Not everything’s new and shiny
We recently added polls to TestingBlues, so of course I immediately went to exercise my voting right – only to be met with a badly rendered and ugly poll sitting at the bottom of the page.
Viewing a TestingBlues poll in IE6
After a bit of digging, I found out the fault’s mine: I use Internet Explorer 6. The polling feature – provided as a 3rd party plugin – doesn’t support IE6 properly. However, we have decided to keep the polling functionality for now as we believe polling functionality for 90% of users is better than no functionality at all.
In other words, we have tested this website, but made the decision to ship with a known problem. We hope readers now understand why – and aren’t under the perception that we don’t test properly. After all, that would be some irony…
Postscript: It’s my choice to use IE6 of course. It’s important to use (and test against!) older and sometimes unpopular versions of software – simply because some users may not have the luxury of the choice of a newer, shinier release. After all, there’s a lot of IE6 users out there: check out some recent usage charts on http://www.betanews.com/article/Statistics-Firefox-35-surpassed-IE7-in-global-usage-share-last-week/1261428919. This did make me think about browser usage data. Perhaps my own usage of IE 6 perturbs these metrics, so ultimately I’m testing software purely because I use it. Sort of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle applied to software: an uncomfortable thought somewhat mitigated by the vanishingly small impact I have…
