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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!
I work for a medium-sized bank that has strict and outdated IT policies.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.
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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."
In his latest blog entry, Douglas Crockford postulates that companies using IE6 are probably among the less efficient and competent ones, and therefore among the more likely to be weeded out by the invisible hand as times get tough.
Hope he's right.
Tweet, tweet.
IE is built into a lot of places in Windows. Help displays, Windows Explorer uses it, etc.
By upgrading, you upgrade those displays too.
IE6 (IIRC) has issues, and probably has unpatched or undiscovered security issues that will root your computer if you run across the wrong stuff.
Even if you never use IE for anything, you should upgrade it and keep it patched. It's free, and doesn't hurt anything and you can continue to use whatever your favorite browser is.
You're not a web developer then?
IE7 is a pile of dog crap compared to Firefox. But compared to IE6, IE7 is a chocolate bar.
IE6 is getting to be like 8 years old. Think of how much the web has changed in 8 years. I cannot think of any real web developers who *like* IE6. It fails at even the most mundane stuff.
blah blah blah
[IE6] is the most up-to-date browser for their version of Windows.
Most up-to-date IE; but certainly not the most up-to-date browser.
Firefox 2 is slightly newer than IE 7, and it runs on Windows 98.
This reminds me of Dave Winer's 2001 idea of Microsoft-Free Fridays from the (2001) days Micrsoft played with the idea of implementing smart tags in IE6. An Apache mod was crafted for it.
...a fact which for the sake of a quiet life most people tend to ignore ~H2G2
The place I'm at runs IE 6.0. I think it's due to user inertia and resistance that it doesn't get switched over to Firefox. What I'd like to see is a version of Firefox that emulates the visual appearance and workings of the IE 6.0 interface (down to the title bar, icons, etc.), but under the hood and all the rendering is really being done by the latest FF. Updates would just go in automatically with no user intervention.
Seems simple enough, and there are some themes/skins for FF that purport to do this, but they don't go far enough, or aren't polished. They end up looking a little crufty (for instance, they don't get rid of the structure of the forward/back buttons in the latest FF).
If somebody came out with a seamless "sheep in wolf's clothing" solution for IE 6.0 -> FF, it would be a lot easier to get users to adopt it. Does that help wider FF adoption? No, but I think that's a separate issue from pure user "acceptance."
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.
There's a nag screen for IE6 users.
Since I've implemented it, the usage has been down, from 23% to 12%. And the january statistics shows the for the first time the percentage of firefox users is greater than the IE* users.
I've lost clients? Maybe.
I'm a happier person? Sure.
entropy happens
GET is a type of HTTP request. Mailto isn't HTTP. Why isn't this the beginning and end of this conversation right there?
Show me one proxy server in use today that limits GETs more than IE. As though that's a valid justification -- limiting, what, 85% of the computers on the net because some proxy might possibly do it for them?
As stated, there are perfectly legitimate reasons for a long GET URL -- Google Maps being a good example (they have to limit it to be compatible with IE). But that's not even applicable, because mailto is not a GET request in the first place. What exactly is setting method to POST even supposed to do? POST to your email client instead of GET? How do you start up a program with POST rather than GET? Get and POST are HTTP requests, and mailto is not HTTP. Doing a mailto in an HREF is the standard way to do it.
I can't believe we're even having to have this debate. IE is imposing a non-spec limit on the wrong type of URI in a way that breaks the standard way of doing a common function. That's a bug.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
I run http://geekimo.com/ which is all designed using transparencies and it looks beautiful on all browsers except IE6, which shows a horrid gray site... I absolutely hate IE6, the offices where I work all have IE6 on them and we're not allowed to install any software to replace it. Considering how horrid IE6 makes the site look, I'm going to show a different page to IE6 users showing them two images, the site as it should look and the site as they're seeing it. A "download firefox" button below. All it would take is major services like Facebook, Myspace, Google and Youtube to boycott the browser for a few days, the reduced visits wouldn't be enough to hit them financially yet it would push the browser almost out of existence.
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.
Microsoft Norway was first out to support the campaign in an interview with Teknisk Ukeblad: http://www.tu.no/it/article200622.ece They also sent out a press release, and we posted it here: http://tekniskbeta.no/ms-stÃtter-ie6-saken/ Both links above are in English, but Norwegian developer THomas Hansen ran it through Google Translate and ended up with this: http://ra-ajax.org/microsoft-supports-the-war-against-ie6.blog Swedish Microsoft-managers also support the campaign: http://stephanielindberg.wordpress.com/2009/02/20/uppgradera-nu-det-har-gtt-mnga-internetr-sedan-2001/ http://blogs.technet.com/microsoftnyheter/archive/2009/02/20/var-med-i-v-rst-dningen-uppgradera-till-ie7.aspx Best regards, Anders Brenna Teknisk Ukeblad TU.no