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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.
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
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.
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.
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".
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.
"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..."
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.
Cars have more complexity than "wheel - gas - break". If you have any sense you get them serviced, change the tyres, top up various fluids and so on and so forth. Either you do it or you pay someone to do it for you. Not moving on from IE6 is akin to owning a car for 8 years and never changing the oil.
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
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."
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.
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.
The answer remains: fuck ye!
Administrator's response: Fuck executables outside %SystemRoot% and %ProgramFiles%.
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.
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
this kind of idiocy pisses me off. I have always had weird browsers on cellphones and other devices... I would rather see a partially broken page than a stuffed shirt jackass page telling me to install a browser that CANNOT be installed on my device or work laptop.
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)
Through one of IE's numerous vulnerabilities?
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.
"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
You're forgetting the XP virtual machine in Win7, it can be made to run IE6 seemlessly. That wouldn't even be that unusual of a situation for a large enterprise. Back in 2003/04 I was on a team that switched out a VERY large mortgage originator from all the loan processors having two PC's to one. The second PC's were used to run OS/2 with a custom origination software, we were upgrading their XP machines so that they could run VirtualPC with OS/2 as the guest. That app had millions in development costs behind it and was certified in almost every state, there was no way in hell it was going to be scrapped.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.