37signals, a company that builds web-based applications, are to phase out support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) for their products, including Basecamp (the project management tool we use extensively to run our various projects).

In many ways we support this move. IE6 came out in August 2001: that’s almost 7 years ago. While it was a real step forward at the time it has since seriously lagged behind other web browsers. It now is responsible for creating an inordinate amount of design and development problems for people who work with the web, as well as having a wide variety of security issues. It will be a great day when the web development world can finally move on. Unfortunately we believe it could easily be another 5 years before this might be possible — there are simply too many people using it.

The percentage of people using IE6 varies widely depending on the type of website and their audience, but looking at the statistics of websites we manage, it is approximately between 15% and 35%.  Clearly a very significant proportion still use IE6, and one that can not be ignored. While websites do not need to look exactly the same in each and every browser, but they should not break or fail to work.

The move by 37signals has created various issues for us:

We do not want to overly concern our clients about what web browser they use. Most people neither know nor care about what browser they are using - and why should they? We would always encourage clients to upgrade their browsers to the most recent because of the security risks, but for medium to large organisations universally upgrading their browsers can be a very complex task.

The situation could also impact on our credibility: we have recommended Basecamp as a tool, and if suddenly some of our clients have problems using it, it would reflect poorly on us. Having the situation ‘taken out of our hands’ by 37signals puts us in an uncomfortable position.

Information for clients

We recommend that clients upgrade to the latest versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Safari. If this is difficult due to the restrictions of IT departments, then glitches or problems with Basecamp will probably occur. Hopefully these should not cause significant or ‘fatal’ problems. Please contact us if you have any questions or experience any errors.

The Telegraph newspaper on Saturday had an article about the forthcoming Acme Climate Action book. We’re working with Provokateur on the accompanying website.

We get endless amounts of spam here at FoxLand, and we all hate it - but sometimes, rarely, we come across something so surreal and odd that it comes across as some artist’s bizarre project. In fact, there is now a whole movement in poetry inspired by spam, the unfortunately named ‘spoetry’. 

One of our major issues with Adobe’s Flash, and one of the main reasons we use it sparingly and rarely recommend it to our clients, is that it struggles to be understood by Google and other search engines. This situation has now changed with an initiative by Adobe: they have released code that makes it easier for search engines to read Flash content. This goes some way of removing our concerns. 

A key problem remains though: it is still extremely hard to create ‘deep links’ into the content. For example, if this journal post was instead text inside a Flash file, Google would not be able to link to it directly. Therefore even if the text was found, Google would send you to the ‘start’ of the Flash file, forcing the user to then hunt for it. This would be annoying not only for the user, but for us as well. The key way that Google ranks content is to measure the amount of links to it, but as websites can still not link directly to it, Flash remains problematic.