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

"Upgrade" to IE 7

[MrEricSir]

Is IE 7 really an improvement? If they're going to tell users to upgrade, why don't they encourage a standards-compliant browser?

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[Rei]

Oh come on. Every time I have to make a webapp work across all browsers, 9 times out of ten, if a bit of code works perfectly fine in every browser but one, that one is IE. And IE7 is still chock full of problems. Random example (I could point to hundreds): As a home project, I'm in the middle of cross-platform debugging for a Google Maps-integrated electric vehicle simulator. If you design a vehicle in it (rather than just using a preset), you can submit it to me to consider for inclusion as a preset. It's emailed so I'm made aware of it right away and have a chance to scour over the numbers that they're providing to make sure it makes sense. The easiest way to do this is just with a mailto HREF that supplies a body. Fine, right?

Well, IE (incl. 7) has a tiny GET limit, and this applies to mailtos as well. It only allows 2083 characters. By comparison, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc are for all practical purposes unbounded. 2083 characters is too small to hold all of the vehicle stats, such as the tables of how efficient the drivetrain and battery pack are under hundreds of different conditions. So, IE throws a cryptic error when it sees it. There are workarounds, of course, such as a web form that submits mail by CGI, but you know what? No. I'm getting sick of pandering to a lousy browser in project after project. I've in general decided to take the same approach that these sites are taking: disable any feature that IE has trouble with, and tell them to use a better browser if they want to have that feature available to them.

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[Tubal-Cain]

But don't you agree it's the best effort on their part to date? I would say so.

Yes, but "best effort" != "close"
"closer", maybe.

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[McBeer]

20/100 on the Acid3 is "close"?

In a way yes. The acid tests are by no means comprehensive. Acid 2 focuses primarily on CSS and Acid 3 focuses on DOM/ECMAscript. A browser can completely tank acid 3 and still render most things just fine. (I use noscript and don't notice ill effects on most websites)

Acid tests aside, IE7 is certainly not the best browser out there, but it is way the hell better then IE6 and probably an easier sell to those still on IE 6.

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

In understand your complaints about ie. But seriously, email is not what you should be doing there. Ajax post to a back end that analyzed the data and determined if it was worthy for you to review, then if you really need to be notified by email, email it to you. Its not that tough, and a more elegant way of doing it.

What about...

[TubeSteak]

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"?

Re:What about...

[Penguinisto]

It's more like: "...all our custom VBS-based apps that we can't afford to get rid of is IE-based, therefore so is your job."

And if you think there's unavoidable lock-ins now, wait'll SharePoint gets its tentacles into the enterprise at large... "what, no Outlook integration? No automatic login from Active Directory!? We can't have that! Forget your wiki thingy, hire a SharePoint guy already, and let's get this thing rolling! You're wasting my time here!"

Call me a troll if you like, but damn - it's a very slick way to make sure the folks in Redmond have continued income for at least the next decade...

/P

About Time!

[MazzThePianoman]

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?

Re:About Time!

[amn108]

Just do what I used to do, when I was doing web development (and they payed me for it) - Disable CSS linking for IE6 altogether by not sending the <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" ... />. If you use PHP, just read the HTTP user agent header and if it is IE 6, do not output the LINK element. If you are as good as you seem to be, catering for webstandards and all, chances are your webpage is readable WITHOUT stylesheets, and NOBODY has complained to me yet about bad looking black on white webpage. It is when things stop working they complain, but when there is no style at all they see, there is nothing to complain about. Webpages are free, since visitors seldom pay to see them, I do not feel guilty discriminating against a web browser, since it cannot display stylesheet properly anyway. The rest of CSS quirks that work differently in Firefox and Opera can be worked out, but IE6 is just too alien for my web-dev tastes. I used to ask for extra money to do IE6 web-dev before, but of course nobody wanted to see that part of the budget, so instead they get a no-style (X)HTML page which works. Even in Lynx, with proper mime type and headers. If your boss or a client threatens to break your kneecaps for leaving out IE6 support brutally like that, make a simple stylesheet from scratch just for IE, small one, with fonts, colors and backgrounds, no fancy box model usage and selectors it has not even heard about. It might end up looking decent, ant it only took you a quarter.

It's good to see some action

[dave562]

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."

Options?

[bill_mcgonigle]

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:

1. tables are bad because they're hard to re-factor, reuse, etc.
2. CSS positioning is not tables.
3. CSS positioning is good.

and then reactionaries who say:

1. CSS positioning is damn near impossible
2. tables are not CSS positioning
3. tables are good

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.

In short

[Rei]

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.