Blog » How old is too old?
- Posted: Apr 20th 2007, 17:02
The BBC and Channel 4 have both launched, or are launching, TV on-demand services. As we all know, the BBC have decided to embrace an operating system agnostic policy and have decided to not alienate their OS X visitors (I’m not sure how well Linux users will be treated so we’ll have to wait and see).
Channel 4 have decided to get it launched (4od) without embracing this agnostic/open approach. It seems likely, to me, that they will include mac users later on in its lifetime. Something tickled my fancy though. It seemed strange to me and I thought I would let you see.
How old is Internet Explorer 5.5! According to the wikipedia:
Version 5, launched on March 18, 1999, and subsequently included with Windows 98 Second Edition and bundled with Office 2000, was another significant release that supported bi-directional text, ruby characters, XML, XSL and the ability to save web pages in MHTML format. (Windows 2000 included Internet Explorer 5.01 instead.) Version 5.5 followed in July 2000, improving its print preview capabilities, CSS and HTML standards support, and developer APIs; this version was bundled with Windows Me.
July 2000 is the date it was released. In my opinion, 5.5 was a terrible browser and is now 7 years old. Its successor is now 6 years old and has now been superceded. How old is too old? Did they accidentally build in support for IE5.5 or did somebody sit there in a board meeting and say, ‘we need to support people with a browser that is outdated and very possibly unsecure.’
I think it’s too old. I know there of those of you out there saying, ‘but we need to support people who can’t afford these things.’ And I say Linux, Linux, Linux, Firefox, Firefox, Firefox. I have concerns about people who don’t upgrade their computer. Are you the same people who wait until the washing machine is on its last legs before replacing it? Do you still have a black and white TV? Will your TV support DVB when the UK switchover takes place?
I think that content providers should me more concerned about supporting modern browsers rather than 7 year old messes. What are they thinking? On another note, how many of you still support Netscape 4?