Don Marti

Sat 18 Aug 2012 06:46:33 AM PDT

Anyone using old MSIE here?

It doesn't look as if many of you are really using versions of Microsoft Internet Explorer before version 8. Up-to-date browsers support the q tag, but, as Stacey Cordoni wrote in 2006, Because of IE/Win’s lack of support for the Q tag, the Q tag is not used by many web designers or web authors.

(You should see the quotation, the part after the comma in the previous sentence, inside quotation marks. On old versions of MSIE, before version 8 fixed it, the quotation marks don't show up.)

It looks like most of my traffic that seems to be from old MSIE is just spam scripts pretending to be old MSIE. Here's a vintage browser:

"Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 4.01; Digital AlphaServer 1000A 4/233; Windows NT; Powered By 64-Bit Alpha Processor)"

Looks like it just did a GET on the home page and a POST to the comment spamtrap. So user experience in that browser is not going to be a priority.

I know the User-Agent is probably fake, but I almost want to believe in the DIGITAL MARKETING POWER GURU who's actually been running this thing all these years. Maybe the inventor of web comment spam just paid me a call.

Anyway, if you want to use a version of MSIE earlier than 8 on this site, you will probably start seeing quoted text that doesn't make sense because of the q problem. I don't want to join the browser of the week club, but I want to get rid of the typewriter quotes, too. It might make sense to upgrade.