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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.
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
Stop doing the hacks, and let IE6 render them ugly and broken, while compliant browsers will render them correctly.
Consider that many users will not realize it is their browser. They will simply decide your site is screwed up, and leave promptly. This is not a mistake to be eager to make in many scenarios.
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And scare away 50% of potential consumers because of a "broken website" ?
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
A semantically-coded site should render acceptably, unless you are using tons of nested DIVs and crazy CSS/image methods to make a site act like something it wasn't meant to be.
Part of the problem is unrealistic expectations of users and overzealous developers. Are your rounded corners in IE worth non-semantic, difficult to maintain mark up, with poor cross-browser and legacy-browser support?
Help fight poverty: Punch a poor person.
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!"
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.