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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.
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.
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.
Since you got modded up so high, I think you also need to be taken down a notch.
Indeed, I haven't seen that. However, I have seen plenty of websites saying something to the effect of "Your brand new web browser doesn't work with our website. Please use IE to continue."
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
Adoption of the draft is hardly uniform and complete among the other browsers. So there really is not de facto HTML5 standard.
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
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?