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Your browser is an arthritic Shetland pony
Imagine if someone handed you a big, beautifully-moving warmblood, showed you an immaculately-groomed dressage area, and said, “Go ride the test of your life.“
Wouldn’t that be fun?
Now imagine they said, “But whatever test you ride, we want you to duplicate on this 12hh arthritic pony. Duplicate exactly. Down to the stride length and everything.“
Sort of sucks, doesn’t it? Especially when you say, “Hey, the warmblood is trained to do piaffe and passage, but the pony isn’t. Can I add that in in just the warmblood’s test?“ Absolutely not. No way. No upper-level movements for you! Stick to only what the pony can handle.
That, seriously, is my life. Those of you who use IE6? Your browser is the pony in this situation. Maybe you are using it because you’ve used it for a long time, and it’s familiar and comfortable for you.
Allow me to reassure you: unlike real ponies, browsers are inanimate objects without any feelings whatsoever. You don’t owe browsers any sort of retirement. Please, put yourself out of your own misery and just upgrade. I don’t really care what you upgrade to—and goodness knows there are plenty of options—just upgrade.
(If you think that scenario was bad: I was once given the job equivalent of “We want you to ride this arthritic pony in this immaculately-groomed double-sized dressage ring and ride this beautiful warmblood on a steep mountain slope at midnight in the pouring rain in a round pen. Now make both rides look exactly the same.“ That was fun. By “fun,“ I mean “painful.“)
Sorry for this post. Google just launched a new browser, which is an interesting idea although the thought of having to design around yet another browser’s quirks is depressing. More to the point of my IE6 vent, I spent all day telling people, “You can do this, but not in IE6 unless you want to do X, Y, and Z workarounds” only to have them look at me like I’d lost my mind. They wanted to know why they couldn’t do whatever more easily than that.
The answer is simple: it’s because IE6 is an arthritic Shetland pony that simply cannot keep up with the big-moving warmblood browsers. Trying to make it do so is cruel. Well, not to IE6, which has no feelings, but to the developers who have to make it work.
To me, ok? To me. Like everything else on this blog, this post is all about me.
Save a developer. Upgrade your browser. Please. I can’t spend the rest of my life pulling out my hair.
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On Sep 3, 2008, Halt Near X said:
Completely unrelated—I was trying to find out if there are rumors of a close release data for Kindle v2 or Apple’s “We’re not building an eBook reader, winkwink, nudge nudge” inevitable eBook reader—but this is amusing: iPod Flea