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

[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

[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

[f1vlad]

I guess if you do not give them Microsoft's option, the other side gets pissed off.

In fact a while ago I've created a little script called killie6, when I posted on linkedin group to ask professional opinion about it, many declared it desceptive, violating user's choice, etc, etc.

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

[QuoteMstr]

I think whoever came up with HTML and CSS was smoking crack. There are so many inconsistencies and bizarre rules that it's impossible for me to believe that a sane person came up with all this.

Browser implementation, web standards, and hell, even programming languages, APIs and file formats are more evolved than designed. Think of a community of bacteria growing on a petri dish competing for resources and occasionally swapping genes. You'll end up with organisms very different from the ones you started with, and they'll probably have some quirky mechanisms in them.

Like in this culture, today's technology ecosystem is the cumulative result of lots of incremental changes that seemed like the right thing at the time. It's no surprise that we're dealing with the technology equivalent to such inexplicable evolution results as our retinas being wired backwards, the male urethra going right through the prostate (which is very prone to swelling), the birth canal being narrow enough to often cause the mother's death, or thymine (one of the components of DNA) being prone to forming dimers and corrupting the cell's machinery. Again, the decisions that seemed like the right thing at the time result in a system that's thoroughly confusing and that in retrospect appears insane.

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

[diskis]

Well, you should stick to the HTML spec. GET requests should never cause an action, like sending that mail. POST requests are designed to allow actions. I don't know about the byte limit on POSTs, but I know you can upload files of several MB. Should be enough for an email.

There is a reason for distinctions between GET and POST. A webcrawler for instance should be able to safely follow any link/form with a GET request. If you trigger mails with a GET request, you can easily get the googlebot to accidentally send you some email.

Also, you may want to read up on the HTTP/1.1 RFC, which states that a GET request can be of unlimited length, but that clients and servers should beware as there is no guarantee that all software supports more than a 256 bytes long URI. This is one thing you shouldn't blame on Microsoft, as this limitation is fairly ancient, older than any copy of IE :)

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

[Rei]

Maybe because it is a HTML (version 1?) standard for GET and the other browsers ignores it?

No, it isn't. Even Microsoft admits as much.

RFC 2616, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1," does not specify any requirement for URL length.

It's their own made-up lousy limit.

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

[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.

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".

Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7

[mikael_j]

If you think IE8 is anywhere near standards-compliant then you need a serious reality check, it's not quite as horrible as IE6 and IE7 but it's still fucking painful to work with. I recently created a website just for shits and giggles, completely standards-compliant, worked perfectly in Safari/WebKit and Opera, needed some minor tweaking in Firefox, barely rendered in the IE8 beta (and it looked nothing like it was supposed to look like), produced a "blank" page in IE7 and IE6 asked me if I wanted to download it (application/xhtml+xml).

I wish all these incompetent web developers would defending IE, IE8 is still a complete failure when it comes to standards compliance but lots of people who have no idea what they're talking about are hailing it as an awesome browser because it's not completely and totally broken in every conceivable way. It's like saying "My 2009 Ford is awesome, it only randomly explodes every 200 miles or so instead of every 10 miles like my 2008 ford...".

/Mikael

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...

[von_rick]

Especially considering Opera is a Norwegian company, I was expecting them to give thumbs up to their homebrewed web browser. Opera is pretty awesome, all things considered and the current version is certainly lot more compliant and powerful than IE6.

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."

Crockford Predicts IE6's Decline

[weston]

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.

Re:IE7?

[jafiwam]

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.

Re:OS Support

[Tubal-Cain]

[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.

Microsoft-Free Fridays

[Jantastic]

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.

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.