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It's fantastic irony that my iPhone 4S gets this message on a page about not being elitist:

"If you want to ensure the best experience, please install a browser that was developed after 2009."




Why the hell can't that guy's website support browsers developed before 2009? It's all text. Is that crazy italic on link hover (great bit of usability, that) not supported by pre-HTML5 browsers?

Maybe it's not blind elitism, maybe it's forethought elitism.


Meh. It's not that big of a deal. You can still see the content and the content is done logically so there aren't any crazy layout issues in plaintext.

Also, this seems to be happening because of his breakpoint at width <= 1024px I believe. Confirmed this on both Chrome dev and Firefox Aurora.


Actually, it comes down to font handling (I'm the guy with the site). Webfonts, CSS3 positioning, and HTML5 semantic are not supported in browsers older than 2009. So you can read the stuff but it doesn't necessarily look as good.


While banning Safari is very strange, the author acknowledges the browser issue:

"I know many would fault me for [not supporting IE] on TNL.net but the design deci­sion of not sup­port­ing older inter­net explorer browsers was based on ana­lyt­ics data that showed me that only 5% of my over­all audi­ence was using those"

Remember, ignoring IE users is not necessarily about elitism, but can also be a financially sound decision.


It can also kill his future growth if he doesn't keep whitelisting each end every new browser signature (for find a better way to lock out old browser users).

It's also not a good idea to be condescending to your users. The tone of that message is anything but friendly. The "banned" message mentioned in another comment even less so.


You should install a different browser.


Shouldn't have to. Safari is perfectly adequate. Heck, I get the message on v20 of Google Chrome.


I get the same message in the latest Firefox.


He might want to update that to "...developed after 2009 and released before 2011".




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