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

[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".

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"?

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?

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.