Ok, I have a question for Izea. It’s about the SocialSpark website. You see, I tried to log into my account there earlier, but the site told me I couldn’t do so unless I have Firefox or IE7. IE7 is NOT always compatible with Windows XP, I ought to know, I’ve had to help customers roll back to IE6 on more than one occasion. IE7 works great with Vista, in fact, IE7 is the lowest version of IE that will work on Vista.
However, forcing people to upgrade browsers is not cool. You don’t know where someone is accessing their account from. They may not have the option for downloading to the computer or installing anything on the computer. Frankly, I think it’s a bad move by Izea to have it set up so you have to use Firefox or IE7 to access their website.
Popularity: 54% [?]
Hi there,
That’s a great question and I’m happy to answer it.
First compatibility. IE6 has a huge number of standards compatibility problems, problems in terms of being compatible with globally accepted standards such as those from the W3C. To deliver a site as graphically intensive as SocialSpark within IE 6 would have meant a great deal more work to make the site compliant with IE6’s flaws and inconsistencies. We had to develop less browser hacks to get SocialSpark working in IE7 and the Mozilla based web browsers enabling us to deliver to you faster.
Second, security. SocialSpark is a social network. In using the network you are going to come into contact with people and websites that we have no control over. IE6 is tragically insecure and did a lot to propel us into a world where Phishing, identity theft through session hijacking, and sneaky spyware installs on peoples machines are common and standard business practices now for online criminals. IE7 is more secure, far more secure, than IE6 ever was. It’s a total redesign of Microsoft’s browser and was designed from the ground up to support things like Anti-Phishing initiatives, greater user control over what add-ons and plug ins get installed behind the scenes, and support for Extended SSL to further protect your identity online. By electing to support that platform we are electing to provide a safer browsing experience for all users. In addition we really don’t want to encourage people to use an insecure browser to connect to any site on the Internet if they are accessing their account from a computer not under their control (as you pointed out).
Third is support. While IE6 is still supported as part of the operating systems it ships with, WIndows Upgrade will force install IE7 on legal copies of Windows today. Sure you can downgrade, but the claim that IE7 is NOT always compatible with XP is something of an overstatement. The number of XP compatibility issues with IE7, assuming you run Windows update and have patched your machine - which everyone should do - is negligeable according to Microsoft’s Knowledge Base. IE7 however is, to my knowledge, not compatible with pirated installs of XP but that’s not a good business reason for us supporting IE6 instead.
Finally, userbase. The decision to not support IE6 was done after looking at our userbase. Of our active userbase outside of SocialSpark, 34% of our users work with Internet Explorer. Looking at the brake down of those users, only 4% use IE 6. We encourage all our users to adopt more standards compliant, more secure and generally better browsers.
I hope that explains our reasons behind the move some more.