While eating turkey and cranberry sauce this day after Thanksgiving, there’s another thing I will be thankful for that has nothing to do with leftovers. It’s the total elimination of Internet Explorer 6 from your mom and dad’s desktop computer.
This Friday, November 25 (and not soon enough) has officially been dubbed “Update Your Parents’ Browser Day,” according to Alexis Madrigal over at The Atlantic, who made the proclimation yesterday in a blog post. While you’re home visiting mom and dad for the holidays, he suggests, update their Internet Explorer and Firefox browsers to the most recent versions.
“No more excuses! These browsers must be upgraded. Do it for the web developers. Do it for the designers. Do it for your parents. On Friday, November 25, every old web browser must go,” he writes (including the bold for emphasis).
Having just completed the redesign and launch of this here website I can’t agree more with the importance of this grassroots campaign. Developers and web designers go to great lengths to write code that supports the wide variety of current browsers out there in the world. Ensuring that fonts and boxes look good on Google’s Chrome browser and Microsoft’s Internet Explorer can mean hours of coding. So it’s no help to us maintainers of the web when you toss in Firefox 3.5 or IE 6.
Not to mention, you’re all missing out on a lot of great new browser features and security updates. So do your part, update your parents’ browser on November 25.
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