Even Microsoft Wants IE6 Dead

Tarmas writes "Microsoft has launched a website intended to persuade people to upgrade their browsers from Internet Explorer 6. In Microsoft's words: 'This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.' About time?" Of course they want you to upgrade to a newer Internet Explorer.

Comments

If only other devs used ie6-upgrade-warning..

[Anonymous Coward]

I've used ie6-upgrade-warning for some of my projects.

It's quite obnoxious, and usually gets the job done.

Re:If only other devs used ie6-upgrade-warning..

[hairyfeet]

The problem is you seem to think the users are going "yay lets use crappy IE6!" when of course that isn't the case, it is the fact that all their Intranet will break since it was coded in crappy IE6 ActiveX and good luck getting the suits to pay to upgrade THAT mess!

But there is a good reason why IE6 usage jumps from 9AM to 5PM Mon through Fri, and that is because millions of dollars worth of corporate Intranet apps are written around IE6. Was it stupid? Of course. Do most places have the budget to replace it? Not in this economy they don't.

But if you want o run off the business users that's cool with me, free market and all that. But don't pretend there are millions of consumers running crappy old IE6 just for the fun of it.

I'm a web developer and I don't like this

[WiglyWorm]

I'm not sure why I should potentially lower my conversion rate by hassling people to upgrade their browser. That seems like Microsoft's job, not mine.

Maybe they could use the same features that redirect you to msn.com or bing to redirect you to a browser selection page, no? In the mean time, I will just keep including stylesheets for IE6 that do some graceful degredation. It won't look great, but it won't be illegible.

Besides, it seems like most IE6 users in this age are enterprise clients who can't upgrade until their vendors start supporting new browsers, or until the interprise itself gets rid of legacy programs.

Re:I'm a web developer and I don't like this

[Pieroxy]

I am working for a big e-commerce website (think several hundred million euros of yearly revenue) and we are actually putting up a banner for IE6 users. We still test it for now but don't spend time on design. Most websites in France are moving in this direction.

Now, when I won't have to worry about it at all, I'll celebrate a second time !

Re:I'll switch

[TrancePhreak]

http://forums.techarena.in/windows-update/451062.htm

Five seconds on Google.

Re:We can do better

[MoonBuggy]

Cross platform doesn't matter as long as the different pieces of platform-specific software all obey the same standard. It doesn't matter whether your TCP/IP stack was coded in malbolge by Russian monks and only runs on RISC OS, if it supports the standard it won't cause any problems for anybody.

The problem, of course, is that HTML & CSS are very complicated and, some might say, poorly-defined standards whereas TCP/IP, ASCII, and so forth are straightforward and well known. Really, though, your theory that one needs a cross-platform browser to ensure correct rendering implies that none of them are implementing the standards properly, and that's something I disagree with - there may be minor quirks, but on the whole you can expect a well coded site to display more or less accurately, although not pixel-perfect, in all modern browsers. IE6, however, made a complete hash of valid markup ten years ago, and does so to an even greater extent now.

International version?

[fearlezz]

So, about 50% of the IE6 users worldwide are chinese... Actually, the top 10 countries with the highest IE6 usage are non-english... and they didn't think of approaching IE6-users in their own language? *sigh*

Re:International version?

[hduff]

So, about 50% of the IE6 users worldwide are chinese... Actually, the top 10 countries with the highest IE6 usage are non-english... and they didn't think of approaching IE6-users in their own language? *sigh*

What they really need is a free upgrade path from the pirated versions of Windows.