Slashdot Mirror
Internet Explorer 6 Will Not Die
caffeinejolt writes "Despite all the hype surrounding new browsers being released pushing the limits of what can be done on the Web, Firefox 3 has only this past month overtaken IE6. Furthermore, if you take the previous report and snap on the Corporate America filter, IE6 rules the roost and shows no signs of leaving anytime soon. Sorry web developers, for those of you who thought the ugly hacks would soon be over, it appears they will linger on for quite a bit — especially if you develop for business sites."
Sorry web developers, for those of you who thought the ugly hacks would soon be over, it appears they will linger on for quite a bit -- especially if you develop for business sites.
Yeah, IE6 is the herpes of the internet. It appears to be gone after heavy medication but if you look under the first layer of skin, there it is.
...
Oh, and I should point out another untimely mark of IE6: we've all made this hilariously fugly hacks to make crap work in IE6 at some point and those relics of the last millennium are still out there. Which means that browsers still have to support the old rendering ways of IE6. Yes, the doctype will tell the browser what standards to use but I'm betting that the support for rendering HTML 4 is just as annoying as having to patch up old struts 1.x applications and read through nested tables galore in the HTML.
And we all know that 90% of the work out there for developers is maintenance. What a painful irrepressible memory
My work here is dung.
This is simply fossil evidence that confirms it, kind of like a coelecanth.
Some days it's just not worth
chewing through my restraints.
The reason IE 6 won't die is intranet applications that were coded specifically for IE 6 that corporations haven't bothered to make cross-browser. IE 7 (and presumably IE 8) breaks a lot of those sites.
At my current job, we're not allowed to install IE 7 or 8, and don't have the administrator rights to do it. It sucks because as a web developer, I'd like nothing better than to see IE 6 die a quick death.
This space left intentionally blank.
Pay attention to your own news site, CmdrTaco! /. and are faced with a pile of mis-rendered & incompatible pages (I'm thinking the user account page in particular). We appreciate having /. optimized for FireFox, but would also like such consideration for the more-used IE6 browser.
Though this is a site for nerds, that doesn't mean that everyone has abandoned IE, or is at least running the latest incarnation thereof. Some of us, for various reasons, are pretty much stuck with using IE6 for browsing
Can we get a "-1 Wrong" moderation option?
Yes, you web developers. You need to explicitly stop supporting IE6. Give IE6 users a strong warning that IE6 is completely unsupported and not recommended for use, much like Game! has since about 2005.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
And IE6 will go away quickly.
Stop doing the hacks, and let IE6 render them ugly and broken, while compliant browsers will render them correctly.
Shameless plug alert: Game server control panel
I work for the United States government. We ordered hundreds of thousands of brand new HP computers last year, with Windows Vista pre-installed. Except our intranet relies on Internet Explorer 6 to function, so they were all wiped and had a Windows XP SP2 image installed. I doubt we'll be upgrading anytime soon, as that would pretty much require a complete rewrite of our entire intranet.
IT departments have no budgets right now. Testing all the in-house apps with IE8 would cost money. Even telling people to press the "render in IE6 mode" button would be quite expensive in terms of calls. So they're just blocking the update.
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
Granted most of the web stuff i do isn't critical but lately if its broken in IE6 i don't fix it, actually since you can't parallel install IE i only check 7 on my host and 8 on my VM so i don't even check 6 anymore.
The summary may be technically accurate, but the point is off. IE6 is dying, quickly. If you happen to develop for it in a corporate context, it really isn't that bad because you are targeting IE6, and *only* IE6. What really hurts is developing for modern browsers, and then having to retrofit IE6, which we can safely say is a thing of the past.
Similes are like metaphors
I built a website for my wedding which will redirect you to a page that tells you to get a new browser if you're using IE6. I provide links to Firefox, IE8, Chrome, Safari, and Opera. We need more people to do this with their sites. I understand it's not realistic for corporate sites, but for personal use sites it can be done. I checked the site statistics for my site and IE6 went from 15% of the hits in April to 0% in May.
Just because it has users doesn't mean that you have to support it. Internet Explorer quickly rose in popularity in the first place because web developers blatantly stopped supporting Netscape, even though it had the majority market share at the time.
Futhermore, the thing to realize about IE6 users is that they do not care about the web. They don't care that your website has pixel-perfect accuracy, for instance. So why waste your time optimizing your website for their benefit? The natural degradation designed into the HTML specifications still allows them to access the content in a limited fashion. That is all that they want. If they wanted to see more, they wouldn't use IE6.
... any more than they expect to upgrade their car or anything else. The computer came with stuff, and normal people think the stuff is the computer and the computer is the stuff and that's about it. Internet services reinforce this - it's not even a computer system with a browser (and other utilities) any more, it's a browser-machine that handles different sites. Even Firefox proponents talk about "the browser becoming the OS".
Normal people just *use* their computers, and they don't want any more complexity than "wheel - gas - brake" in the car.
No more hacks, no more workarounds. If it works, great, if not, too bad. We gave up on Netscape 4, and it's time to give up on IE6.
There are many "web apps" that supposedly don't support anything but IE6. But work fine in other web browsers. I have IE6, FF3, Chrome and Safari on my laptop here at work (I'm a web dev) and have tested many of our supposedly IE only legacy web apps. Other than a problem I found with the web server (IIS) not having mime types set correctly, all those web apps worked fine.
The only way to kill IE6 is to stop supporting it and clearly stating "If you can't see this page properly please update your browser".
The end will come when developers simply decide it's not worth jumping through hoops for an antiquated browser and IT departments in corporate America are flooded with calls of "this site won't work - what's wrong with my browser" thereby forcing IT departments to get with the program and update the browsers on their networks. Until then, why should an IT department invest any time and effort into updating the browsers on their systems? The kicker is all that it will take is one major website to take the bold step forward but the question is who has the balls to be first?
Businesses often stay about one version behind on Microsoft products, or in some cases about a half cycle behind. They wait for a given MS product to get service packed out the wazoo before deploying it.
For example, my employer is just starting to roll out Office 2007 very slowly, and based on my experiences and many other reports, this is typical at most businesses.
Similarly, they are just rolling out IE7 now, when IE8 just came out.
So it's not surprising that IE6 still has a major deployment base considering that IE8 just came out and that many companies stay about one revision behind.
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
if(window.XMLHttpRequest){
}
else
{
if(window.ActiveXObject){
document.write "Error 404 Page Not Found"
}
}
i haven't had any problems with ie6 since i implemented this holistic approach
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
Old crap tends to stay around, until something kills it.
What if someone develops a html 5 webapp, using a speedy browser as a base that becomes a killer must have app? Then MS will have no choice or be known as the OS vendor whose browser ain't good enough.
MS isn't trying to limit IE for nothing, it hopes that nobody dares create a webapp that simply doesn't work under IE. Google has shown with Chrome they are thinking of pushing the envelope, wonder what they got in the pipeline that needs Chrome.
IE6 will die when using it hurts the user. Personally, for private web-apps, ie ALL ie is dead. It is amazing what you can make a webapp do when IE support is dropped.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
That is not dead which can eternal lie. And with strange aeons even death may die.
Ditto. I did, however, install Firefox and use it as my default browser. Some corporate apps don't work (non-standard javascript, mainly), which is why I still have to open some stuff in IE. All of my stuff works in both, some of other people's stuff works in both, and whenever I'm goofing off reading Slashdot and such, I use Firefox.
There is one guy that I work with, though, that insists on "coding to the corporate standard," which in his head means proprietary IE6. He refuses to do things even to the standards that IE6 recognizes that are cross-browser compatible. ("Why do you use that getElementById stuff? It's so much more typing!...") It's like he likes for things to deliberately break in non-IE6 browsers. There's a project underway now to upgrade everyone to Windows 7, and AFAIK, part of that project will be FINALLY ditching IE6. I guess he'll have to go back and recode all of his stuff. Me, I plan on laughing at him when he's working on code that's years old that he should have written right to begin with.
Meanwhile, I have converted so many people at work to Firefox with AdBlock Plus, it's funny. I show them something as simple as CNN on the "corporate standard" browser, then the same page in Firefox. Look ma, no annoyances! Invariably, that's followed by, "Wow, how do I get that? I'm going to use it at home!" I've even converted a few over to using as the default browser on their work machines, which technically, we're not supposed to be doing. Sometimes, they ask me why a corporate application doesn't work. I tell them, "Guess who wrote that one..."
A company I work for dropped support for IE6 (not only but also because of my pressure) about a year ago. The impact was minimal. People who came to their page with an IE6 or earlier were asked to update, and they did. According to the logs, people who arrived at the page with an IE6 soon came back with IE7/8 or other browsers.
Why?
So far, it seems people don't frankly care what browser they're using. They're just using what they have. And they're usually quite willing to update to something "new and improved", they just don't know that it exists. Now, the average user that visits this client's page isn't too computer savvy (the company is in the adult education sector, the usual visitor of the page wants to be educated), and from the questionary I attached to the booking process nobody was really "annoyed" that they were asked to update. Many were actually happy to learn something new and "better" is out there for them.
So don't be shy to tell your visitors "hey, there's some new browser out, you might wanna use it for a better browsing experience". People like it.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If IE's newer versions let you customize the topbar like you can with IE6, I'd gladly switch my work computer over. When you force a crappier UI (like Vista), many users will stick with the better, older version.
The only way to kill IE6 is to stop supporting it and clearly stating "If you can't see this page properly please update your browser".
The excuse: "It's not my browser; it's the administrator's browser. How do I update another user's browser?"
Yes Canadian government workplaces still use IE6 because IE7 and FF2/3 are still being approved In Ottawa.
Also the Zune HD will feature a Variation of IE6 Mobile so we have a long road ahead as web developers.
The last time something like this happened, it was everybody wishing Netscape 4 would die. But it kept shambling across the Internet like a zombie for years.
At this point, IE6 will die when the computers still using it get replaced.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
I build and maintain a site which is used almost entirely by subscribers from large asset management firms. Looking at our stats IE accounts for 54% of our traffic with 46% of that from IE6. Firefox manages 39% with 34% from Firefox 3. Nice to see Firefox doing so well but depressing how wildly used IE6 still is.
The trouble is most corporate intranet sites are so badly written that they don't render correctly on anything other than IE6 and most companies don't see the point in fixing them. Things like MS Sharepoint, which has crap support for Firefox, donâ(TM)t exactly help.
Internet explorer is the cancer and Firefox is the cure.
Print one for your cube today!
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
We unfortunately use IE6 exclusively here at my office/entire corporation. IE7 is being trial (and we're 'not allowed' but not blocked from installing IE7 or IE8) but 99% of the corporate populace is running IE6. It made things interesting when I inherited an internal app that's "developed" using oracle application express. Giving the entire app an overhaul and trying to integrate stuff such as jquery to makes things a bit more user friendly was quite a challenge when the browser that everyone uses keeps throwing up rendering errors for what seem to be almost no reason. Eventually I said screw it and developed the entire site twice; using browser sniffing to determine what version to send out. The work wasn't justified at the time (only myself and a few others use alternative browsers), but when the company eventually does move to IE7/8 this app will at least be compatible with newer versions. Not only that, but it'll exhibit features that simply aren't available under IE6.
everyday is another shooter.
Background: Work with government/state/private business so all walks of default browsers
All it takes is to stop catering to the people who use it. With a div-based layout, sites are frequently very compatible with IE6 with no additional work. But when you start intentionally making concessions, you make an assumption of equal functionality amongst all browsers. When that happens, not only does Firefox and other third party browsers suffer, but IE7 and IE8 as well.
Without a rational business need to upgrade, many institutions won't. When, as a web developer, you choose to provide IE6 compatibility, you help remove that business requirement. But when you forgo it, it helps to force their hand.
It's really not the stodgy network and server admins that are holding us back, it's this idea we have to stay compatible. IE 4, 5, 5.5 and most recently, Netscape 4 died without this kind of issue. No one worries about making those compatible. It was time two years ago to let IE6 fall into planned obsolesce.
I work for a huge corporation. Since the sysadmins have nothing better to do, they just this month automated a company-wide process of deleting Firefox from all workstations, forcing users to go to IE6 (with alternate browsers available only for web developers)!
I was gobsmacked.
"Topbar"? Did you make that up yourself or pick it up from another uninformed person? The term is "toolbar". IE itself uses that term when you customize it. If you want something customizable, use Firefox. No one is telling you to use IE7/8. They're just saying that it's idiotic to use IE6, and that, by doing so, you are holding back the Web. Stop it!
IE6 WILL die if enough web developers go on strike and simply stop supporting it. The people running IE6 can make their problem go away one of two ways: pressure each and every website which says "IE6? Go away." Or they can do one thing: upgrade their web browser or install FF. One thing with instant guaranteed success, or many things with likely failure?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
Won't somebody PLEASE think of the children!?!
I recently had to submit my thesis to the college library under IE6 + WINE. The library's file submission web-app didn't work with any other browser except IE, and IE6 was well supported under WINE. I hated it but I had to do it anyway...
Colorless green Cthulhu waits dreaming furiously.
We want you to save IE6!
And I use to blame IE6 for making /. look like shit but then I go home and use Firefox and /. still looks like shit. It makes me wonder if there's any browser that will load up /. correctly.
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
I just downloaded and installed Firefox portable but couldn't access any outside sites. I even copied my IE6 user agent string and pasted it into general.useragent.extra.firefox, still no luck. Our IT department must REALLY want me to use IE6!
the right term to name its current status is zombie, as most of the machines its run on.
All the more reason to stop using browser-dependent "features" and write rigidly standards compliant html, I say.
Apart from those features explicitly designed to test a browser's error handling, Acid2 and Acid3 are intended to be "rigidly standards compliant html". And look how Internet Explorer pukes on them.
And tone down the CSS and JS freakery; it's "content", not "user experience" (which is mostly "frustration" anyway), you monkeys.
But what do you call "freakery"? Is the use of JavaScript in things like Gmail "freakery"?
There seems like a pretty clear free-market solution to this problem: developing sites that support IE6, with all the requisite hacks and workarounds, is harder. It takes longer, and should cost more. If developers just attach an appropriate premium to this extra work, businesses start having a financial incentive to stop demanding it.
"Well boss, I got a quote for that intranet app we need developed, and it turns out our IE6 requirement adds 35% to the total cost." "Hrm.. and what's your estimate of the cost of migrating?" "Migrating would cost us more than the 35% on this one project. But looking a year or two out, paying that kind of premium on all future development contracts, switching is way cheaper, and will probably reduce IT expenses for security issues to boot." "Right. Start working on that."
This is misrepresentative and a sign of false hope; IE has lost no ground to FF according to that chart:
IE7 + IE6 + IE8 = 43.51 + 18.23 + 8.26 = 70.0% share
FF3 + FF2 + FF1 = 18.58 + 1.45 + 0.17 = 20.2% share
This is unchanged from the average (71.6% v 19.84%) or the oldest data in Dec '08 (70.8% v 20.8%).
There is no growth here, just the obvious resistance to change in the corporate world, which will be more reflected in Windows (IE6) than anything else.
.
We'll only really see the demise if IE6 when the corporate world fully adopts the next OS, which would be Windows 7, a year or three after its first service pack (assuming MS plays it smart). That means we're stuck with IE6 for at least another 2-3 years.
(Yes, I know that a large percentage of corporate deployments are still on Windows 2000. If they're moving to XP but aren't already too far along, it will hopefully be with IE7 or IE8, or even something else entirely.)
Use my userscript to add story images to Slashdot. There's no going back.
It would do seeing as it's on every PC sold with a Windows Operating System.
Microsoft should do the right thing and force a compulsory upgrade to IE7/8 for every copy of XP. The only reason this thing won't die is that it comes bundled with XP and people don't know any alternatives exist.
I would love to upgrade to IE7 or IE8 but unfortunatly mircosoft decided Windows 2000 wasn't worthy.
Firefox is out of the question as our intranet uses ActiveX (our intranet works perfectly Firefox apart from this small problem)
Think about this: if you have a legit copy of Windows XP you're HARASSED to upgrade to the latest version. If you have an illegal copy, you're either smart enough to ignore the harassment, or you constantly fail the required product validation before upgrading.
I think this proliferation of IE6 is because it was the last upgrade that didn't require validation. It lives on through piracy, which also promotes insecure computers that don't have the latest updates.
It's the only way to be sure.
I'm sure many of you have seen Joe Lifrieri's judgmental IE6 splash pages. But for those of you who haven't, enjoy:
http://www.thedonutproject.com/2009/05/22/overly-judgemental-ie6-splash-pages/
The answer remains: fuck ye!
Administrator's response: Fuck executables outside %SystemRoot% and %ProgramFiles%.
No, but, if enough of these people's sites break, they will call their techie friends, and those friends will enable Windows Update and/or install Firefox.
The primary reason IE6 is still around, is that we do not care enough to kill it. Of course there are some corporations that refuse to upgrade their software. But in their refusal to upgrade, they make theirselves vulnerable to attacks. As sites still support IE6, home users have no reason to upgrade as well, making themselves vulnerable to attacks.
Botnets sending viruses and spam have a great benefit from this practice. Easily said: These few companies are holding the whole internet hostage. For a few bucks saved in the company, millions of other users are at higher risk. I'd say lets all annoy the shit out of IE6 users until they upgrade.
I'm running a site that has a few thousand visitors daily. I've just implemented a oneliner that gives IE6 users a 600x100px red warning they should switch.
.sig: No such file or directory
I know that you are simply repeating the excuse you have been given by your IT people, but they are smoking crack. The "understood" security risks are that using IE 6 to surf the web is probably the most efficient way to funnel malware into the Norton AntiVirus malware collection system. The real truth in most of these companies, if you scratch the surface, is that they have a mountain of HTML code for internal custom applications which assumed all the flaws in IE6, and they don't have a budget, nor a plan, for updating those apps. If you're the CIO or CEO, demand a plan. If they can't produce one, fire them, and get people who know what they're doing.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
I've also found that there are a large number of folks who are still using old versions of WinXP with not-so-legit site licenses or corporate licenses who don't want to upgrade to Vista and don't intend to now pay for a license for an OS they have been using "free" for years and are stuck with IE6 because they can no longer perform windows updates.
my solution was
div.blah{
-moz-border-radius: 3em;
-webkit-border-radius: 3em;
}
how do i handle ie6,7,8? i don't. its called gracefully degrading. the site is uglier in ie than firefox/ safari/ chrome (and ugly in opera too: opera has no border-radius yet)
oh well
and there are other issues where the shoe is on the other foot. for some reason, ie, safari, chrome, and opera all render border-style:groove correctly, while mozilla seems to do some funky ugly thing with the style. then other bugs only effect the webkit browsers safari and chrome. its pretty much a given that every rendering directive i put in html or css or javascript, one of the 5 browsers i design for (opera, ie, chrome, safari, firefox) will render it wrong. well, not wrong, just different. but here's the key: if the "alternative" style is not truly heinous or interferes with UI, i just let it slide. so every site looks different in every browser
oh well
what i don't understand are these anal retentive developers who are so insistent on every pixel being exactly the same in every browser. just let some browsers look a little goofy, just let it slide, move on, no big deal
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
ie9 and firefox5
they're way ahead of the curve man
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
I dunno. These numbers seem very low to me for Firefox. I've recently reviewed other statistics sites and I've never seen FF given such a low marketshare. I think this might be a case of everybody's statistics differing. Now, show me the data for Google Analytics on googleanalytics.com (where the tracking script is loaded from) and I'd be willing to call those figures "authoritative."
DJB
Why anyone thought IE8 would replace IE6 is beyond me. The people running IE6 are obviously not accepting the automatic updates from Microsoft. If they were they'd have been running IE7.
Now, expecting IE8 to replace IE7 is certainly a logical conclusion, but that doesn't really help us much...
Go to www.end6.org, download the little Javascript app, and apply it to your web site. Then, the first time the user goes to that site, they see a nag screen telling them to update their web browser. If they start seeing them on every site, they'll begin to get a clue.. while those whose companies will NOT allow change can at least get work done (it's not THEIR fault!). I installed in on my site, www.dwheeler.com, though in my case I complain about obsolete IE7 too.
- David A. Wheeler (see my Secure Programming HOWTO)
The fact is that there are many "coders" out there working on corporate sites that will only work around IE and it's active-X controls. It's no wonder they manually apply updates via managed server, and disallow updates to IE because it breaks their enterprise application code; and we don't want any over-worked enterprise coders now do we??!! :-0
All content in this message is copyright (c) 2008. All rights reserved. RIAA is prohibited here.
I finally, and happily, left the web development business this year, and dealing with IE 6 and the goblins that support it was one big reason why I wanted out.
I know thats why 2 of my own PC's are on IE6. WGA and Windows Update wont run any longer so no IE7/8 for those PC's.
but i thought ie8 was an automatic update? shouldn't that have cured the ie6 disease?
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.
this morning I took five minutes to write a simple smarty block plugin: {ie6} ie6-only code here {/ie6}
Now everyone who loads the page with their user-agent set to IE6 will receive a banner:
WARNING: Your browser is reporting that it is highly insecure and outdated. Security upgrades have been available for over a decade, please select the reason you continue to put yourself and others at serious risk of virus infection and identity theft: (ajax-enabled dropdown or fallback to simple form). Once filled out, links to upgrades are provided.
I really just did it because I want to know _why_ people use it.
There may also be old bots (or libraries) which simply have their UserAgent still set to IE6...
Err, you probably have a proxy...
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Well if Microsoft really wanted to outst IE6, they should of allowed IE7 on Windows 2000. There's plenty of Win 2k machines out there in corporations across america. Why? Because they are just 'good enough' and still can get the job done. F- Microsoft for not letting IE7 or IE8 work in Windows 2000. I hope they read this.
IE6 probably provides your domain credentials via NTLM to an invisible proxy somewhere near your network porder. Firefox doesn't do NTLM (thank you!) so it will fail authentication every time which limits your access to outside networks.
Microsoft. They sat on their ass after illegally crushing Netscape while setting the web back 5 years.
ayottesoftware.com
I make websites/applications for a living and have a company with designers and developers. IE6 has always been the bane of my existence. So much so that I feel like changing careers so I never have to work with it again. I thought it'd get easier but it's just one extra thing I have to do to get the website done.
We're thinking of charging extra for IE6 compatibility, but I live in China and the majority of IE6 or 3rd party software which use IE6's rendering engine are in abundance. It's as close as I can feel to hating my job every time IE6 comes into the workflow.
I hope you're reading this Microsoft - you've made the web a very unfun place for many years.
did we try holy water and a stake yet?
I used to loathe IE6 - I used Opera until FF rescued me with an ad free alternative.
Feel free to continue trying to use it to browse the web. Heck, you can try to use IE4 if you want, what do I care?
But as a web developer I quit testing in IE6 a year or so ago, and at this point I no longer test in IE7 either, since IE8 is on Automatic Updates, so any Windows system connected to the internet *should* have it, unless somebody has gone out of their way to avoid it, which is Their Problem(TM) as far as I'm concerned.
I haven't gone out of my way to *break* IE6 and 7, and in fact I haven't done any significant sweeping changes to the website at work since IE8 came out, so for now it almost certainly still works fine in IE7, and well enough in IE6 to be usable if you can ignore things like the lack of proper transparency support. The old legacy IE6 stylesheet that I developed for IE6 several years ago is still there and probably still has things covered pretty well. For now.
But, next time my boss comes to me and says, "I think we should change the website up again", IE6 and 7 will probably break. I don't test in them any more. How would I? All of the computers have been upgraded to IE8.
Web developers can't make users upgrade their browsers. But neither do we keep supporting ancient browsers forever and ever. You can upgrade or not, your choice. But don't come whining to me if the site doesn't look right in NCSA Mosaic. I try to support a wide variety of browsers, but I've got limits, and anything that came out more than three years ago is generally beyond the limits, unless it's still the *current* default browser for one of the major platforms (as was the case with IE6 well beyond three years until IE7 finally hit Automatic Updates, for instance). More than three years old and *used* to be the default browser? Sorry, I've gotta draw the line somewhere. Feel free to send me a screenshot showing the problem, but I make no promises.
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The question would be "What's wrong with this site? What isn't it displaying correctly?"
Which is why user-agents that self-identify as IE 6 would get a link "What's wrong with this page?" near the top to a page explaining the situation:
IE6 tasks me, IE6 tasks me & I shall have it... I'll chase it around the moons of nebia, & thru the antaris malestrom & round perditions flames before I give IE6 up..
Are these stats even correct? I usually go by this http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
I don't know what fantasy world you're living in, but in reality people will keep their browser and never visit your site again. Yeah, yeah, nothing of value was lost and all that. But then why have a website in the first place? Or do you consider the browser someone uses the most important part of someones personality? And there are more bizarre browsers out there than IE6 (especially mobile/embedded ones), what do you present them? If you're using nice semantical markup, pages might not render 100% OK, but they will be readable. If not, you're doing it wrong and your "The page looks crappy because of your IE6" translates nicely to "I'm too lazy/inept to fix my website and too much of an arsehole to admit something is wrong."
So why are people still using IE6 you ask? Well, from what I've heard (small social circle, yeah, yeah, I'm a nerd, ~50 people, not all using IE6) the reason people don't upgrade is because IE7/8 and Firefox use too much memory and frankly run like tar on their computers. Buying a new computer is a hassle because you have to port all your settings and stuff and something always goes wrong, count on a week productivity lost. Then there is Iron/Chrome, which does run nicely, but it has an eyeball grinding Fisher-Price interface with Vista influences that's an order of magnitude worse than a misrendered page every now and then.
You want people to drop IE6? Make other browsers run with a private working set of 20 MB. Make it so that your eyes don't hurt while using them. And make it take over Windows' internal HTML rendering control, because otherwise you'll have RSS readers, forum checkers, and so on, that are still and always will be little IE6's. If IE6 won't die, it isn't the user's fault. The people behind the competing browsers are to blame 100%.
Setup the proxy correctly in Firefox then try. Even at Microsoft you can use Firefox just fine and no one gives a crap.
as we know they'll survive nuclear attack. I guess IE6 could be added to the list.
"You can't really dust for vomit" --Nigel Tufnel
We used to do this when they didn't have the ability to use frames, had too old of a browser, or used an unsupported browser. I used to have a couple different versions of websites to be both compatible with IE and Netscape, but now there's no reason for that. If I was implementing a site these days that was complex enough that IE 6 would choke on it, I don't think I'd even bother to make an alternate version. I'd just make a simple error page stating that the visitor was using an unsupported browser and have download links to mozilla.com and maybe microsoft.com.
To the "...but your CLIENTS might need it!" argument which others have mentioned, would you really want a client like that? Being hopelessly behind due to organizational incompetence manifests itself in many ways, and one is using horribly outdated software. The customer is not always right, and taking-on a customer who's chronically wrong will bring worlds of grief. Part of good business management is being willing to "fire" your customers and not take jobs that will be more trouble than they're worth. The best case scenario is you somehow manage to make the customer happy and get paid. The more likely scenario is that nothing will make them happy, everything you do will be wrong because they don't have any clue what they actually want or how to implement it, they'll provide the wrong specs and then revise themselves time and time again, and then they'll not pay you & they'll mention how much you suck to the rest of their contacts. After a couple such experiences, I learned that I needed to screen my customers in much the same way that they reviewed the bids folks submitted to them. I haven't had a significant problem with a client since I took that mindset into bidding on jobs.
Or they use a proxy server and you need to setup Firefox to use that as well.
all of their 404 errors ;-)
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
you're doing it wrong.
Would someone mind explaining why Firefox vs IE is such a big deal. I don't see what either company gains out of this stupid competition. Its not like firefox or ie make any profit any time I use either of their products. It seems like this is just a game of who's balls are bigger.
There are ton of small administrative web-tools in companies out there which only run when using ie6
I would love to get IE7 or IE8 working on my PC here at work, but I cannot do this because I don't have the permissions for the installation. I tried. The application that you need to install never recognized that it was already installed, so it keeps trying to install itself. (Yes, I have a legit machine. I even have that stupid windows code sticker on my PC). If Micro$oft cared that much, they would let me install it without going through the WGA. In the mean time, I will happily use my Firefox to take care of business.
IE6 can never die.
I'm tired of people complaining about how they're stuck with IE6 at their company and can't install other programs. Why not download Portable Firefox which requires no installation and use that?
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
Thank our judicial system for letting microsoft get away with being a monopoly and pushing their browser onto every windows machine, the whole world must suffer seemingly indefinitely. The whole microsoft vs. netscape case failed to provide justice. While we are add it windows media player sucks @$$, and countless people in the world are suffering from being pushed into this "default" video player. Sadly most people aren't computer literate enough to know there are options, and that's the whole problem with microsoft's practices...
I find that rather strange. When I used it many moons ago it seemed to die about every 20 minutes or so.
Blazing Spiders
There's a real easy way to implement that. Add this code to any web page. Anyone with IE 7, IE 6, or previous will get a message to upgrade. No one else will see the message.
<!--[if lte IE 7]>
To view this site, you will need to <a href="http://www.microsoft.com/ie/">upgrade Internet Explorer</a>, or <a href="http://www.getfirefox.com">get another browser</a>
<![endif]-->
Those two words makes it tough for some business' to move from ie6. In healthcare, everything has to be tested, and FDA approved. ie7 didn't last long, so hoping they start dev now for 8 and move to that (or ff or whatever browser). Even in a greatly structured organization. Just because we have to do something "right now" doesn't mean we can do it "right now." though I agree there should be more done to move in this direction faster, some entities are large beyond comprehension. Healthcare is one of them.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
Really, how is this a story? This should be tagged "duh", it has been repeated and restated so many times. Yes it's not going away, yes the enterprises love it - get over this already, please. How about we start writing about possible ways of making the transition easier, instead of continuing to carry the same whining torch around? Thank you.
Bow before me, for I am root.
Doesn't IE6 get end-of-lifed around June 2010? I can't believe any corporate would consider running IE6 after that... they could reasonably be sued by their own customers if say they lost data due to a hack.
The way I approach IE6 is to get it to an "acceptable" level of usability but not go out of my way to make it look as good as say the latest Firefox. For instance, I don't put any PNG transparency hacks, etc.
At my site, ~40% of my traffic is Firefox, ~30% is IE of which ~5% is IE6 (or below...all grouped together). FWIW, I used the YUI as a reference design for my layout and using BrowserShots nearly every browsers handles the layout (more or less) correctly.
When I have a kid, I want to put him in one of those strollers for twins and then run around the mall looking frantic.
Who are these guys? What's their methodology for getting data?
When I go to their home page to see if I can discover these things, a bar on the side tells me that I'm running "Operating System
Mac OSX - Puma 10.4.11". This does not make me wanna trust these people.
egypt urnash minimal art.
This site requires Adobe Flash Player 8 (or above) to view the charts. Please click on Ok to install Flash.
It's because companies (like AT&T for example) don't want to spend the money to upgrade beyond IE6 internally, even though you'd think they would be a leader.
There is a cost to staying with IE6 as well so I'm not sure why people cling to the idea that cash strapped IT departments need to stay with IE6. They day will come when the cost of maintenance of software to support IE6 is greater than it is for other solutions. Kicking the can down the road until then is a recipe for disaster where no one should support software like this without a "end of support" plan.
then someone should be able to code up an exploit that force installs IE7 or IE8 (and ff while you're at it).
that'd kill IE6, if its really so insecure...
When we forked LedgerSMB from SQL-Ledger, the project was pretty much as you describe.
My suggestion:
1) Analyze the db.
2) Start building a NEW application which is properly structured and engineered (rather than merely written quickly) and as this happens use headers to redirect to/from the old application.
3) Eventually retire the old application.
This may take a year or even two. However, in the end it will save your employer a ton of money, headaches, and outages.......
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
First, Forgive me if I didn't look closely enough, but I'm not seeing how these statistics are substantiated. On your first link it says one thing and on the other its completely different and what makes this source so valid over something like http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp Now to the point: So what if ie6 is a dev pain, that isn't news. Yes, you build for current standards, but you should also build so your site will gracefully degrade, not just regarding client-side script (JS), but with your markup and styles as well. Just because a visitor can't receive your site exactly the way you want them to, doesn't mean you should instruct them to upgrade just for your site. I'm sorry but if a front-end developer's biggest complaint is accounting for ie6, they should just deal with it and stop whining about ie6 usage and new standards that conflict with the browser. ...Or you can ignore ie6 and its users and justify your elimination of a user market share however you see fit.
Please just stay off your soapbox because trying to get others to hop on your bandwagon using a broken record is just annoying
"If you upgrade to a newer version of IE, or Firefox we will give you 5% off next year."
You will save that in not needing to maintain for the pile of crap.
It's business, money talks.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
Microsoft will no longer provide any updates for IE6 come 13-Jul-2010. That means no security patches which means many businesses will have to move to something else. My company will tell our clients that come that date.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps/#Internet_Explorer
Portable Firefox.
Please see my other comment about Portable Firefox.
The web developers are often just working with what's there and are told what to do otherwise they won't get paid. The real driver for the IE6 cancer is large corporations with old web apps they don't want to bother to upgrade to newer standards. The web apps were developed for IE6 and work in IE6, but nobody wants to pay the money to have them tested and upgraded to IE7,8 or Firefox.
I have never seen a windows network where you weren't able to execute your own binaries
What you've never seen does exist. Please see my other comment.
In fact, it's exactly 70.00%. That's a suspiciously nice, round number. Has someone been cooking the data?
Any sufficiently unpopular but cohesive argument is indistinguishable from trolling.
http://ietab.mozdev.org/index.html
What if customers that run IE6 are also the same customers that rack up huge costs in tech support calls or often have systems too obsolete to run your software? Seems like a good way to dramatically reduce exposure to those customers if your website intentionally lacks support for IE6.
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
To the /. powers, I run IceWeasel and your website only works well with user-agent switched to IE6. Remember when you point a finger at someine, three fingers point back at yourself. Or whatever.
"especially if you develop for business sites"
Two business sites that I need to visit on a regular basis don't work with Safari or Opera - but they work with IE and Firefox. Not to start a war, but if your code is specific to *any* browser, it's probably broken.
A.
...bringing you cynical quips since 1998
Yup. It's a much bigger problem than people realize. Many companies are very dependent on a mountain of applications which were built exactly in the manner of the one you describe. Management didn't budget for maintenance of the application, so IT staff are "maintaining" it by responding to crisis situations which float to the top of priorities and put other work on hold. Maintenance of applications is a cost that is nearly always underfunded or not funded in corporate IT. Heck, most companies can't even tell you how many custom applications they have. They don't even know until they break how critical they have become to some process or another. The converse happens occasionally, too, where a "critical" application breaks and nobody notices for quite a while. That happens less often, though.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
We are also more-or-less stuck with IE6 at work, because this is the "supported" browser of the IT department. Those of us who still retain adequate user rights to do it have installed Firefox -- and actually that is the unofficial advice we get from the people in the IT department if we report browser problems!
Very little of our internal applications doesn't run under Firefox. More is broken under IE6... Yet IT continues to install and support IE6 as default browser. (I don't know whether they are trying to fudge IE6 onto Windows Vista!)
The technicians where I work disallow everyone to use anything other than IE6,7 and 8 on their work PCs. I had FireFox for awhile and they said it was inadvisable to use as it was "full of spyware / malware." There are a bunch of pre-approved applications we're allowed to use and the staff are very inflexible about it.
Actually our company recently dropped IE6 support unless specifically asked for.
The reason?
All statistics from monitored sites and campaigns are showing roughly a 1% drop per month of IE6 and we are currently raging from 12% to 18% (with a single one at 23%). Most users seem to be upgrading to IE7 which is fine. The general Firefox share is consistently larger than the IE6 share which only makes sense if you are comparing "the lowest common denominator"... which we are.
How do we deal with our clients?
We advice them. If the client specifically asks for IE6 we will explain the budget implications (which is the truth of IE6). Actually we've had several clients who are positive of the way we handle it since they can suddenly ask for much more without being told "well, it won't perform/look good/work in ie6". We've had no complaints yet and the current trend tells us there is no need to worry.
According to my experience I find reason to doubt the conclusion that IE6 will not die. It may sound optimistic but I project that IE6 will be irrelevant to most developers within 12 months.
Seph
My current workplace has IE6 as the default browser because of websites that were written explicitly for it. Fortunately, I have local administrator, so I installed Firefox.
I used to be the sysadmin for a high school. My base image has only IE6. Why?
- The teacher portal frontend was IE6-only. Even if I included Firefox, many teachers' brains would explode if they had two browsers.
- Ditto for the computer labs. If I put Firefox in labs, teachers would accuse me of "taking the Microsoft Internet off the computers".
The web design teacher/school webmistress was largely computer illiterate, designing the school's website straight out of "Web Design for Dummies". I offered to include Opera, Mozilla, and Firefox in her lab to let students view their work in multiple browsers, and she couldn't even respond to the question. She later called me at home to complain to me that the school's website, which she wrote 100%, didn't work in Mozilla. Doh!
I even offered to give her web design students directories on an internal IIS server, so they could see their pages on a real web server instead of just with UNC paths. She refused this offer, yet every year when funding came out, told me she wanted to get a web server for her classes. I'd tell her I could just set up IIS on an existing server, and I was not going to stuff another server into my already-overheated server room. Her head would explode from information overload, and the conversation would repeat the next year.
By using IE6 you are personally responsible for holding back innovation. Countless development time is wasted supporting the completely broken browser. If the company you work for is still using IE6, then they are a serious problem. Well, personally I would never work for a company that is a Windows shop, but that is a whole other story.
All my development supports modern browsers only. If you can't or won't upgrade, then too bad ... its not my problem. The percentage of IE6 users against all my sites is very low, sub 10% of users. But even if it was 25% or more ... it still wouldn't cause me to waste precious development time on a pile of shit browser.
When you visit some of my sites you are given a warning that the site will be broken in IE6 and that you need to upgrade.
This is what happens when you get in bed with Microsoft, you will get screwed in the end.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
when IE is down to 66.6%.
This summer I'm killing support for IE6 from all my sites. IE7 is the new dino. Very little revenue comes from IE6 users anyway although they still make up about 10% of my traffic.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Do what I did on my website and detect when a user is on IE6 and give them a nice fat message saying "Upgrade you bozo. See these screenshots of how nice this site looks on a real website (links to screenshots)? You are missing out!".
Dont just drop the hacks, tell the IE6 users you are dropping the hacks and show them pictures of what they are missing out on!!
And give them a message and screen shots of what your website would look like if they upgraded to a modern browser.
If microsoft included Internet Explorer 7 in Service Pack 3 or future service packs IE6 usage would be vastly reduced.(Since XP is mainstream and it comes with ie6..)
Vade Retro Satajax!
Never antropomorphize computers, they do not like that
What if someone develops a html 5 webapp, using a speedy browser as a base that becomes a killer must have app?
Last I heard, Google is losing money on youtube, per unit of traffic.
If they convert youtube to HTML 5 (or in other ways break it for IE 6, and tell the users that it doesn't work in IE 6), would people switch?
If no, then the IE 6 users would go away, and Google would lose less money. If yes, then woo-hoo ;) maybe if Google advertised Chrome as a replacement...
But... is it evil to use your power to make people do something they don't really want? If Google felt Opera was better than Firefox and tried to force me to switch, I definitely wouldn't be happy with them, so I think it's bound to generate some ill will.
Also: if your corporate IT overlords won't let you use anything other than IE 6, you just lose, so the web app needs to be a must-have to corporate users (and more so than their IE 6-only web apps).
I have one word for this: aaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrggggggh!
Of course, there are ways around it. I find the most effective is to include something like
<!-- Additional IE/Win specific style sheet (Conditional Comments) -->
<!--[if IE]>
<style type="text/css" media="all">@import "/fix-ie.css";</style>
<![endif]-->
or
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<style type="text/css" media="all">@import "/fix-ie.css";</style>
<![endif]-->
between and . Then I don't necessarily have to hack the stylesheet, it will just load and override the previously defined elements.
Founder & COO, Hayai India (hayai.in) / USA (hayaibroadband.com)