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The Man At Microsoft Charged With Destroying IE6
Barence writes "The man in charge of Internet Explorer has told PC Pro that he's been tasked with destroying IE6. Internet Explorer 6 continues to be the most used browser version in the world at the ripe old age of nine. IE6's position as the default browser in Windows XP means many companies still cling to the browser. 'Part of my job is to get IE6 share down to zero as soon as possible,' said Ryan Gavin, head of the Internet Explorer business group. Microsoft has also been giving further previews of Internet Explorer 9, with demonstrations showing two 720p HD videos running simultaneously on a netbook, thanks to IE9's GPU-accelerated graphics."
How about an automatic update that uninstalls IE6 and replaces it with another browser?!
I had hard time believing those stats as FireFox had only about 25% market share and IE appears to be used by over half the people. Both of these figures sounded very odd compared to what I've seen. But I guess that is true for the world, then. Anyways, I googled browser share by country and Firefox has about 55% share in Finland and has stayed constant for at least a year. IE on the other hand is used by one third of the population and has been in slow but steady decline for the whole year.
Karma is a bitch...
Tell me about it. My "bad" slashdot karma won't go away anytime soon with all my crappy posts.
In any case, they just have to issue a service pack which replaces IE6 by IE9.
Tell this twit, before he destroys IE6 that SOME of us use it because our CLIENTS use QUICK BOOKS 5, and while we might want them to upgrade, if they fail to, and upgrade IE, QUICKBOOKS NO LONGER WORKS. If Microsoft was in the OS business instead of generating a cash cow both for themselves and the software companies that play according to their rules, they would take steps to allow others to upgrade as they could afford to, instead of being FORCED, in the middle of a recession, so they can make more bank.
Uses, or requires? It should be trivial to NOT require those technologies.
I just tried a couple quick tests of two irritating shortcomings which I had remembered off the top of my head: the <object> element and 'inherit' as a CSS property value.
They actually do work. So I retract my complaint. I can only offer the meager defense that I tried those things many times as various IE versions appeared over the years, including in recent years. But clearly not recently enough.
The Internet is full. Go away.
What if MS did something "outside the box", like maybe let version 6 and version 8/9 be installed at the same time?
And push out IE 9 as an automatic update for everybody (removing IE 6), while giving companies a way to keep IE 6 installed?
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
As I understand it, that won't work. IE 6 won't run on anything newer than Windows XP, and IE 9 won't run on anything older than Windows Vista. XP runs IE 6 through 8; Vista runs IE 7 through 9.
XP is 10 years old. But you can still buy a new computer with XP preinstalled. That says a lot about the current problem with XP. Why is Microsoft still selling licenses for XP if they aren't going to support it properly.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
What's the problem using Firefox, Chrome, or Opera for browsing and using IE6 for those applications that require it?
It almost seems as if people are deliberately avoiding the easy and obvious solution so they can complain about MS.
My current company requires IE6 for certain ActiveX components that don't work on IE8. There is a massive certification process for all software to get certified on Win7, though. All internal software are getting upgraded from VB to C#.NET. (yay)
Of course, they're going from one insecure browser (IE6) to another insecure browser (IE8) (gotta have ActiveX).
Or you could just run this IE6 VPC Image and be a lot safer by not having vulnerable IE6 left on the machine. As for TFA I wish him the best, IE6 was an STD on the Internet and the quicker it is dead the better.
For those that have friends/relatives on IE and whom you want to GTFO Ie, here is a trick I've developed working PC repair that has a 90% success rate, at least with my customers. The key is to use the carrot, not him them with a stick. So in that vien I give them Firefox with ABP and...this is the key here...Give them ForecastFox set to their zip in the Menubar position. Once you point out that no longer will they get those screeching ads, but that ForecastFox will actually warn them with a popup if bad weather is approaching? Well then they are sold, no arguing and no hassle. One caveat though, you MUST set Firefox to their home page, which is usually the Yahoo portal. You and I may think it sucks ass but to them it is "the paper" where they read the news, check their mail, check sports scores/horoscopes, before going out to the big web via the Yahoo Search at the top. Which is why I know MSFT is full of shit when they say Bing can't get a "long tail" because if they can't mine enough data with the vast majority of average users using Yahoo's portal, well then they suck.
But just use the above trick to get those irritating friends/relatives off of IE and make theirs (and your) life better in the process. If they are clueless or live a distance so you can't set it up directly you can point them to Ninite to get the install automated (along with Flash, Silverlight, MSFT Security Essentials, IMs, etc) and not have to worry about them falling for a fake Firefox install site. Then you can easily walk them through getting ABP and ForecastFox via email links. The quicker we get the masses off of IE on XP and onto FF (Or Chrome, Safari, or Opera, all available at Ninite) the better off we will ALL be. Because I don't even wanna know how many PCs I've had to fix this month can be traced back to IE drivebys. I swear any PC that crosses my desk that only has IE seems to have 5 times the amount of malware.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.