I decided to try putting in "www.google.com"

Seems it worked...
(see attachment in previous post)

People generally use whatever works for them. Punishing them is not an effective way to encourage  them to change. If websites just stop jumping through all those hoops they allegedly do to support older browsers, people will eventually migrate over to what works. That's how it's always worked in the past. Those people who are unwilling (or can't for technical reasons) upgrade will become a new market and income opportunity for those sites that do continue to support their browser versions.

Web developers and hosts need to get over themselves a little. This isn't the 90s any more. The web's era of the child-king webmaster and the techno-elite is largely over. The Internet has already become a commodity. And it will soon become just another public utility - no different than electricity, water, and sewage treatment. Time to get with the new reality folks!

Openness and 'come as you are' has always been the rule of the web. How is this "go dark" initiative any different from the thinking of certain governments when they propose to establish an official web access client? And are these people who propose the web "go dark" the same people protesting closed ecosystems whenever Apple and Microsoft attempt to play that game? Or who rebel against any attempt to dictate to them how they operate their websites?

If so, it's a sad state of affairs.

I can see a time in the not too distant future when I put an old school Fido BBS system on a Raspberry Pi and walk away from all this browser nonsense once and for all. And after talking to a few other folks, I now know I'm not the only one thinking about doing it.

I can't count how many times some stupid browser detection rules caught me as collateral damage - either too new a version (after a new release), or Opera etc. I typically tweet how lame they are, and never go back.

First, if you are going to block IE 8 then you ought to block older Firefox, early chrome, people who have older smartphones (how dare they not buy a new one every 6 months!) and pretty much every release of Safari. And you probably will end up blocking people on Linux or BSD by mistake - or people using secure/solid IE derivative browsers. And everyone on XP that can't run FF or chrome. That's a lot of people to call names and antagonise.

And blocking people on older computers might make sense if you're selling only to the digital crowd, but even then, be careful. You might be surprised what people are using outside the "i have the latest computer to impress my friends" crowd.

If you can't put in the effort to support ie 6, 7, 8 (or opera) then that is fine. Understandable considering some of the hacks on has to do, the knowledge it requires and all the testing effort. But you don't have to be an ass about it and cast judgment on people and rub their noses in it.

And if it is to put some of the annoying new features of modern web design that make a site hard to use, navigate and impossible to bookmark, well then, I have no sympathy for you.

Websites ought to be designed for their users, not used for their designer to compete in the cool leagues of featuritis...

oops, soapbox alert. getting off

Irritates the utter hell out of me...and at the moment, I am highly strung and sleep deprived, so could go on a rant for many many hours, so I shall shush now