Comments on: Graceful Degradation and Progressive Enhancement

By: Red glosses

Red glosses — Sat, 28 Jul 2012 07:07:05 +0000

Progressive Enhancement in webdesign is a conservative stance that behold the web as it is, slowing the adoptions of more efficient technologies and wasting resourses (time, money, bandwidth, …).
It suggest you: design for the worst browser. IE6 release is dated 2001: according to P.E. the site must be, basically, designed in a 2001-manner. Than you can add some irrilevant decor, but not core functions and features, for the rest of your visitors.
According P.E. you should also design for a js-disabled target, which is even more masochistic and castrating and sometimes quite impossible.
Browsers are free and require a few minutes to install. But what reason have you to upgrade if you don’t see anything wrong in the sites you’re visiting and nobody tell you your browser is obsolete and harmful?
For deeper insight: http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/07/09/old-browsers-are-holding-back-the-web/

By: Tatsh

Tatsh — Fri, 25 Mar 2011 20:19:00 +0000

‘Making it possible for users to view web pages in older browsers is imperative’. Not imperative. You do not have to provide the exact same experience to them.

A modern mobile browser (such as on iOS or Android, NOT IE7 on WP7) is more than capable of browsing the big pages. But we still give them something more accessible.

The same should be done for older browsers. Compare Wikipedia on Chrome and how it acts on IE 5.5, or even 3.0. They have great compatibility but the users of those browsers have to get a worse experience. Regardless, I have to agree with Wikipedia in not using a bunch of hacks to get the site looking the same in all versions of IE and old browsers.

The very idea of making a modern ‘web 2.0’ site look and act exactly the same IE6 is utterly ridiculous. Should I start making games that work in older hardware because of bugs and obscurities I find in the video hardware/drivers?