Ev Williams and Biz Stone launched Branch this week and as you might expect, not much attention has been paid to older browsers, but exactly how little is a surprise to me.

Last year I took a look at how the shop window of the web was changing so that not every user gets the same experience. Specifically, we were seeing a lot of sites not giving flourish and flair to users on older browsers: things such as rounded corners, drop shadow and so on.

So it is interesting to see the founders of Twitter launching a site that doesn’t cater for IE6, IE7 or IE8. At all.

As you can see, IE6 almost looks better than IE7, and IE8 was a black screen for me (although this could be teething problems). Viewing with IE9 shows the full site, with a warning for the user to upgrade their browser.

It’s an interesting move by Branch, but not one I would emulate for my projects. I suspect this is more down to intended audiences: Branch wants to make the site look yummy and interesting for people who work in the tech industry, in the media, and probably not people who work in accounts departments of biscuit factories (who else uses IE6?…).

UPDATE

One of the developers at Branch has been kind enough to point out that it’s not quite as audacious a move as I had thought. Looks like Adobe Browser couldn’t fetch all 3 CSS files, leading to the completely borked screenshot.

He sent this one and I have taken another shot from BrowserLab below:

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Filed under: Coding,News,Social Media,The Future of Code - @ August 15, 2012 4:52 pm