Back in the day, you may have seen notices on browsers like “This site best viewed in Internet Explorer v4.” Since then, we’ve moved into the belief that a website should work on as many browsers as possible, and degrade nicely when it can’t. So imagine my surprise when I’m looking at photos online and I get a message saying I’m using an unsupported browser.
I happened to be using Chrome on my iPad, so I clicked the link which took me to http://www.corbisimages.com/BadBrowser and I saw this:
I was taken aback. Not that they say ‘IE 7 and up’ as it’s something I try to support as well. Frankly making sites look awesome on IE is about as easy and fun as a dental student doing your root canal. You’ll get there in the end, but it may hurt like hell.
Now, Corbis has certainly one of the more out of date designs for a photo sites I regularly visit (there are 10), but it’s not the most egregious. Yes, there are worse ones. Still for a site to have an alert like this in 2014 and to omit Chrome is rather shocking. Someone remarked it looked like that site was designed circa 2003 and Chrome, if you didn’t know, only came out in 2008. So while I remember this new design for Corbis being rather recent (2012 or 2013, but that may have just been some tweaks), it’s clear they’ve not visited that page in at least six years.
I talked to my family about web design at a recent brunch, stressing that I do not do website design per se, but I am happy to help them find people and upload their content. At that time, I pointed out that the trick to a website was to frequently update it and make it more modern. “It’s like the runway shows,” I replied. “What’s in this season was weird last season and may be out by next season. So making a site and never changing it is as smart as never updating your wardrobe.”
People judge by how things look. If someone only wears a black turtleneck and jeans (Steve Jobs), we create a specific mindview of them and it rarely changes. Someone who always wears avant-garde clothes that are nearly unwearable (Katy Perry), we create another. If that person always wears a suit jacket (Tim Gunn), we have yet another view. Neither is right or wrong, of course, and they all have their places.
We update our wardrobes when we gain and lose weight, when we decide we want a change, when we feel different, when we have to change, when we want to. While I tease that Brian Gardner is never satisfied with a web design and is always changing, I’m often just as guilty of this as I don’t feel things fit forever. If I’m not afraid of changing my wardrobe, why would I be afraid of changing my website?
And yet. We worry a lot more about the change of design, to the point that sites like Corbis haven’t significantly changed or adapted since 2002, when the site was born. Since then, 12 years have gone by, browsers have changed, security changed, and the viewing experience is wildly different. Corbis on a phone? Yeah not a great experience.
When your site never changes with the times, never grows to adapt to it’s new audience, you lose respect in the world of the Internet. We have to keep up with the times, test and retest on as many browsers as humanly possible, and make sure that it all works. We can’t just say “Yes, this one design is good” and more so, we can’t say “This site works best on…” anymore.
Unless you’re the sort to say “This jeans only work with turtlenecks.” Then, by all means, never change.
Comments
5 responses to “Bad Browser Complacency”
Having done battle yesterday with an obscure browser incompatibility* just let me say that it can be a lot worse than the site just not looking right. Now that people are rolling out complex browser-based applications that are used to perform critical tasks, it becomes an even greater challenge to test everything with every available browser.
* This was a function that isn’t often used, but when it is, it needs to work. To be specific, it’s the function to deploy an aid worker to a disaster, so you can see why all of a sudden it’s being used a lot. Couple that with a recent push to get everyone off of XP, which has the side effect of changing the browser version that they’re using, and the stage is set for a huge problem.
@Steve: And you have to keep testing, because what works on Safari last year may not work today, which is why you can’t….
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be complacent
@Ipstenu (Mika Epstein):
Last year? Try “yesterday”.
@Steve: Hey, the actually patched IE yesterday for XP. So … The Bank may have updated 😀
I installed that patch on the copy of XP that I keep around for those times when you just need to run XP.
I also installed it on the Windows 8.1 system that I actually use.