Recently I’ve been building up the web site to better handle cases in which the simulator simply cannot run: cases in which javascript is disabled, for instance, or cases in which the browser does not enable webgl by default. One of the more noteworthy cases are those in which the user is trying to view the simulator from an older browser that does not support WebGL, and thanks to the transformative adoption of Evergreen browsers this case almost exclusively applies to old man Internet Explorer.
To be fair, IE10 and above both appear to run simulations with acceptable performance. This will continue for as long as I care to use the technologies that they support, but I’m not really going to take it into consideration the next time I see a useful new web technology. Adoption rates for IE6 and 7 also thankfully no longer require consideration. China is exceptional, but they can go add me to their blacklist before I’ll try supporting IE6. In any case, this post does not apply to these versions. Thanks to a combination of user negligence and developer incompetence, IE8 and IE9 still holds a legitimate portion of the browser market. This fraction will reduce with time, but the case still needs to be considered. Rather than cripple the simulation, I figure: why not have some fun with it?