swa66 - 12:38 pm on Nov 17, 2008 (gmt 0)

Old versions of browsers (like e.g. IE6) are a curse to those developing websites. It's lack of support for even basic CSS1 (dating back itself from 1999) and trivial thing like selectors from CSS2 are a major problem in getting the web to evolve. Add to it the unwillingness of MSFT to fix even the most glaring (non-security/non-lawsuit) bugs. A lot of these bugs have been given names over the years (3px jog, guillotine, double margin, the broken box model, the lack of support from auto margins, ...) And nobody else can fix them as we lack the source code to do so properly ...

Now Firefox: the drop of support is a good thing as it'll prompt people to switch to the next version. This will cause us to have to worry less about the old version (something MSFT never achieved with the horror of IE6). The other browsers using the old gecko engine well they have a choice: getting stuck in the middle ages and continuing the support themselves (and -for all I care getting ignored by web developers so slowly they'll see their browser not being able to handle what's out there), or they can adapt and upgrade to another rendering engine: webkit (used by chrone and safari), or the newer gecko, or make their own better one. I'm not sure if opera's engine can easily be used.

In the end open souce allows for more choices. Now that doesn't mean some of them are good. And my vote is to let the old gecko die a somewhat swift death. Freeing web masters from havng to deal with how stuff renders in it.