Free The Web

This is cool - what I've decided to do with this (and the other) site is create a sortof single-event way-back-machine... put together a gallery of what it was like back in 2009.

So I'm after as many examples of responses to IE6 as I can possibly find, so I can document them here.

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I'm sure it's all perfectly innocent etc, but I was fairly amused a while back (Earth Day it was) to see that Google was giving an "upgrade your browser" for IE7 but none of my other browsers. I presume it doesn't do this for IE8 :)

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Absolutely Brilliant 

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Well, first post for the year, which being March, ain't too good, but there you go.

Various things need a re-think maybe.

Rather than having lots of codes etc, maybe we'll just have one or two, and a load of links to other sites that are doing similar things.

Maybe a network of similarly motivated sites. The twitter thing needs revisiting as well - started off with a bot, but that was kindof against the whole vibe of twitter. I felt guilty the whole time. I think it might be better to... do something manual. 

Anyway, there it is. Back again etc.

LOL Looks like Zune has managed to come down with a millenium bug, 9 years late.

"After doing some poking around in the source code for the Zune's clock driver (available free from the Freescale website), I found the root cause of the now-infamous Zune 30 leapyear issue that struck everyone on New Year's Eve."

from the truly great Make magazine

In some ways, this post is just an excuse to re-post a list that turned up on Reddit today. It's a "will you please not fucking do this any more" list to Windows application developers... and every single item rings truer than a... really really true thing (that rings).

It comes from Wiseman1024 who has lived up to his name, and I'm reposting here in the time-honoured tradition of asking forgiveness rather than permission.

Along side this in the stream of newsy things that greet me every morning was this 10 things songbird does that itunes can't

Because let's face it possums, iTunes is a bit of a dog when it comes down to it... I immediately thought of this - the 5 most annoying programs on your PC, with which I heartily concur - in a nutshell:

Acrobat Reader
iTunes
Real Player
Internet Explorer
Microsoft Outlook

Each of which is an opportunity waiting to happen... (and most of which have pretty good alternatives now) - but the point (vaguely) is, you simply don't get this sort of cobblers with open-source design. As a fundamental process, it's so much more agile. So much more adaptable. A really quick study, as they say in the theatre etc.

It's something I've been noticing more and more... the latest being in response to this:

where someone's attached a router to a little robot and now it can make things from CAD designs. It's incredibly cool in its own right, but whenever I've shown it to anyone, they've come up with really interesting ideas of their own - my Brother immediately came up with "that's cool, you could use it to create detailed parts inside containers"... and insisted I give him a link, because he knows someone who make their own one, the size of sofa.

I mean the crowd-sourcing of testing and useability is one thing. (I first "got it" when I heard some MySQL people going on about somone releasing a proprietary database saying that "it hasn't been tested yet"). A thousand eyes are better than one. Unpaid fanatics are better than paid experts. Anyway, that's one thing...

... the thing that's the real killer though, the real killer-feature... the real mouse vs dinosaur thing... is the ability to create little memetic/developmental ecosystems. The ability to crowd-source imagination.

We can live with annoyances... god knows, we have been for a long time now... but any "successful" application that doesn't crowd-source imagination is basically an opportunity waiting to happen for an application that does.

Crowd-sourced imagination is the new Intel-Inside.

Well the first faltering steps now appear to be behind us... Set up a robot so that whenever someone mentions IE6 on twitter, they're sent a little invite to join the boycott.

Most of the feedback has been good - a couple of nasty comments, but there you go. They only get one message... I hope this is ok. I don't really want to annoy people etc. It is kindof scary looking at the "sent" list and seeing my logo appearing again and again and again. If it gets to be too much I'll remove it I guess.

Anyway - because people kept following the twitterbot, I set up a human version at 

http://twitter.com/freetheweb

Which will give everyone a real live human to talk to.

http://www.free-the-web.com is now more or less completely liveish, and looking as it should in all browsers, with the possible exception of (wait for it) IE6.

looks ok I think - it's hard to tell when you've seen nothing else for the last week.

I tested it with the mult-browser tester here : http://browsershots.org - pretty cool - shows you 62 different browser combos.

This allows you to thin them down to the ones that you're going to support, and which don't work. ie: varieties of Internet Explorer...

eg: IE8...

Features you never knew you needed eh?

I feel a bit guilty about not including IE7 or IE8 in the recommended browser list - theoretically, these should work etc - but I'm running a personal vendetta of my own. Microsoft fund legal attacks against open-source - and my livelihood depends on open-source, so as far as I am concerned, Microsoft are off the radar.

Still, never mind. www.free-the-web.com includes a several bits of eye-candy on the mashup front, eg: a twitter feed of what people are twittering about IE6 right now and several graphs generated using Google's graph-drawing API and the stats feed from marketshare.hitslink.com.

todo :

• cache both of the above
• make a thing which sends a tweet to everyone (once) when they mention IE6
• start telling people that the site exists (oooh, scary)

This all started with the following post.... which I wrote about a month ago. Something had to be done. Anyway, here it is:

If you google "internet explorer pie chart", then look at the images, the very first thing... the very top of the list is this:

Right now I'm trying to put together my CV site - and it's working in all browsers except IE, and the reason it doesn't work in IE, is that if you set the opacity of an absolutely positioned element, it (and this is the magical part) removes the browser scrollbars.

Why? Why in the name of anything remotely sane would anyone want to do that?

I'm gradually coming round to the notion that I should just boycott IE. People who use it need to get used to the idea that it simply doesn't work very well... but this is supposed to be a CV site. It's supposed to showcase things working... so I'm spending a large (look at the pie chart) chunk of time that I could spend on something else, dealing with a dismal anachronism.

(Cut to) One of my favourite TED things is Clay Shirky talking about Cognitive Surplus.

It revolves around the measure of time that entire populations have free, simply to think... (and as a natural extension, create, build etc). In the late 20th century television took up a lot of this potential, but that is starting to change. "The Internet-connected population watches roughly a trillion hours of TV a year. That's about five times the size of the annual U.S. consumption. One per cent of that is 98 Wikipedia projects per year worth of participation.".

He's inspired (and is inspiring) about the possibilities created by this sudden explosion of available, collective intelligence. .. and inevitably, being a web developer, I see the hours, days, weeks, months I waste with Internet Explorer in these terms.

Internet explorer is a crashing waste of cognitive surplus... and more specifically, it's a crashing waste of cognitive surplus to MY industry. My people. The people who are building this digital revolution that's unfolding before our eyes. It's wasting our time... if Internet Explorer didn't exist, we'd be able to do... not twice exactly, but... 10%? 20%? 30%? more than we're currently doing.

This is holding us back.

There has got to be a way of stopping this. The reason that pie chart is at the top of google is because every web developer that has to deal with it feels the same. This is our internet... we live in it and we built most of it... if anyone can get rid of this thing it should be us.