We all seem to be bending over backwards to accommodate a very small number of users on a variety of issues including browser
compatibility. Where there is no legal requirement (eg DDA) then it comes down to a simple business decision - do we want to spend
time supporting a browser that only 0.77% of our visitors are using. No!
Many people complained when the BBC moved their national radio stations to FM and closed down the MW frequencies - "I'll have to
buy a new radio". But the BBC did their research, decided that a critical mass of FM radio users were out there and made the
business decision to stop broadcasting on MW.
The overwhelming majority of visitors to our site use IE so our pages work perfectly in IE and degrade reasonably well in other
browsers (including NS4 as it happens, but it's Friday afternoon so I'll carry on!). The majority of visitors have Flash, so I
have no problem with using flash on our site, the same goes for Acrobat.
Each of us need to make these decisions for our own sites using our own web stats, and we need to keep monitoring these for
changes and adjusting our policies accordingly. Do you honestly think Kodak/Fuji/Et Al would still be making film if only 0.77% of
camera owners didn't use digital cameras?
Netscape 4 was released in the last century. Yes we have a responsibility to make our sites available to the widest audience
possible - but we don't have to spoonfeed every user - their browsing experience online is as much their responsibility as it is
ours.
Will
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Will DG Cox - New Media Marketing Manager
Department of Marketing, Sheffield Hallam University
Telephone 0114 225 3893 E-mail [log in to unmask]
www.shu.ac.uk - Gold HEIST Education Marketing Award winner 2001 & 2002
-----Original Message-----
From: Managing an institutional web site [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Helen Sargan
Sent: 29 October 2004 13:37
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: CSS positioning - am I just being short sighted?
At 12:34 pm +0100 29/10/04, Cox, Will wrote:
>On the day A-Level results were issued just under 6000 unique visitors
>browsed our clearing listings - 0.77% of them used Netscape and only
>0.04% were using version 4 - that equates to two people - hardly a
>figure worth worrying about.
>
>There are no real barriers to upgrading as browser software is a free
>download and/or available on any number of cover disks - I wouldn't be
>surprised if the main reason we still get visitors using these browsers
>is because they are being used people like us to check how well pages
>degrade!
Downloading over a modem, buying a magazine, why bother? I'll just get grumpy because the page doesn't work. Users aren't
technocrats and you shouldn't expect it of them.
Just make sure they can read the page sensibly whatever they look at it with.
--
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Helen Varley Sargan
Information Provision & Webmaster
University Computing Service
New Museums Site email [log in to unmask]
Pembroke St [log in to unmask]
Cambridge CB2 3QH Phone 01223 334480
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