BRINK is a creative digital agency pushing boundaries in web, mobile, social, video, and even indie film.

This is our blog. A place to cheer the successes and lament the failures. To give wisdom and share experiences. Sometimes it's business, sometimes it's pleasure, but it's always through the eyes of an agency living on the BRINK.

Enjoy!

Microsoft announced that our creative capabilities would increase by 20%.

Seems unlikely that a single announcement from a Fortune 100 company could impact a small boutique agency like ours in that way, but last week it happened.

Here is something you might not know about website development, different browsers sometimes have different rules for building websites to operate properly when viewed by them. There is a community (W3C) that creates specifications for how HTML and CSS (the languages we use to build websites) are to be coded from a developer side and rendered from a browser side. This process of adopting official standards can be painfully slow, so often browser developers will take one of two actions to institute some fun and interesting technologies they see on the horizon: (1) they will go ahead and institute a proposed standard even though it is not yet officially adopted which often makes that standard become “unofficially but pretty much officially” adopted or (2) will come up with their own way to handle it that does not and will not be included in any standard.

The problem with the web is that you want your site to accessible by all of your potential users. This means you have to anticipate one chunk of your users using Firefox, another Internet Explorer, another Chrome, another Safari, and a few using other smaller browsers, and be sure to deliver a professional and functional site (or in the demanding client / creative director’s case - a site that looks the same down to the pixel on every browser). These days all of the browsers do a pretty good job of sticking to standards to make it easy on us developers. In the case of Firefox and Chrome, updated versions of their rendering engine are automatically pushed to the clients on a regular basis keeping them cutting edge.

There has always been one black sheep in this ecosystem and that is Microsoft. This is for a multitude of reasons. Microsoft has often taken an attitude of doing things their own way rather than sticking to standards. This culture is changing quite a bit and their newest browser versions are doing a much better job. However, this leads to the next point: Internet Explorer is rarely updated.

The way MS has approached their browser is to pre-package it with their OS (and on a software level, it is very integrated) and then spend years working on the next version. Once the next version is available, the user has to go out of their way to find it and download it. Contrast this to the Chrome, which is releasing an updated version every few months quietly to users in the back end.

To this day, we still see up to 3% of our users using IE6 (10 year old browser) and up to 15% using IE7 (5 year old browser). We chose to drop support for IE6 about a year ago, but having to support IE7 has easily taken 20% of our productivity away. That is 20% of our client’s budget wasted on technical tweaking rather than creative pursuit. That is also a 20% that eats into our profit margins in some instances as we are sometimes stumped by issues with IE7 that require resources above and beyond what we bill to solve.

That brings us to the big announcement. Microsoft is going to be auto-forcing users to upgrade to the latest version of IE. That means BRINK will be dropping support for IE7 as well. This exciting news means that BRINK will have more budget and time to devote to pushing the envelope and turning heads with the creative on our web projects.

Thank you Microsoft.

(Source: brink.com)

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