My how technology has changed. In the early days, we had to hand-code everything ourselves: sortable table columns, animated visual graphs, WYSIWYG editors, form builders, pop-up help boxes, etc. That’s why we don’t have any of that in the old MailChimp.
Now, there’s a plugin for just about everything. It’s allowed us to make huge improvements in MailChimp v3, and fast.
Instead of wasting time on minutia, like how to make a checkbox clickable even if you just click the text to the side of it, we just plug that stuff in. Instead of using calculus and SVG and databases and Flash to generate a graph, we just plug graphs in. Another cool thing is AJAX. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s basically a way to make web applications run fast in your browser (kind of like software that’s installed on your computer’s hard drive). MailChimp v3 is so much faster than v2, thanks to AJAX.
Now we can focus on making email marketing better.
The downside of all this cool technology is that not all browsers are supported perfectly (the more things change, the more they stay the same). So we had to decide which browsers we’d support, and which ones to leave behind.