I pretty much think the war is retarded and that people need to get a new hobby or something. Whenever I design sites I make sure they run correctly on IE7 (I don’t even worry about IE6 anymore), Firefox 2 (FF3 coming soon), Safari (which I hate) and Opera.

BTW: I love this site. Keep up the good work.

While IE has gotten better with security, that does nothing to excuse the period of time when it was a big open screen door hanging half off it’s frame. Microsoft is this huge billion dollar a year company and they let that issue fester far too long. Too little too late sums it up I think.

It seems like Microsoft is more concerned with protecting the RIAA, MPAA and US DoJ than the customers who fund thier businesses. Then that whole “Open-Source” issue comes up… that’s a biggie.

It took the serious threat of a contender like Mozilla at thier door before they did anything. Honestly, if IE was not embedded in your OS, would you choose it over all the others on the shelf at the local OfficeMax?

There’s an image floating around of what the iPod’s packaging would look like if the Microsoft marketing team designed it. Hits the nail on the head, funny part is that MS’s marketing dept DID do it. Google it, no joke, a few days after it leaked a MS guy fessed to it…

So that being said, it’s a trust issue. They lost mine. So for now, I’m running FireFox on a WinME machine. I’m sure that some day I’ll make a move to linux, I’ve played with it in the past, but I’m not ready to make that move yet. I still shudder remembering the switch from Win\DOS machines to Win95.

So now that that is out of the way… that’s where I’m coming from. And if a visitor comes to my page and hits this “Microsoft Internet Explorer is not compatible with the page you are trying to view…”, “Please consider switching to one of these fine alternatives…” The less computer experienced might find themselves with questions why someone would do that… maybe they’ll switch too. Being blocked by my page may start them on the road to alternative programs… a lot of people do not realize that many times you can get a comparable (if not better) program for no or sometimes little cost.

It’s a scenario that has been played time and time again, remember back in the day? There was Intel, Cyrix, and AMD. Intel busted Cyrix down, and put a serious hurt on AMD. They defined an industry with thier Pentium Chips. But then AMD stared nipping on thier heels and now… Well, I’m a devoted AMD user. I will not own an Intel chip for as long as I can. David and Goliath? Either you throw your chips in with the big brute that powers over everything in it’s path… or you go with the little guy that uses cunning and nimbleness.

Just my opinion… like it or not, I have mine- you’re welcome to yours.

So, lock out a number of potential customers

If you do get in just shows that he has Flash skills and no indication if he can actually code decent HTML/CSS/etc

His site has a best viewd at 1024 x 768 – dont dictate to users their screen sizes

And as stated his entire rationale seems flawed (tough I have’t fully investigated sparkle)

If you change the User agent string in IE the site runs fine

Flash isn’t exactly portable. Sure it runs on nearly evetything today, but if a new OS comes out tomorrow that doesn’t have flash support, they are hosed.

In short, all he has done is ensure I’d never recommend his services to anyone, and made my already low respect for Flash get lower.

And Palli, no it’s not right to limit any web site to IE only, but that that’s a different issue. Competent web developers can target all the relevant browsers.

Wonder if anyone has bothered given him feedback? though personally I couldn’t care less and just move on to a site I can access. There is *nothing* on that site that warrents me actually going through hoops to access it

But that’s ok, right?