. It's a city of bicycles, windmills, cheese, and clogs - not to mention the 'coffee shops' and the 'red light district'. A fairly new city, Amsterdam has an artistic and care-free buzz.
Let's face it. Internet Explorer 6 is not a standards compliant browser. And, it's still widely used(1). Designers spend countless times designing websites that look excellent in Firefox, only to have a look at it in IE6 and see their work of art displaying poorly - elements in the wrong place, too much spacing or not enough spacing, issues with Javascript/JQuery, and so on. So, how much time do we spend debugging and building our websites for IE6?
After a brief look into this question, I discovered that many others were having the same issues. There are several IE6 'Hate' websites and forums, and these highlight IE6 issues such as lack of PNG image transparency, security holes, as well as lack of using the web standards. The developers at Digg claim to spend countless hours on supporting IE6, with 5% of their page views from an IE6 browser(2). 37signals, the company that makes backpacking applications such as Basecamp, decided to stop supporting IE6 in August of 2008 and requires upgrades (3). One user of a forum posted that nearly a third of the time developing one medium/large-scale web project was spent on IE6 (4).
The good news is IE6 is starting to become used less, but we still have some way to go before it breathes its final last breaths. Until then, I will continue ensuring that my websites do look as good in IE6 as they do in the other browsers.
(1) World Wide Web Consortium. Browser Statistics. http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp [May 6, 2010].
(2) Trammell, Mark. Much Ado About IE. 3 August, 2009. http://about.digg.com/blog/much-ado-about-ie6 [May 6, 2010].
(3) Owen, RJ. 37signals stops support of IE6 (and me). July 10, 2008. http://insideria.com/2008/07/37signals-drops-ie6-support.html [May 6, 2010].
(4) Jamie. March 8, 2010. IE6 - what percentage of time do you spend on it? http://boagworld.com/forum/comments.php?DiscussionID=5311 [May 6, 2010].
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