As web standards have changed, browsers gotten better and people’s interactions with the internet become something else entirely; 20% of Internet users insist in keeping an 8 year old browser. Do you remember what websites were like 8 years ago? Here’s Microsoft’s own from the Wayback Machine’s archive. No video, no Javascript, no CSS, basically nothing of what makes a modern site.

As developers we have to work, often tens of hours longer, to replicate the experience that works on every other browser, on IE6. And it’s not just us, here at ML. The development community has had to create workarounds and exceptions to mold our carefully designed product to IE6’s shortcomings, and lack of W3 standards compliance.

With that in mind we are ecstatic that Google decided to raise the visibility of our cause by marking IE6 as an unsupported browser for Gmail and various other Google products, and recommending instead many other free options that will better serve the user. Sure they might have ulterior motives, such as advertising their own Chrome browser, but by coming out against this seriously outdated program they help to raise the industry as a whole.

We have not followed Google’s route in that we will continue to support IE6 as long as it is used by more than 15% of Internet users, but we would like you to help us in our plight by dropping this antiquated relic and upgrading to some of the various (much better) options available in the market. Even more, here are some links to help get you started:

Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Opera, Internet Explorer 8

Yeah, you guys read that last one right, IE is up to its eighth version, which is leaps and bounds better than its predecessors.

So there you are, links, options and all. If you’d like a recommendation, personally I like Firefox and Chrome for the PC, Firefox for the Mac and Linux, and Opera 9.5 beta for my phone. You no longer have an excuse, upgrade today.

EDIT: IE6 finally has dropped below 15% and we have stopped supporting it for regular projects. We will nevertheless keep supporting IE6 in projects that specifically require it for an additional fee.

We’ve decided to keep the “problem” whichever it might be, unsolved for now and get some more feedback from users.

My best guess is that the feed is having trouble in a couple of specific RSS readers but is generally working fine. I guess the first clue is that out of 13,000 daily readers only a few are having trouble and most seem happy with how everything works.
These sorts of compatibility issues are the bane of the web-developer’s existence. Sure when it comes to sites we’re pretty much used to it and we’ve created workarounds, found loopholes and installed legacy browsers for testing, but the same sorts of issues keep cropping up and in starker contrast when it comes to HTML e-mails and apparently now RSS.

It really is a difficult position to be in and in general as developers we do everything we can to make our code standards compliant and take into consideration the limitations of our users’ tools but it becomes practically impossible to test in every possible environment. That’s how you get to the situation we’re at right now, waiting for complaints. We’ve already tested out the wazoo in 5 different OSes, 12 different browsers, 8 e-mail clients and 5 RSS readers, but now we have to wait for the fails, the errors, the complaints to pop up in regular usage. Reminds me a lot of this:

There’s no way of knowing that someone’s going to get orange juice in the face until they try to drink some(watch the video, seriously). This approach isn’t only necessary but it is almost impossible to do it any other way, and you’d be surprised at the amount of user recomendations that go far beyond simple bug-reporting, and turn into solid recomendations that make the website experience so much better.
I guess that’s the note I’m happy to end this post in. Here’s to our users, our greatest critics, fans, and unwitting beta-testers. Without you we’d be just as mediocre as everyone else.