Time to bite the bullet?

Time to bite the bullet?
According to this week's stats, here is the evhead™ reader browser breakdown:



















Browser		HitsPercentage
IE 5.x294039  82.01%
Navigator 4.x3704510.33%
IE 4.x95332.66%
Other70061.95%
Navigator 3.x43261.21%
Navigator 6.x  26490.74%
Navigator 5.x26060.73%
Opera12590.35%
IE 3.x700.02%
Navigator 2.x180.01%
Lynx40.00%
NCSA Mosaic00.00%
IE 2.x00.00%


A surprising number of IE5.x users. (Maybe I shouldn't visit my own site so much? ;) The 10% Netscape 4 users is the main contingent I'd be shooing away if I implemented WaSP's Browser Upgrade campaign. I really despise designing for Netscape 4, so I'd be glad to do my small part to obsolete it from the hard drives of this planet (while still loving the people who come to visit with it! :). Of course, Evhead is pretty insignificant and reaches a mostly tech-savvy crowd. I could do a lot more good on Blogger, but part of the beauty of Blogger is that you can update your site from someone else's machine or an Internet cafe. Kinda hard to require a browser upgrade first.


I like what WaSP is proposing. (If you haven't read it yet, it's to deny access to your site from non-standards-compliant browsers -- basically everything 4.x or older -- and encourage them to upgrade.) It's time to bite the bullet. It's the kind of bullet you always hope the other guy will bite first -- at least when it comes to currently functioning sites. But when it comes to building new things, as people are going through the hell that is implementing sites for new and old browsers, this campaign may give people the justification they need to say, "Screw it!" With a line of JavaScript they can end the misery Netscape 4 is causing them and not feel nearly as badly about it as they otherwise would have.