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Internet Explorer 6 Users. Help Us Help You

With the preview launch of our Control Panel, if you’re an Internet Explorer 6 user, it’s probably time we had a chat. And if you don’t want to talk to us, then please do us a favour and seek professional help before it’s too late. Because we care about you a lot, and it’s tough watching you put yourself through this.

The Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 web browser was ~~unleashed~~ released to the world more than ten years ago.

As we were designing the OpenSRS Control Panel, we made a decision, after ten long years, to drop support of Internet Explorer 6. Despite the very small reseller base this would affect, we still struggled with the idea that we were finally leaving some of them behind if they continue to use Microsoft’s infamous version of this browser.

Before we get too far into it, let’s put things in perspective with a quick overview of visitors to the opensrs.com website:

In the last 30 days, the OpenSRS website welcomed 40,887 visitors. Of these visitors, 20.91% were using the Internet Explorer web browser. Of those visits, 3.23% were using infamous version 6.

Using these numbers, it means that we’re no longer going to support 0.68% of visitors to our website (276 people) if they report a browser-related problem.

No customer-focused company wants to ignore concerns of its users, but at some point, this day of tough love had to come. On the plus side, there’s no downside to upgrading.

In fact, here are just some of the pros associated with taking the time to upgrade:

It’s free and doesn’t cost anything to upgrade.
There are multiple browsers available to choose from.
Better security and protection
Faster web browsing, Faster browser startup
Your computer will not crash as often
Support for the latest web standards

Depending on your connection speed to your ISP, you could be enjoying a shiny new web browser in less than five minutes!

Moving the world off Internet Explorer 6

If you still don’t believe us, look at the efforts Microsoft, the developer of the browser. Even they don’t want you to use it! They’ve been putting lots of effort into migrating IE6 users to a safer, faster, more secure browser:

The Internet can be a dangerous place. It’s important to protect yourself by using the latest version of your web browser. Anything less would be outright crazy. If you’re one of those people frustrated by choices and would rather be told what to do, then go download Mozilla Firefox and install it right now (and remember to keep it upgraded!)

Update

Perhaps the continued use of Microsoft IE6 can be attributed to the idea that not many people know what a browser is?

After writing this post, a friend directed me to this YouTube video, shot in Times Square, New York, by Google in 2009.

It’s a bit dated today in 2011, but it makes a good point that lots of average Janes and Joes simply don’t know what a web browser is. At the time of filming, only 8% of people knew that a browser was an application used to view webpages, with the majority of those surveyed believing the browser was the search engine itself.

The image used in this post was licensed from iStockPhoto.

Tooting the Horn of an Internet Legend: Peter Tattam

Before Microsoft had the good sense to build Internet support into its Windows operating system, there was Peter Tattam and his software, Trumpet Winsock.

Personally, I don’t think of myself as being old enough to talk about how tough we had it during the “old days”, but man, the Internet sure was a different place 17 years ago.

At the risk of offending the technical veterans with some elementary details, Winsock (a mashup of the words Windows + socket) equipped the Microsoft Windows operating system with the ability to ‘speak’ the Internet Protocol (TCP/IP). Back in the “olden” days of 1995, Windows computers were often not even connected to the local office network, never mind the globally-connected Internet.

The Trumpet Winsock software was distributed under a shareware, “try before you buy” license, which means you could use it on a trial basis, but after the period expired, you were legally required to pay for it. The problem was that people rarely paid for the software after the trial period ended.

Trumpet Winsock was hugely popular in the days of Windows 3.1, mostly due to the inclusion of the software in many popular computer magazines and distribution by Internet Service Providers. The wide distribution channel these magazines offered should have been a good thing for Tattam Software; Internet users signed up by the hundreds, and then thousands, and then hundreds of thousands. But ultimately, although they used the software, many Internet users didn’t care or didn’t bother to register (and pay) for it.

In the end, Peter and his company received very little financial compensation for what many would agree was software that enabled a connection to a global network that has positively impacted the lives of millions.

At Tucows / OpenSRS, at our very core, we believe the Internet is the greatest agent for positive change the world has ever seen. Trumpet Winsock accelerated Internet adoption during a time when Microsoft failed to offer Internet connectivity in the OS. So, earlier this week, we wanted to thank Mr. Tattam by recognizing his efforts with Trumpet Winsock by way of a small corporate donation.

If you’re a former Trumpet Winsock user, we’d love it if you would also take a moment to thank Mr. Tattam for his hard work and dedication in building one of the most popular on-ramps to the greatest resource the world has ever seen. Donations are accepted via Paypal at the thanksfortrumpetwinsock.com website.

Holiday Hours: Good Friday, April 22, 2011

Happy Easter holidays from the OpenSRS team!

We’ll be closed this Friday April 22nd for the Easter holiday.

Our Technical Support team continues to be available 24/7 to assist you.

Please note that during this closure, there will be:

No orders or requests processed for the following TLD’s: .at, .fr, .ch, .li, .dk, .com.mx
No special processing for .ca (registrant transfers, conflicting and municipal registrations) or .eu/.be (redemptions).

Here are the hours by department:

Department	Dates and Hours
Technical Support	Regular hours
Payments	Email support: payments@opensrs.org
Compliance	Closed April 22nd (Friday)
Service Bureau	Closed April 22nd (Friday)

Special thanks for Flickr user Alanna George for licensing their colourful Easter egg shot under a creative commons license.

The Elephant In The Room

You work in an intense competitive environment. Customers are always comparing your services and your prices to others’. When you mess up, there’s a pretty good chance you’re going to get defectors. When a competitor messes up, there’s a good chance you’re going to benefit.

So what do you do when a competitor messes up big? Maybe they have a huge outage. Maybe they get caught up in a legal battle. Maybe a senior employee ends up strangling a giraffe to death. Or just smacking around a monkey.

It is really tempting to call attention to the situation and position yourself as the antidote.

Just a few warnings:

Remember that you had your own mess ups in the past and will likely have them in the future. You will have outages. Maybe you once kicked a pigeon. Avoid inviting scrutiny and retaliation that will ultimately hurt you.

Be careful not to appear too opportunistic. If you suddenly start donating 10% of your revenues to save porcupines, it might seem more exploitative than generous. Maybe not. Sometimes the outrage is so great and the opportunity is so right. Also, honesty, creativity and humor can go a long way. Just be aware of the risk.

Stay on message. You work hard to stand for something. Great service. Innovation. Reliability. If you leap to a very different message because it’s trending on Twitter, you could sacrifice clarity and you might not be playing to your own strengths.

Having said all that, a competitor’s stumble is certainly an opportunity to step up your game. Their customers are going to come looking for alternatives. Make it simple for people to switch. Pound home the benefits of your service. Do all the things you likely do anyway. Just think about using this as an excuse to do them a bit better.

New Control Panels Sneak Preview

Be careful! This is no ordinary blog post. You’re going to need some headphones with the volume turned way up and you’re going to want to be sitting down before you look at what we have to show you.

This is a post about our control panels. People say they’re ugly. This hurt our feelings at first, until we realized that over the past ten years, we’ve added more and more functionality to the control panels, without giving much thought around around how our resellers use them.

Sure, they’re powerful and since we cater to wholesale customers, they have a lot of functionality around the management of bulk domains. But feedback from newer resellers was the learning curve to the system was especially high.

We also learned through our reseller satisfaction surveys, that the design of our current control panels have been the majority of the complaints.

So that’s what we’ve been working on.

These quick video intros and previews are snapshots from our current development environment. That means some things might look different once the control panels are officially released. But we’re coming down the home stretch now and we just couldn’t wait to show them to you.

We believe these control panels, once released will go a long way in helping our resellers streamline how they register, renew, transfer, and manage their customers’ domain names and I couldn’t be happier to share them with you today.

Introducing… your new Domain control panel:

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