Gary Haran.com

Microsoft is limiting downloads of Internet Explorer 7 to Windows users who validate their licence with Windows Genuine Advantage. What they hope happens is that they’ll sell more licences or get more people to upgrade to Vista. I hope people know better and adopt the Firefox web browser.

No matter the reasons for the slow adoption of Internet Explorer 7 I can’t help but feel bad for users who don’t know any better and stick with such a sloppy mess that is version 6. It hurts us web developers too because we can’t put in practice all the newer stuff because of numerous browser crashes. We also have to put so much work in making things work.

As a fellow web developer remarked even the hotmail home page has all kinds of hacks to make IE6 work:

<div id="contentMinWidthPlaceHolderWithOutSkyScraper"> <!-- ensure the min width in IE -->

It’s pretty easy to break IE6. A simple line of Javascript does the trick and it’s not only limited to scripting. CSS can also crash the browser rather easily.

If every web developer pissed at Microsoft slowing the adoption of IE7 added this piece of code to their blog/personal projects we’d see more users grab a hold of Firefox or Microsoft changing their tune because they’d look bad.

<script>for(x in document.write){document.write(x);}

But of course that would be unethical… almost as much as abusing your monopoly.

• Take pics of themselves mooning a camera and make moo(n) cards with them.
• Hop on a plane wearing a t-shirt that says kill -9, or go to church with one saying “practice safe hex“
• Fill out your skype username in forms asking for your phone number
• Answer yes or no question with true or false

I had a meeting today for work. A developer present at the meeting thanked me out of the blue. Particularly he thanked me for encouraging him to try Ruby and RoR. He had developed systems in PHP, Java and C++ before and Ruby completely turned his view of programming on its head.

I always thought that language in programming was irrelevant until I tried Ruby. It opens capabilities of expression that I never thought possible.

I’m always happy to proselytize to a developer about the virtues of being able to express yourself in short, readable and maintainable high level language.

In every case he has an epiphany and finds programming fun again.

I even want to open books about Ruby to learn more about it on my lunch hours.