I found myself at my printer’s this morning waiting for a press check. If you have ever done a press check you know it is both incredibly worth while and a sometimes frustrating waste of time. You need to be there to make sure the job is printing the way you want. It’s your last chance to make adjustments. “Can I go a little deeper on the magenta?” I asked. “To warm up her face?” Sure, but I have to wait a bit while they do that.
That waiting kills me. And I knew I would have it, so I brought something I was supposed to read on my thumbdrive. But the only available-to-me mac in the shop was the dinosaur on OS9 and my thumbdrive was incompatible. I know, all your jaws dropped, but if you think about it, it makes sense for them to have a workstation on OS9 if even only one of their long time clients is still sending them legacy files. So instead of work, I thought I would check our blog and see if I could do some blog hopping and commenting.
Our home page, on I.E. 5.0 for the mac. Yikes!
But this is what I found when I went to our site! This is what our site looks like on an old version of Internet Explorer. Yikes. And the choose your mood feature didn’t work.
Our designers upgrade their browsers immediately. (I always stay one step behind them so we can test on both versions in the studio.) If you don’t upgrade your browsers you will eventually start having a lot of problems, especially as all new sites are launching in CSS and so many sites are converting their old design to CSS or at least a hybrid. And at first you won’t even know you are having problems. Things will load slower and with gaps. You may not know… until it looks like this.
To be fair, this is an egregious example. This is a browser so old I can’t imagine that anyone is still on it. I couldn’t even access my webmail on it. But sometimes with examples you have to be hyperbolic.
Staying updated is important. As a rule I never jump in on the first upgrade of any system software. I let the gotta-have-it-first-bunch work their way through the bugs. I prefer to wait a few months until whatever needs to be patched is patched. Plus, with system upgrades, invariably some of my essential software chokes and suddenly half my fonts go missing or my accounting software freezes — things I have to stop everything to deal with.
And stopping everything to deal with crashes makes me really, really cranky.
So for some things I say, if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. My studio is still on OSX 10.4. I know, I know. 10.5 is the coolest and Oh, the features! But our essential time tracking software would require an upgrade and I hate the new version. LOATHE it. Every time they upgrade it it gets worse for us. I still miss the version that ran on system 9.
So we are waiters. But not with browsers. Never with browsers. Except for me (see above).
Anyone else wait to upgrade? Or do you jump right in?
11 Comments
I know how you feel! I refuse to upgrade to Windows Vista because from what I’ve seen, it’s very buggy (good fodder for the Mac commercials, though). I’m not even willing to upgrade now that they have service pack 1. My Windows XP is working just fine, thank you very much, plus so many of our clients are on XP that it would be silly of me to switch.
The problem will come when it comes time to purchase a new machine. I’ll have to purchase a separate OS… argh!
And that screenshot… my goodness!
I’m the slow poke. I prefer version 2 of anything to version 1. My PDA is ten years old. As far as I’m concerned it still syncs to the latest Outlook and if I update anything on it or on the computer, the syncing is flawless. Why move to something else with its inherent downtime when I have a functional system that I’m comfortable with? Besides, thanks to it, I have found two crashing bugs in shipped Office software that my husband had to then go in and put in their bug tracking software so that it got fixed in one of their SP releases and next version releases.
We used to have test machine farms where we’d keep all target OS’s and IE’s around just so we could sanity check what’s going on.
I wish I were still using Word 5. It had all the features I might EVER use and never crashed. And, I knew all the tricks!
I now use Word 2004 for Mac and am a relative amateur.
As Dire Straits once sung:
I want my…
I want my…
I want my 5.0
I feel the same way! But it’s also frustrating when some people view websites on really old systems and then wonder why everything looks whacky. We have about 7 PCs in the house and they all have difference versions of Windows.
But what really gets me is when people don’t upgrade their IE or other browser. Sometimes this can make a huge difference in how a site will look.
And I could go on and on about upgrading my photo editing tools. There are some that, in my opinion, are perfect and should never change but they still end up with a newer version. *sigh*
I’ll even tell on myself… I have a desktop here that still performs perfectly but only has 10mg harddrive and is over 10 years old. I’m rather shocked it will even boot anymore haha.
A huge secret hidden deeply within my closet… a CLASSIC WebTv! Scary isn’t it.
Abi, I’m not looking forward to the Vista switch either. I’ve heard too many horror stories about it.
Ahem, Abi and Haven. You *have* to upgrade to Vista. Ha. Like I would say otherwise?!
I refuse!
Just the word Vista sent me out of my PC world and into a Mac. I couldn’t take another Windows change. I know, I know, Macs OS software changes as well, but oy! Windows! I just couldn’t do it.
Welcome to the Mac, Elizabeth. I was thrilled when I heard you crossed over. It’s a better world.
I’m afraid of Mac. I know my way around the PC so well. I’m not sure I’m ready to face the switch.
Haven, there’s hope for you.
Elizbo, you live in the same city as I do, so your defection alarms me.
Emily, sigh! One day, one day…