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.
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
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.
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".
f. Some of us, for various reasons, are pretty much stuck with using IE6 for browsing /. and are faced with a pile of mis-rendered & incompatible pages
Slashdot doesn't render properly in Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5 beta4 either - the comment titles and scores aren't displayed anymore
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.
"I checked the site statistics for my site and IE6 went from 15% of the hits in April to 0% in May."
Well, duh, because no sod can see anything in IE6 - visit once and never come back again.
This is the sort of crap that Opera has thrown at it - email a complaint to MSN, the BBC, any large website about parts not working in Opera (although they all do now), and you only ever got "nobody uses Opera to visit us"... OF COURSE NOT! BECAUSE IT DOESN'T BLOODY WORK!
It's like saying "Since we started banning unhappy people, our store recorded that 100% of customers in the store were happy with us!"
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..."
doesn't slashdot have any bug reporting tools for us to use?
i doubt CmdrTaco is reading anything below +5 insightful ;)
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
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.
They don't even have to do that, IE8 has a list of incompatible sites which can have updates forced to it through AD. Corporate IT puts the entire intranet zone in that list, pushes it out, and magic, everyone can use IE8 and have it render their broken-ass webpages designed by retarded fucksticks (yes I do have major anger issues against anyone building with IE6 as a target). Individual apps can be checked out by IT and/or adventurous users one by one and moved off the list if it works in IE8 mode.
I'm a believer in standards compliance with graceful failure. Write it for proper browsers, then do the absolute bare minimum to make it usable in the shitholes of the internet. If you can, place a notification on those pages explaining their experience is not optimal due to them or their IT department not clicking the goddamn update button. They don't get the nifty stuff, but they get a working site and encouragement to solve the problem thus making the internet better for the rest of us.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
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.
Then the corp network you're trying on is probably not using these restrictions.
The place i work is very relaxed regarding executables and installs, because it is necessary to be able to test and so forth as a developer, so each user is in the local administrators group.
Yes of course i have Firefox installed, it works great and i prefer it over any newer IE, anyway if I try to download and install a newer IE than IE6, i'm not allowed to, and why? because of some internal webapps they don't want to untangle from IE6 compatible into standards compliant.
So the major benefit of webapps is void, it's not platform independent and it's not future proof, some day even the standards of today will be void, so what webapps are is an infinite job security for web developers.
Unfortunately I can't avoid IE6 completely, because it comes installed with the certificates needed to browse our intranet, this browser won't die right away, too many non-tech users on corporate networks around the world, and some places they're even more restrictive when it comes to executables, which is a good thing for the non-techs ("I can have those smileys for my msn?"). The internet should have had more courage back in the IE4-5-6 days, but everybody just accepted, many even made pages that only worked for IE, this is just the aftermath of ignorant/lazy web developers.
If I was as pragmatic and objective as I claim to be, would I be commenting?
If the network overlords are requiring IE6 in favor of Firefox, then someone needs to have a chat with them.
The software I'm developing for corporate clients is Javascript-heavy stuff, where IE6 has some performance problems (not functionality issues, just performance). IE8, Firefox, Opera etc handle it just fine. If a corporate client comes to us and has a problem because they can't execute Javascript (it's required), or things are just a little too slow to render because they're using IE6, I just get them to put me in touch with the IT people at their company. You might be surprised how reasonable these people are. I've gotten some clients set up with Chrome even.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
Some of the most inept computer users I have ever met are programmers. One in particular told me that if she didn't have kids who needed a computer for homework, she wouldn't even own one.
You may be able to maintain your system, but many programmers are worse than the non-IT people who are their customers.