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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.
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.
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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?
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.
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?
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.
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
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!"
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.
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
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."
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.
Rumour has it that the browser that was built in to Duke Nukem Forever loads /. fine.
*sigh* Now we'll never know for sure.
"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