On Wednesday, February 4, 2004, at 03:03 PM, Universal Head wrote:
Now THAT's a smart idea - old browsers that expire. If only IE and NN did that!
Peter
A browser that actually expires would be great. If NN4, IE4, Opera 4, etc all *expired* in 2002, the cost of web development would be a lot cheaper already. If IE5.x and NN6 (and early Mozilla's) expired sometime this year, CSS2 and other standards could really take off.
The problem is, Safari 1.0 doesn't actually expire (AFAIK). It's tied into OSX's 10.3.x upgrade. Whilst it's more than likely that a vast majority of web users will upgrade to 10.3 this year, there will still be a massive number on 10.2.x, and developers are either forced to:
a) stay with 10.2.x thinking that they're safer testing on the older (more bugs) version
b) upgrade to 10.3.x, take the update of Safari, and ignore Safari 1.0 users
Safari 1.2 should be available to 10.2 users via the software update.
Safari 1.0 & 1.1 should be available as multiple installs for any Mac OS X user.
All browsers should have an expiry date, auto-update, and a nag-screen for any browser that has expired.
I guess in one way it's nice that Apple is enforcing upgrades... the result is probably that a LOT less people will have 1.0 in a few years time, but it's at the expense of developers who need multiple versions of everything loaded at all times.
Perhaps Safari needs a developer edition (even a commercial product requiring registration and/or $'s) which allows multiple versions to run, without nags, auto-updates, etc. What would be even better is if Safari (and Mozilla, etc) had multiple rendering engines that could be selected from a list (Safari 1, 1.1, 1.2) so that developers could easily switch between all three form within one app.
Justin French
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