This is the story of a guy who wants a better web, a guy that wants a web where the only limits are people’s creativity. It is time to move on. It is time to believe in the future1. Maybe… it’s time to laugh? Look at the date silly people.
My fellow designers, developers and general web aficionados; we are embarking on an incredible journey, one that in the future will be looked at as a necessary step towards the growth of our industry as a whole. We are seeing new strides in design, new experiments in bringing rich interactivity to our world and new minds joining the fight on a daily basis. It is truly a wonderful time to be working in this industry and it’s only going to get better.
Two-thousand, four-hundred and ten (2410) days ago, Internet Explorer 6 was placed into our collective lap. At the time, we all used it and designed for it. Netscape 4? It just rendered the pages wrong. Didn’t it? But my browser couldn’t have been displaying the web wrong! My friends, denial is the first step towards the recovery of despair. As time went on, this browser started to inflict wounds on our collective body, wounds that every single designer has suffered. We have wasted hours upon hours upon days of our lives trying to fix errors that should have never been there in the first place!
Suffer no more my friends, for today, IE’s time has come. I’m saying I want none of my fellow designers to suffer with browser incompatibilities. I want none of my fellow developers to waste time on people who now refuse to partake in an upgrade that takes a menial amount of time. I want none of my fellow web aficionados to have to wish for the rich web they can have today. I desire a web that supports all of the incredible capabilities placed upon our doorstep by the W3C and other industry leaders. HTML5, CSS3, microformats, OpenID, OAuth and whatever else comes our way in the future. Today my friends, is the day I stop supporting the browser that has been the bane of the existence of every web citizen out there. I am going to spend my hours beautifying the web, and not making it backwards-compatible for 6 year-old-browsers.
However, my actions will not stop with IE, but with all browsers whose product life has come to an end. When it is time to move on, we will move on because this industry needs the future-focused who will make sure that the innovation will never falter and never end.
My friends, I ask you to join me. Renounce your desire, wether true or otherwise, to let go of the past and lead the way to the future. Wear this on your shoulder and wear it with pride. Spread the word. Crush its market share into oblivion. And then, when another browser meets its end, do the same to it. Do it for yourself. Do it for the industry. Do it for the future. WE ARE SLAVES NO LONGER!!
I am a designer, and this is my manifesto. You may stop me, but you will never stop us2.
- If you believe in this, believe it. If you don’t, happy April Fools Day.
- This last line is credited to the Hacker’s Manifesto.
haha I believe you ;)
Top of the morning and all that to you. And by all that I mean that I will ignore the fact that it actually is April 1st, since you have just summoned something very close to a shit-storm upon yourself; by shit-storm I mean web developers who completely agree with you on this matter pitted against web developers who disagree for very nasty reasons (blabla about customers and that they should design for the customer (which just puts emphasis on the good ol’ “I am a whore, I am a whore, I will do as I am told”) not against the customer.. and other such fine examples of spineless bullshit) not against him. Or her. Or the soulless company du jour.
And you just invited both of them with this post of yours to.. well.. to do the same thing that happens, when someone talks or writes about why a Mac is better than a PC or vice versa.
POST RANT: are your input-areas meant to be off by 7 Pixels vertical-orientation- wise ? (I take it that no- one is willing to understand what I mean, so I will de-caff the meaning: there is a 7-pixel- gap between the bottom of the input- fields and the horizontal lines used for visually separating the individual rows in the comment-form- section.)
Have a nice day and all that; will add a comment to your post concerning your visual design now, since I can’t remember how I got to your site in the first place. So I’ll just be professional about it.
POST POST RANT: and enjoy the ensuing shit-storm..
Top of the morning to you too Wedge. If a shit storm shall come, then a shit storm it shall be. As long as people get a laugh out of it, I could care less what happens to me. That rhymed didn’t it. o_O;
Anyway, to say that I didn’t expect anything to happen would be as naive as standing on the train tracks while the railroad arms are down. ;)
Oh, and to your comment form stuff. Yeah, I do know about that. Thanks for reminding me. If only Firefox and Safari didn’t treat stuff like… fonts differently. But I’m working on it! :D
As long as you don’t feel compelled to do something akin to the SEO-Rap, you can rhyme to your heart’s content.
I just might stick around.. for a few good laughs and the inevitable PC v. Mac- meta- discussion.. I can feel it coming..
I am like a drunkard and your site is like that broad across the table, winking at me.. getting prettier by the minute. I want to fondle your site/said broad.
You know that your whole website is only readable on Mac and IE7, right?
Web standards are nothing without common sense.
My website should be readable in all modern browsers. I’ve seen it in Firefox Mac/Win, Safari, IE7 and Opera. So if there’s a problem that you’re seeing and I’m not, I’d appreciate it if:
I block IE6 users because that’s who my audience is not. It says that in the colophon.
How is it you could write some ish like this Bryan. I mean why should I take it upon myself to support a technology and vendors looking towards the future. Why support software that will allow me to push the boundaries of the industries with buzz words like ajax and standards compliance.
You have step out of line and spoken for everyone when you shouldn’t have, and how dare you do so. I should inform you I love spending the better part of my day fixing and hacking areas of my site, I mean that is the way it is meant to be, right? I remember the days when I.E. had the web all to itself, none of these goodie goodies to point out it small flaws.
I could create a site to only be supported and rendered in its beautiful window, turning away all other with a nasty message if they didn’t use something other then my chosen software. Now I am regulated to writing this standards-compliance code, then having to spend hours making it work on the only software we should be using. Sure its 7 years old, but its just like wine…this software gets better with age.
Why take time promoting progress, stopping the support and educating my audience is so much harder and a waste of time for everyone in this field. As a professional designer/developer, why should I support all of this? I mean designing for “A class” software only is taboo. I know…I know… we did have I.E. only sites, but for good reason.
I think that this post goes against everything the web is about, how dare you promote progress. I will not support your revolution you radical and will boycott your site from this point forward. I leave you with this, remember what happen to Copernicus when he told everyone that the earth was not the center of the universe. Correct your ways sir and use your blog for the right purposes.
20080401 - AINGF :p
Amen Brother!
Save the Developers is a little more subtle.
I loaded up IE6 in a virtual machine just to check this out. Your link to /bsod/ appears to loop back over and over to itself… Might want to check that out ;)
The BSOD should really go full screen. :)
Mr. Harrison — Haha, thanks for that, I oddly had the JS in the BSoD file. Took that out, should no longer loop on anybody. Maybe that’s an added effect though. ;)
Mr. Simmons — If there was a way to force full-screen. Hehehe. ;)
Thanks Bryan! Can’t wait to use this on my own site. I’m not quite sure that I could do this at work and keep my job, but it has to start somewhere. That somewhere is long passed due.
LIES! IE WITH ITS ACTIVEX CONTROL SHALL RULE THE WORLD! /aprilfool
Very convincing, although you gave it away when you said “wear it on your shoulder”. If this manifesto was read 2410 days ago by developers everywhere, Microsoft would have been scared.
Rosano — Hehe, I guess I was getting ahead of myself at that point. :)
When can we expect an update for IE8? Please advise, thanks. :)
Michael — If I skip IE7 altogether, then, not that long. But I’d want to be fair to each version of IE. Therefore, I probably wouldn’t want to skip it. Maybe when IE9 assimilates with WebKit, I’ll write up something on IE8. :P