Recently in Cynicism Category

I have a confession to make. I am a terrible, insensitive web developer.

I was working on a brand new, snazzy HTML 5 design for my personal web site, but could not get it to look half decent in Internet Explorer 6 (a 10 year old browser at the time of this writing) and Internet Explorer 7 (a 5 year old browser) without bogging down my web page with hacks and work arounds.

After wrestling with the markup and CSS for weeks, I finally threw in the towel and decided that people using IE6 and IE7 do not deserve to see my new web site.

I added the following configurations to Apache in httpd.conf (.htaccess works too)

RewriteEngine On

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !upgrade*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "MSIE 6"
RewriteRule . upgrade.php [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !upgrade*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_USER_AGENT} "MSIE 7"
RewriteRule . upgradeagain.php [L]

Which serves up the following 2 pages depending on the browser being used by the visitor.

Internet Explorer 6 users are treated to Tandy Kitteh:

While Internet Explorer 7 users are treated to baby IE7 Kitteh:

I believe a lot of the kool-aid in the corporate world isn't brewed by those who wish to intentionally mislead the small people. It's just that the big people are so far removed from reality that they get unreasonably optimistic.