Slashdot Mirror
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."
Is IE 7 really an improvement? If they're going to tell users to upgrade, why don't they encourage a standards-compliant browser?
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I guess suggesting FireFox or Opera is too big a leap for an established corporation.
Is "I recommend Internet Explorer" the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"?
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
Some Norwegian guys == all of Europe
A press release on Wired == Big Media
Getting rid IE is good and all, but does like Slashdot hire out to India to write their article summaries? The retardation is growing daily.
This is my sig.
I work for a medium-sized bank that has strict and outdated IT policies. All Windows XP workstations are set up with non-admin accounts, including developers. IE 6 is installed and we're not allowed to update to IE 7.
I don't even have a Windows PC at home, but at work, I'm officially effectively forced to use IE 6 (even though I've found a way to install Firefox as a non-admin user).
It's employees in companies like mine that will not be able to convert to IE 7 or another browser, even if they really want to.
This space left intentionally blank.
I have to waste so much time adapting my code to work with IE6 when it works perfectly fine in FF 1.5 thru 3, Chrome, Opera, Safari and even IE7. We talk about needing a stimulus; you have any idea how many man-hours are wasted because of IE6 quirks?
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
Althought a lot people like to complain about IE6 sucking, it takes an organization standing up and taking action to actually change things. Microsoft, like the record companies, and all the other "evil" organizations out there will only continue to shovel shit if people continue to consume it. IE7 has been out for a while at this point and there isn't any reason for anyone to be running IE6. It takes action from the community to change things. The community needs to say, "We aren't going to support IE6 because it sucks. Here, run this other browser that works great."
I think whoever came up with HTML and CSS was smoking crack ... I say this as somebody who writes high profile web applications that must look right in all major browsers (including IE6).
Hey, good for you for not being one of the ones who finally masters it and then so declares it good. :) There are many more in the Give up and use tables camp than masters of CSS positioning.
My initial reaction to HTML, almost 15 years ago, was "this is unnecessarily hard". :)
I do like the ideas in CSS for decoration (though not the classing syntax), but CSS positioning is so hard as to be nearly unusable. Larry Wall's maxim of "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible" clearly wasn't followed. There's a school of thought that goes like this:
and then reactionaries who say:
and that doesn't make sense either.
If anybody has a favorite meta-language (e.g. ideas like MarkDown) that's easily rendered into HTML/CSS, please comment.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
To sum up:
1) There is no spec limit for GET lengths. Microsoft decided to make one up. And they made it tiny.
2) mailto is not a GET request. According to the spec, "No additional information other than an Internet mailing address is present or implied." Microsoft decided to interpret it as a GET request, probably due to lazy coding.
3) HTTP/1.1 RFC applies to *http*. Mailto is not http.
Their choice of behavior is both in violation of specs *and* a big annoyance. And it's just one random example out of hundreds that I've encountered. 9 times out of ten, if one browser isn't working and every other one is, that one is IE.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
companies using IE6
What about "government agencies using IE6"?
Unfortunately, they are more likely to survive the invisible hand of the economy than private corporations at present. Some 80% of my website page hits are from government users with IE6.
I won't object to the claim that the government agencies using IE6 are among the less efficient and competent. But that won't stop them from surviving.
I am anarch of all I survey.
I decided a few months ago when I was doing a site redesign that there was no reason to continue supporting IE6. It simply lacked too many things now to make it worth wasting my time and effort on to continue making complicated workarounds for. IE7 is a fine browser, and IE8 will be even better and is quickly approaching, so there's no reason for anyone to have not upgraded by now.
Don't get me wrong though, I feel it's very important for any developer worth their salt to support EVERY major browser. I don't care if you don't like Opera or Safari or whatever the case may be, you should code your site to work right in everything. It's really not very hard, assuming you know what you're doing. I use very little workarounds (none this last time) to make sites render properly in everything these days.
When someone visits a website and their browser isn't supported, it is simply a major turn-off. More people should realize that.
More great news for Windows 2000 users... This is my call to "upgrade", yeah?
Rishi Chopra
www.rishichopra.org