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IE6 Almost Dead In the US
SharkLaser writes "Microsoft, and the whole tech world, is celebrating the fact that use of Internet Explorer 6 has dropped below one percent in the US. 'Time to pop open the champagne because, based on the latest data from Net Applications, IE6 usage in the US has now officially dropped below 1 per cent!,' said Roger Capriotti, director of Internet Explorer marketing. 'IE6 has been the punch line of browser jokes for a while, and we've been as eager as anyone to see it go away.'"
I'll celebrate when usage of all versions of IE drops below 1 percent.
Every web designer celebrates for 10 minutes. Then back to work on the CSS for that pesky div.
The day to pop the champagne is when you don't have to treate IE6 as a supported browser. The day to pop the Dom Perignon is when you can set a policy of only supporting recent versions of any browser.
"IE 6 is STILL alive, WTF??!!"
I feel sad for the few people left still using it. Probably someone in a big org where some vital piece of software was written only with IE 6 in mind.
...and no, that's not an acronym for some Yet Another Language/framework/etc. I mean real fire...as in flame thrower.
When Fascism comes to America, it will call itself Anti-Fascism, and tell you to give up your guns.
There comes a time and age when all changes are bad. Also IE9, firefox or chrome are bad when you're happy with IE6.
That beat up old car is still running, and you're also happy with the old TV. All those new things are for younger people. You just have the computer to talk to the grandkids who apparently cannot write a normal letter anymore. Still, that's better than not hearing from them at all.
In my opinion the debacle of "IE 6" happened because
- Microsoft was all about "embrace & extend" to shut out
competitors
- Many web designers and even programmers didn't know there was an "internet" beyond IE, Exchange & hotmail
Is it still possible for another "IE 6" to happen?
That is a browser that doesn't follow W3 standards, a browser that becomes incompatible with later versions of itself and such a browser that is kept in use by big orgs because zillions of lines of code were written to work with THAT BROWSER only?
I haven't kept up with IE development, but it seems like Microsoft from IE 7 on has made an effort to get closer to the web development standards everyone else uses.
Even supervisors resistant to change like at my old org are now aware of the existence and popularity of other browsers beyond just IE.
I guess the question is are there still web designers and web programmers who code to IE only and organizations that support that........and if so, does it matter, does IE get close enough to standards so it doesn't matter?
IE6: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: What?
MS: Nothing -- here's your nine pence.
IE6: I'm not dead!
MORTICIAN: Here -- he says he's not dead!
MS: Yes, he is.
IE6: I'm not!
MORTICIAN: He isn't.
MS: Well, he will be soon, he's very ill.
IE6: I'm getting better!
MS: No, you're not -- you'll be stone dead in a moment.
MORTICIAN: Oh, I can't take him like that -- it's against regulations.
IE6: I don't want to go in the cart!
MS: Oh, don't be such a baby.
MORTICIAN: I can't take him...
IE6: I feel fine!
MS: Oh, do us a favor...
MORTICIAN: I can't.
MS: Well, can you hang around a couple of minutes? He won't be long.
MORTICIAN: Naaah, I got to go on to Robinson's -- they've lost nine today.
MS: Well, when is your next round?
MORTICIAN: Thursday.
IE6: I think I'll go for a walk.
MS: You're not fooling anyone y'know. Look, isn't there something you can do?
IE6: I feel happy... I feel happy.
[whop]
MS: Ah, thanks very much.
MORTICIAN: Not at all. See you on Thursday.
MS: Right.
[clop clop]
MORTICIAN: Who's that then?
MS: I don't know.
MORTICIAN: Must be a king.
MS: Why?
MORTICIAN: He hasn't got shit all over him.
Free Martian Whores!
I posted a comment almost identical to yours this year praising IE9, but today IE9 is not a good browser.
It's an old and crusty browser, because you know web stuff moves THAT fast.
As usual IE is tightly bound to windows, and yet again particular versions of windows. IE9 supports some HTML5 stuff sure. It also supports canvas, but canvas is useless without requestAnimationFrame. Session history management, asyncronous external Javascript, native Regex form validation
http://caniuse.com/ for the complete list of how embarrassingly old IE9 is.
So sorry, but your comment is around 9 months out of date.
saveie6.com
Who the hell makes jokes about web browsers? :/
Home. There is no home button
Alt+Home works fine in every copy of Chrome that I've tried. You mentioned that you have a netbook; it might even be easier to hit Alt+Home than to move the cursor up to the Home button with a trackpad.
They should have used Fire...and no, that's not an acronym for some Yet Another Language/framework/etc. I mean real fire...as in flame thrower.
I say they should nuke that site browser from orbit.... it's the only way to be sure.
...they should have had a way to automatically upgrade it the moment they detected any of their websites being visited by IE6, or alternatively, send viruses that way to break into it, and work w/ anti-viral vendors to get browser upgrades to be a part of any fix.
I just setup a new computer and had to setup XP mode to run IE6, because my state still has Juvenile Court Web page uses a really old activeX app. The major Hospital and Healthcare organization in the area still uses IE6 on all the doctors computers too. I don't think it dead until you can't find it used in business anymore.
Do these stats pertain just to use of IE6 on the public internet? Is IE6 still being used a lot more on internal intranets?
== Jez ==
Do you miss Firefox? Try Pale Moon.
Yet another reason to rally against them!
hey!
Something tells me that in February when I "tune in" ( okay, download ) to see what happens with "The Walking Dead" I'm going to see a scene with some people from Rick's group running frantically through a building. At one point they are going to dart into a closed room to escape. It will be a computer lab. There will be animated corpses rotting in the chairs. On screen, in front of them will be IE 6 running.
IE 6 reminds me of the old pre-Jurassic Park dinosaur movies. In most of them there is a scene where a big monster is shot, but still keeps moving. Some scientist explains that their nervous systems are still so primitive that they don't know they are dead yet and there is a delay between being shot and falling down.
Since you got modded up so high, I think you also need to be taken down a notch.
now simply need to ban them outright and fuck corporate installations that havent fixed their shitty internal app by now.
I would like to take yet another obligatory moment to once again point out that people being "stuck" with IE 6 would not have been such a big deal if it had been a proper independent application rather than "integrated" in to the OS.
People would have been better off designing apps that ran only under Netscape 4! You can run that alongside any newer version and on any newer version of Windows. No such luck with IE (at least not in an officially supported manner)
And because Microsoft made IE 6 part of XP, now they have to support it until XP dies. They didn't think about that back then did they?
Question is, if standards compliance and cutting edge features are so important to OP, why didn't he switch to something better long ago instead of waiting for IE to finally catch up?
Possibly because potential customers won't form a good opinion of an organization whose web site states: "Your ten-year-old web browser must be upgraded to current web standards. Please install Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or the Google Chrome Frame plug-in for Internet Explorer to continue." For one thing, "please install a plug-in to continue" is a tactic that fake antivirus software has used to social-engineer itself onto users' computers. For another, if it's a B2B site (a business selling to businesses), an employee in a heavily locked-down IT environment might not be able to convince IT to authorize the installation of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, or Chrome Frame. Either way, the viewer will quickly end up on a competitor's web site.
If Microsoft's product is the most prominent shipping product that doesn't follow the draft standard, and Microsoft doesn't have a supermajority market share in this segment, then I'd consider the standard to have been de facto adopted.
I read the title as 1E6 -- 1 million -- almost dead in the US and it made me sad.
I'll pop the cork when my customers get off IE6. Until then I need to sink development resources into maintaining and testing on IE6, no matter how painful it is.
Unfortunately my customers' IT departments are slow moving and not motivated in moving quickly off XP and IE6. Most of them are understaffed and underfunded and dealing with PC's that are sometimes more than 10 years old. I suppose they have more pressing problems, given that...
C
}#q NO CARRIER
These days, most webmasters have stopped caring if their sites look good in IE6. It is IE8 that is currently the lowest common denominator of the Web. Microsoft's failure to port their modern browsers to Windows XP means that we are basically stuck not being able to use CSS3 and other advanced HTML features until after 2014.
IE6 still survives in the last place it should ever be: Banks. There are major financial institutions that still use IE6 internally. If I was a customer or investor with one of these banks and knew they were using IE6, I'd consider that gross negligence and pull my money out of them.
The good news is that IE6 use in banks is dropping steadily, but the bad news is that they are not upgrading to IE8 or IE9. They are upgrading to IE7. In other words, this whole IE6 crisis will be an IE7 crisis in a year or so.
the tech world also with fond nostalgia noted the passing of Firefox 5,6,7 in the past few months and the imminent demise of FF 8
IMDB quote:
"Captain Von Schoenvorts: No, there's nothing wrong with our shooting, gentlemen. In primitive nervous systems like this allosaurus, even a fatal wound might register in the brain with a delayed action. As your saying would have it, this "chap" was late for his own funeral."
The gov still thinks it is okay to use... this makes being an IT person and having anything to do with the gov a good reason to off your self. I will get excited when NO ONE uses it anymore..
i think half of the websites / online applications that I use don't run on Internet Explorer 6 or don't render properly. Only a couple of web-based games run properly in IE6. I could go on and on about the details but i'll spare everyone the list. I'm too lazy to install IE 7 or 8 on my windows XP coputer. so i use Google Chrome instead of IE.
Netcraft has hardly earned any credit in the arena of confirming *anything*. Have you actually looked at their data?
Early in October, I logged hits to some of the pages on my own Web site to analyze which browsers and search crawlers are in use. Of the 301 hits by IE, 13.6% were by IE 6, 14.6% were by IE7, 49.2% were by IE8, and 22.6% were by IE9.
However, my chosen browser is SeaMonkey, now at 2.6.1. Almost no one seems to use SeaMonkey, which accounted for only 3 hits.
The upcoming HTML5 features vastly expands the possibles of web browser.
Now you could fall back to that argument that you only want your browser to display documents, so browsers are already good enough, but most people want more. That is the reason we have flash and a bunch of propitiatory phone environments.
Implementing the finer points of HTML5 in a timely manner, will go a long way to ensuring the viability of web apps on the "open web".
Or did you prefer walled gardens?
4. Forced to reinstall Windows 7 on a home machine to get that coveted IE 9 support, for banking, school, etc.
Unfortunately, the percent of people that use IE6 shouldn't be the main factor is determining the time to celebrate. I work with hospitals, and many of the pieces of software hospitals use depends on IE6 which means that while less than 1% of the US is using IE6, the less than 1% that do, are handling very sensitive information. What if in that less than 1% of users were included missile control systems...suddenly less than 1% is 1% way too many.
I don't hate IE9 per se as much as the company behind it, and how they achieved market dominance by bullying rather than by making better products.
My web logs still show the occassional web crawler reporting a useragent of MSIE 6.0, coming from MS IP blocks...
I frequently find web sites that only work in IE, and sometimes find sites that work in everything but IE, but at least IE lets me visit http://unqualifiedhostname:9000/ - which chrome does not.
Sure, I'd love to know the magic settings to make Chrome act like a browser instead of just a fancy UI for Google search, and I'd love to know the settings to make IE9 standards compliant, but it's honestly not worth my time when every new version of firefox "just works" on all three of the platforms I use every day.
Waiting for cache...
It's probably Stockholm Syndrome, but I'm ... I'm actually feeling sad about this! I spent a ton of time on my site hacking in IE6 support. Just last month I got my compy characters to FINALLY layout correctly in all cases on IE6. Ok, I can't resist a little war story ... In the past, the right hand column of character DIV's had a vertical offset of like 5 pixels. Why? WHY DID IT LAYOUT LIKE THAT?! There's no reason, no known peekaboo bug or whatever that I could figure was the cause ... it was just IE6 getting its digs in. It's like it had planned bugs that only I would see.
Memory un-management, DOM-splosions, layout goofs, CSS head scratchers - it was like trying to carry water with a bucket that has a bunch of rebel army bullet holes in it. One thing I could always count on, IE6's JavaScript implementation was juuust good enough. Me and Resig always had a way to squeak out of the jungle alive.
IE6: I beat you. I beat you silly countless times. I won! But, I never thought you'd actually die from the beating. It seems you finally have given up the ghost. R.I.P., ancient warrior. As you rot in the 8th circle of hell, I want you to know that while I cursed you and your creators as foul on a daily basis, I secretly enjoyed our time together.
Dave
Thank God, because IE 6 is probably the least standards friendly browser which has been plaguing the progress towards newer and more "featureful" web standards.
Adoption of the draft is hardly uniform and complete among the other browsers.
True, but there does exist a proper subset of the HTML5 draft that is uniform among the majority of notable browsers. Microsoft is usually by far the last to implement any particular feature from this subset. Furthermore, Microsoft tends to tie implementation of newly adopted features to a paid upgrade to the operating system: IE 9 requires at least Windows Vista, and IE 10 requires at least Windows 7.
i wish chrome or chromium would support GPOs
Your wish was granted quite some time ago:
http://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-list-3
http://www.chromium.org/administrators/policy-templates
Unless you have IE only intranet apps you shouldn't be using IE on XP. IE8 is not that much better than IE6. Sure you get transparent PNGs but you don't get a lot of stuff even Firefox 2.0 has. Not everyone can upgrade from XP but you can change to Firefox, Chrome, Opera or Safari which all still update on XP. If you are forced to use IE at work you should force your IT administrator to explain why he hates web standards.
Thanks to the anti-vaccination movement, we may see an outbreak of IE6 in the near future.
Because of security restrictions IE6 is the best working bowers for the intra-net at my job.
I work for a Fortune 100 company. A significant portion of our user base still has IE6 installed by default, with the workstations locked down preventing any other browser from being installed. Coincidently the workstations also are running XP...... :P
Hey! W are working with dictionary management system. We started at 2005-6. Each entry in dictionary is a XSD scheme validated XML. Editing aerea uses one XSL transformation; viewing area, same that goes to book layout, uses another. Last december me moved to the browser-independent version. Strange, this is totally possible. But without IE9: never. There is no "if () else" about browser recognition. You look at these function names, they are same under all browsers, and they are working too in all browsers! There are, of course, things, that only some browsers owns. Local xml content validation with XSD schemas in browser: only IE. Include local script in XSL transformations: it is not found under FireFox (some EXSL functions are). And of course: FireFox's disabilty to output content with "disable-output-escaong="yes"" option.
I thought for a minute we were saying that people were finally stopping use of IE9...
I can wait. ;-)
The question is whether enough users have usage patterns like that to justify spending advertisers' money on improving the experience for those users. Let's take it to an extreme and then work inward from there: Would you pay one of your developers to fix a bug that affects only one individual user out of millions, or would you write off that user as collateral damage?
So nowdays an html monkey is a developer, huh?
In my days it was more like a hooker but lesser pay and lesser respect.
It's also easy-as-pie to create INTRANET apps with for business via Visual Studio's ASP.NET (with TONS of excellent addons (e.g. -> Crystal Reports, custom Grid controls (saves a LOT of time programming the stock/oem ones to have anywhere NEAR the same functionality, IF you can do that, that is, in the 1st place - not everyone can or does)).
I spent a few years doing .NET coding in that capacity for large insurer companies, & found it excellent that way!
(Especially since it's server-side driven, not clientside, & prevents a LOT OF CRAP happening ala SQL Injection exploits etc. because IF/WHEN you "do it right", you use BIND vars + Stored Procedures + scrub out bogus "escape characters" while sanitizing inputs (via keypress events for example)).
* Someone also mentioned this & it's another "plus point" for IE9: It supports Group Policy Objects, which also makes it a snap to "mass manage" (this is where Windows excels between Active Directory & GPO's) & unlike FF's efforts in that area, or Chromes? It's GUARANTEED TO WORK right 1st time outta the gate! It was built to do so from the start/outset, is why...
(Disclaimer: I rarely use IE9 64-bit @ home while online, more of an Opera 12 64-bit &/or Waterfox 9 64-bit user here @ home on Windows 7 64-bit - I only do so, because Opera + Waterfox seem to be faster is all...).
APK
P.S.=> People are going to "bitch", no getting around it (someone's ALWAYS got complaints in other words, especially the "opposing camps" ala the Linux Penguins around here), but facts ARE facts... & IE9's a BIG improvement on IE6 this is certain!
... apk