Using Internet Explorer for the Mac is like driving at night with your headlights turned off.

 

When you see somebody driving with their headlights turned off, what do you do – put up more streetlights?

 

Of course not: You flash your headlights at them so they realize they’re making a dangerous mistake, turn their headlights on, and don’t cause themselves or anyone else harm.

If you’re a cop, you pull them over, give them a warning, write them a ticket if they refuse to turn them on, and throw them in jail if they’re drunk.

 

The solution to the problem is not to put streetlights along the one particular road where you saw them driving, because they’ll surely drive along many other roads with their headlights off.

The problem is not the lack of streetlights on every road, it’s the people driving around with their lights off.

 

It costs absolutely nothing to turn your headlights on, or upgrade to Firefox. So it’s not an issue of “poor school districts can’t afford it”. They’re still in the business of educating, so there’s no excuse for cultivating ignorance.

 

Streetlights are expensive, and take resources away from other more important tasks like stop lights, building new roads and filling potholes.

Supporting MacIE is also quite difficult, and a waste of resources, and pointless because upgrading is absolutely free.  

 

OpenLaszlo supporting MacIE isn’t going to help those users with the millions of other web sites that have problems with obsolete web browsers. But encouraging them to upgrade will.

 

But OpenLaszlo is open source, so if you really want to support MacIE yourself, then go right ahead.

But what you ask is extremely difficult, and you might as well petition Microsoft to fix their unsupported software.

 

However, if you won’t even flash your lights at people driving around with their lights off to make them stop, then it’s not reasonable to expect others to put their time and resources into building streetlights everywhere just because some people drive without headlights.

 

If it’s really an issue, then webmasters who gets lots of hits from IEMac users should redirect them to a page that explains the web browser they’re using is obsolete and buggy, and gives them links to download modern web browsers. Then they’ll be improving the world instead of turning a blind eye to its problems.

 

It’s more responsible to educate kids in poor schools who use bad software, and encourage them to simply upgrade for free so they’re safer and better off, than it is to ignore their plight.

 

            -Don

 

 

-----Original Message-----
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Cortlandt Winters
Sent:
Saturday, December 17, 2005 9:29 PM
To: [email protected]
Subject: [Laszlo-dev] Re: MacIE is dead.

 

Hi Don,

I read the announcement when it first came out and I would like to believe that it will make a difference, but I will really only believe it when I see the server logs that say it is so.

I understand how horrible it is, but like a virus, it's out there. And real normal human beings to whom a browser is just an icon that you click on, do seem to use it.

I am also willing to bet that the folk who use these browsers have never received support of any kind from microsoft for any microsoft software that they have ever used and the lack of support will go unnoticed by them.

By what I have seen these are largely elementary, jr high and high schools in poor districts that were once given labs of macintosh computers and still use them. When a computer has a problem they use the software that came with the computer to fix it.

I'm afraid that to believe that IEMac is dead is to believe a bit in engineering by wishfull thinking.

Thanks though.

-Cort

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