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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.
...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.
Very likely. In addition, this number may include the few dev shops that still have to support legacy software for a customer that requires IE6.
1% of 200,000,000 = 2,000,000. Still a lot of copies of IE6.
âoeAny society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.
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 had such a job.
They built their software with programmers and supervisors who thought IE was the internet and everything else was just a passing fad.
Their primary customer was a government agency, run by a central IT subagency about 5 years behind everyone else.........AND PROUD of it. Seriously, I interviewed with the head of the place and he thought it was foolish to go with new things as they were not as sure as what you invested time and money in.
The boss where I worked thought like that too.
I think they both had a point, but as the medical people say "its the dose that makes the poison".
Both of those groups took that anti-change philosophy too far and suffered losses from it.
I think that is poor judgement, fueled by fear of change.
That place still had systems running in foxpro.
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.
A lot of websites I've used throw up w/ IE6 - it's not like it's something web page designers have to support. As for supporting the most recent versions, how does one work that w/ Firefox and their prolific versions? Plus, if they drop support for IE8, then doesn't that imply that anyone still on XP is out of luck, unless they switch browsers?
saveie6.com
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.
Take comfort you are not alone. My last job was in an org like that. They even had production software that relied on foxpro, microsoft access and bat files. They were able to get away with it because their customer was a government agency with an authoritarian IT sub-agency that was just as technologically conservative and resistant to change.
The good news is that not all places to work are like that. You go through stress when you leave and find out how far behind you are, but at the same time you also fall in love with your career again as you end up learning new things.
...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.
Why can't you? If I ran a web service I'd gladly inform people their browser is too old to be supported.
To offset political mods, replace Flamebait with Insightful.
Since you got modded up so high, I think you also need to be taken down a notch.
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.
People can install every stupid piece of software out there but when it comes to browsers, oh no I can't download and install the newest version of my browser of choice. And if the computer illiterates are still using XP for much longer it is proof that HDD manufactures have done a bang up job making that old 80 GB ide drive and computer manufacturers are using quality parts. Come on people XP is over 10 years old.
1% of 200,000,000 = 2,000,000. Still a lot of copies of IE6.
Microsoft's estimate of Windows deployment about five years ago was about a billion installs, and that was without counting pirated copies, which in some countries (e.g. Asia) are huge (look at China with it's ~25% IE6 usage, that's pirated Windows copies). So let's say 2B installs. 1% of 2B is 20M. OTOH 25% of several hundred million or whatever China contributes is still 100M or so. So worldwide there's still an awful lot of IE6 around.
(I'm not sure if your 200M is meant to be US-only to fit the headline, where would a figure of 200M Windows installs for the US come from?).
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.
And update the firefox versions on that policy every week.
XP may be 10 years old, but Vista, which succeeded it, is how many years? It was out in 2006, and since it was unacceptable to a lot of businesses, XP had to be sold until 2009, when Windows 7 was finally out. So somebody could have bought a computer w/ XP (I'm talking legit version here) in 2009, in which case, he's just used it for 3 years. Why should one discard such a system?
The most graceful way for MS to deal w/ this would be to persuade anti-virus vendors like Norton, McAfee, Kaspersky, et al to drop support for XP i.e. stop developing virus fixes for that platform, on the same grounds that they probably no longer support, say, Windows 98. That way, owners of XP boxes are safe only if they don't connect them to the internet, but do everything else on it - word processing, home finances, etc. Keep in mind that if they were to switch to Windows 7, the'd probably have to upgrade their hardware (particularly memory) as well. This has all been discussed in the other 'What's keeping you on XP' thread.
For IE in that case, users may be either w/ IE7 or IE8. For any other browser - Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Opera, they still have a wide choice to pick from.
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
Yeah, this. Although even just getting off of IE6 is a big improvement, IE7 still represents a problem. IE8, while not perfect, is considerably better than either of those, and I look forward to its becoming the minimum.
Of course, the holy grail is IE9 or later, but until Microsoft swallows its pride and backports something to WinXP, that won't happen.
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?
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.
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
That's not true at all. Most major web services define clearly browsers that are supported and not supported. The good ones will let you continue regardless, but will inform you that things may not work as expected.
All the world's a CPU, and all the men and women merely AI agents
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
Compared to navigating to a competitor's website that works in $browser? For the average non-technical person, or the office drone locked down to IE6, the answer is yes.
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?