Norwegian Websites Declare War On IE 6

Eyvind A. Larre writes "A large and rapidly growing campaign to get users to stop using IE6 is being implemented throughout Europe. 'Leading the charge is Finn.no, an eBay-like site that is apparently the largest site for buying and selling goods in all of Norway (Finn is Norwegian for "Find"). Earlier this week, Finn.no posted a warning on its web page for visitors running IE 6. The banner, seen at right, urges them to ditch IE 6 and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.' The campaign is now spreading like fire on Twitter (#IE6), and starting to become an amazing effort by big media companies to get rid of IE6! The campaign also hit Wired some hours ago."

Comments

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[SanityInAnarchy]

If by "quite close", you mean "still the least standards-compliant browser available", you're right.

Why not simply encourage them to download Firefox? Or Chrome? Or Opera? Or Safari? Or freakin' iCab, if they're on an old Mac?

Upgrading to IE7 is just going to make them do the same again when IE8 comes around, and it's still going to force me to boot Windows just to test in IE. If I was in that position, I would actively block IE6, and have a large banner for IE7 users suggesting Firefox.

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[Tubal-Cain]

20/100 on the Acid3 is "close"?
Webkit and Presto got 41/100 and 46/100 respectivly when Acid3 was released (now they both pass with flying colors).

Unless all of IE's compliance improvements have been in areas not covered by Acid....

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[dvice_null]

If we measure "better" in percents of all features (not just those in the ACID tests), then:

Browser: ......... IE6 ..| IE7 ..| FF2
HTML / XHTML . 73% ..| 73% ..| 90%
CSS 2.1 .......... 51% ..| 56% ..| 92%
CSS 3 changes . 10% ..| 13% ..| 24%
DOM ............... 50% ..| 51% ..| 79%
ECMAScript .... 99% ..| 99% ..| 100%

http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE6=on&IE7=on&FX2=on&uas=CUSTOM

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[ignavus]

I guess you have never heard of a Microsoft-only shop, or of business users who (a) often cannot control what is on their work PCs and (b) make up a large proportion of PC users.

I help run a site for government (and some non-government) users in various agencies. About 80% of my users (by page hit) are IE6 and another 14% are IE7. Firefox is mainly used by non-government clients of my website.

The government users have no say over their desktop configuration. And if you have never had to deal with the IT section of a large government agency you don't know the obstacles and bureaucracy (and random malfunctions) to simple things like "Just use Firefox" or "Update to the latest version of IE". These are projects that can take *years* to accomplish.

Sometimes entire state governments can be locked down into a single "solution" - most likely a Microsoft-only one. Then it is IE all the way, and version upgrades will take ages to filter through.

There is no "simply".