Newfangled is very happy - thrilled - to announce a new browser standard that will raise our common browser denominator in order to afford a much more robust web design palette. We are formally dropping support for all Internet Explorer 5.x browsers. Somewhere Jim Hendrickson is rejoicing. Why all the hoopla over dropping a browser that's over six years old? Well it's because of you, Mr. Apple System 9 holdout man. Even up until a year ago, we still had clients who had no options other than Internet Explorer 5.x, or worse, an old version of Netscape, because they were still using Mac System 9 rather than System X. We sympathized with the Mac world. Making the jump to System X was not easy. Everything changed, and it wasn't cheap to upgrade existing hardware and software - never-mind enduring the learning curve of a new operating system. Because Newfangled specializes in partnering with small to mid-size advertising agencies and design firms, we had several clients and many prospects that still used Mac System 9. We were not willing to completely abandon their latest available browser. Extending our support of I.E. 5.x well beyond its natural lifespan carried with it a heavy cost. It made our job of supporting sites across all of these browsers significantly more difficult, and it put a downward pressure on our design options. This cost was magnified given that I.E. 5.x browsers were full of bugs and only partially supported CSS, which created all sorts of weird and unpredictable display problems. Sites that performed perfectly in all the current browsers could break badly in I.E. 5.x. Fixing such problems was never a matter of a simple tweaks. Sometimes it required significant design changes, or multiple versions of CSS files and templates to fix the site, all for the sake of the 1.33% of users that still used that old browser.

Now that we've dropped support for this browser, we can take that same effort and apply it to adopting new features and capabilities, supported in the current crop of browsers. Better design and easier to build - that's what I'm talkin' about!


The content formatter is one of the most useful features of Newfangled's content management system. This allows basic website text formatting using familiar word processing tools. Unfortunately, this feature has not been available on the Mac, due in large part to lack of Mac web browser support. Newfangled's new browser standard has allowed us to upgrade our system to support our formatter on the Mac! For those agencies that have been helping their clients with website content without the availability of the formatter, this is a major improvement.


The Browser War is over and relations between the browsers are improving. We can all hope I.E. 7 will continue to move in this direction and that the open source browsers like Firefox will continue to compete, forcing I.E. into stricter standards compliance and promoting exciting innovation. After all, nothing is more fundamental to our use of the web than opening up our favorite web browser.