Concrete The Studio

by Andrew Embler

…For editing, at least. Sites built with Concrete5 will work in any browser, if they’re coded for it. But the editing interface and the dashboard, both of which feature some pretty complex interface work, are only supported in:

• Safari 2+
• Internet Explorer 7+
• Firefox 2

Other browsers, like Camino and Opera, will likely support Concrete5 just fine. But IE 6 will not. Not even close. As I was mulling over this blog post I caught another one on the same topic. It seems that Apple is doing exactly the same thing with their forthcoming suite of web applications, MobileMe. 

Not bad company to be in, and necessary. The sheer amount of time that goes into debugging things for one specific, eight-year-old browser is mind-boggling. However, dropping IE 6 support is not without its pitfalls: the sheer amount of time saved might overwhelm the typical developer, as she finds herself with much less to do and much less stress about the web in general. The key is to fill this time with something productive. Try tending a garden; read a lengthy Russian novel; teach yourself Spanish; take a cooking class.

(Oh, and install that IE 8 beta in some of your free time - it’ll be released before you know it. And Firefox 3 just came out, so you’d better download that. And Opera 9.5. And Safari 4 is on the horizon.)

Maybe you’d better read a shorter novel after all.