October 4, 2002
Sorry! Getty Images is not able to use your browser.
At one point in the not so distant past, I would have ripped a bloody strip off of any site that blocked or discouraged certain browsers or platforms. Lynx was the baseline for accessibility, as far as I was concerned. In fact, I distinctly remember giving the designers and developers of the gettyone.com site a double-barrelled shot of “wtf” about a year and a half ago for shutting out Netscape 4 Mac browsers. I was in the employ of Getty Images at the time and felt compelled to offer as much constructive criticism as I could. Especially, considering that they obviously didn’t know what the hell they were doing in the first place. Of course, nobody listened, but it felt better getting it out of my system nevertheless. Today, I can almost forgive a company or individual for designing a site that discourages the use of 4.x and older browsers. These browsers are evil, and we would dearly love to be rid of them once and for all. Unfortunately, they’re still entrenched in the consumer and corporate environment and won’t be completely through with them any time soon. Note that I said “almost”. Discouraging the use of certain browsers is quite different than blocking them entirely. Getty Images still blocks some of them, including the older standalone version of Netscape Navigator and text-based browsers of all flavours, as demonstrated by this oddly apologetic page on their site. Encouraging potential users of your site to upgrade their browser is commendable, providing your give them easily accessible and usable alternatives. Telling your users to download the latest and greatest browser is fine, unless your site doesn’t work in the latest and greatest browsers. Sure, the Getty Images Creative site presents itself in all its faceless sterile glory when using Internet Explorer, but… when your site implodes with spectacular consistency when using Netscape 7.0 (view screen dump) and Mozilla 1.1 (view screen dump), then you probably need to go back to the drawing board. I’ll be the first in line to admit that the sites I build aren’t perfect either. But at least they don’t haphazardly scatter their constituent widgets all over the blessed screen.
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