Stories
Slash Boxes
Comments
Search

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Slashdot Log In

Log In

Create Account  |  Retrieve Password

Internet Explorer 6 Will Not Die

Posted by timothy on Tue Jun 02, 2009 09:00 AM
from the when-undead-is-a-compliment dept.
Internet Explorer The Internet Microsoft IT
caffeinejolt writes "Despite all the hype surrounding new browsers being released pushing the limits of what can be done on the Web, Firefox 3 has only this past month overtaken IE6. Furthermore, if you take the previous report and snap on the Corporate America filter, IE6 rules the roost and shows no signs of leaving anytime soon. Sorry web developers, for those of you who thought the ugly hacks would soon be over, it appears they will linger on for quite a bit — especially if you develop for business sites."
+ -
story

Related Stories

Submission: Internet Explorer 6 Will Not Die by caffeinejolt (584827)
This discussion has been archived. No new comments can be posted.
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.

Internet Explorer 6 Will Not Die 50 Comments More /

 Full
 Abbreviated
 Hidden
More
Loading... please wait.

  • Sorry web developers, for those of you who thought the ugly hacks would soon be over, it appears they will linger on for quite a bit -- especially if you develop for business sites.

    Yeah, IE6 is the herpes of the internet. It appears to be gone after heavy medication but if you look under the first layer of skin, there it is.

    Oh, and I should point out another untimely mark of IE6: we've all made this hilariously fugly hacks to make crap work in IE6 at some point and those relics of the last millennium are still out there. Which means that browsers still have to support the old rendering ways of IE6. Yes, the doctype [w3.org] will tell the browser what standards to use but I'm betting that the support for rendering HTML 4 is just as annoying as having to patch up old struts 1.x applications and read through nested tables galore in the HTML.

    And we all know that 90% of the work out there for developers is maintenance. What a painful irrepressible memory ...

    • Oh, and I should point out another untimely mark of IE6: we've all made this hilariously fugly hacks to make crap work in IE6 at some point and those relics of the last millennium are still out there. Which means that browsers still have to support the old rendering ways of IE6.

      Or maybe we can just ignore that crap, start designing according to standards, and get this fucking mess finally cleaned up.

      In the old days, if you pissed off those with IE6, you lost 90% of your viewers. Now it's totally different. Even IE8 respects standards now.

      Let's write off IE6 as obsolete and force those users to upgrade.

      • Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:5, Informative)

        by Bashae (1250564) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:25AM (#28181859)

        I'm a web developer and I'm already doing that. However, people from certain areas of business may have the majority of their users still visiting through IE6. When that happens, your only choices are either to support IE6 or not to work for that client.

          • Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:5, Insightful)

            by poetmatt (793785) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:41AM (#28182175)

            You can't do that to a business though. Ours hates IE6 and is migrating to firefox support but lets look at it this way: if a client is stupid/stubborn and uses IE6 and brings in 10+ million bucks a year for example, would you be able to just say "sorry, we can't support you" when you know there's competition? Not all people welcome browser changes with open arms even if it's just plain ignorance. You'd be dropped for your competitors faster than you could hit send on that email.

      • Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:4, Interesting)

        by gnick (1211984) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:27AM (#28181913) Homepage

        It's not quite that easy.

        We're forced to use IE6 at work - Mainly because IT understands the security risks (significant, but understood) and their web-apps are written to support it. Upgrading is too expensive expensive right now - Especially when the suits realize that we'll have to do it again later. Think of the brake-recall equation from Fight Club - The result is tragic, but real-world rather than ideal. So, IE6 endures...

        • The "understood" security risks (Score:5, Insightful)

          by Gary W. Longsine (124661) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:43AM (#28182197) Homepage Journal
          I know that you are simply repeating the excuse you have been given by your IT people, but they are smoking crack. The "understood" security risks are that using IE 6 to surf the web is probably the most efficient way to funnel malware into the Norton AntiVirus malware collection system. The real truth in most of these companies, if you scratch the surface, is that they have a mountain of HTML code for internal custom applications which assumed all the flaws in IE6, and they don't have a budget, nor a plan, for updating those apps. If you're the CIO or CEO, demand a plan. If they can't produce one, fire them, and get people who know what they're doing.

          • Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:5, Interesting)

            by McFadden (809368) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:53AM (#28182373) Homepage
            I tend to take a less generous view. I think any IT department that can't figure out a strategy to upgrade IE6 is either useless or fucking lazy. I simply don't believe in this mythical "mountain of HTML code" that has so many problems that couldn't be fixed in a relatively short space of time by a competent professional.

            I've heard these kinds of excuses time and time again, and on every occasion I've asked the IT admin staff responsible to give me some solid examples of where the problems lie (i.e. actual apps/code that moving to IE7/8, Firefox, Chrome or whatever would break and couldn't be fixed within minutes). Never seen a single example yet. They don't even know because they don't have a clue.

            • Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:5, Insightful)

              by cml4524 (1520403) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @10:10AM (#28182679)

              I simply don't believe in this mythical "mountain of HTML code" that has so many problems that couldn't be fixed in a relatively short space of time by a competent professional.

              If I say I don't believe in you, will that make you disappear?

              I have one application sitting here right in front of me that is comprised of over 5618 files (about half of which are ASP or HTML) that were orginally built around IE5. When IE6 came out they broke. When IE7 came out, they broke. IE8 won't even render half the site.

              The people who were commissioned to build it were done and gone years before I started working here. I have no documentation, the code is laced with inline SQL, .HTCs, and, in some places, 7 or 8 layers of includes. The database is undocumented, I'm the only person in the company who understands any of it.

              COULD it be fixed? Yes. But it would take months for me to do it, and it would cost too much to hire someone else. Scrapping it and rebuilding it is the only viable option, but management spent a ton of money on this app and nobody will admit that it's a disaster and a $1 million+ mistake.

              Whether you admit it or not, a lot of early web code out there was written by a lot of people who never had any business being anywhere near the profession. It's not going away any time soon.

              • Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:5, Interesting)

                by FictionPimp (712802) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @10:33AM (#28183089)

                I suggest you find a new job. That is a time bomb. Any management who won't admit that in 5 years a important part of the business logic is not going to work. Microsoft is going to stop supplying security patches for IE6. It's a fact, at that point you are going to have to run a very insecure browser while you do what you are saying is too expensive to do. Only now you have even more risk then starting the project before it's an emergency.

                What happens when new hardware simply will not run XP and you have no choice?

                My company just went though this. Luckily they listened to me and were proactive. We had tons of PHP4 code, a lot of it incompatible with php5. I pointed out plans from several projects we use to drop PHP4 support and the fact PHP itself was getting ready to drop support.

                So we got approval to start the project. It took us 2 years of modest work in addition to our normal projects. We also made sure all new projects were fine with PHP5. While we were at it, we rewrote everything to conform to a standard that worked in all major browsers at the time IE6, firefox, and safari.

                We also came up with a unified plan for the future. Doing things like putting an end to little access databases and random mysql servers. Unifying that took even more work as we had to reverse engineer work from developers long gone.

                Now we have a very flexible framework to work in that allows us to quickly change directions as trends change in our field. Boss wants a site to work on his blackberry, no problem. He suddenly switches to an iPhone, again no problem. He goes bonkers and moves to linux, guess what, no problem.

              • Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:4, Informative)

                by gbjbaanb (229885) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @10:08AM (#28182639)

                Most of it isn't down to the IT department to upgrade their web pages and ActiveX controls, but the 3rd party vendors who supply the 'mission critical' apps that need to work. I'm talking companies like SAP or Siebel whose ability to change direction makes an oil tanker look zippy.

                Most IT departments do have a strategy to upgrade:

                1. buy upgrade of vendor for tens of thousands of dollars.
                2. change and configure the new system at cost of more tens of thousands of dollars
                3. install on new servers (that cost.. you get the idea by now) and pilot it
                4. roll it out to users, if it actually works and provides the features the old version did.

          • Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:4, Insightful)

            by gnick (1211984) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @10:10AM (#28182683) Homepage

            The "understood" security risks are that using IE 6 to surf the web is probably the most efficient way to funnel malware into the Norton AntiVirus malware collection system.

            You're only half-way there. "Understood risks" can be explained up the chain. Other risks can not. If you have no funding to document risks in new software, you can't pass them up for approval. In the corporate world, that's fine - You only need to get it past your CIO.

            In the government world, it means you need to pony up for your IT staff to write up new security docs or live in an insecure (but approved) IT world. Ugly, but true.

      • Most of us do not get to pick our customers, and cannot afford to give the middle finger to a very large potential customer base.

      • Re:We still have IE6 at work (Score:5, Funny)

        by Tanktalus (794810) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:50AM (#28182327) Journal

        Rumour has it that the browser that was built in to Duke Nukem Forever loads /. fine.

        *sigh* Now we'll never know for sure.

      • Re:We still have IE6 at work (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Canazza (1428553) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:53AM (#28182389)

        Safari does aparently (beta 4)

        Basically, you need a browser that hasn't officially been released to browse /. properly.

        this is the only site I know of that attempts to implement things it knows does not work on the majority of browsers, just because they SHOULD work.
        IE6 was the worst offender for this, but just because a browser isn't perfect doesn't mean it should be deliberatly broken.

  • Dinosaurs rule business (Score:4, Insightful)

    by oDDmON oUT (231200) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:02AM (#28181479)

    This is simply fossil evidence that confirms it, kind of like a coelecanth.

  • Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:5, Informative)

    by javacowboy (222023) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:04AM (#28181501) Homepage

    The reason IE 6 won't die is intranet applications that were coded specifically for IE 6 that corporations haven't bothered to make cross-browser. IE 7 (and presumably IE 8) breaks a lot of those sites.

    At my current job, we're not allowed to install IE 7 or 8, and don't have the administrator rights to do it. It sucks because as a web developer, I'd like nothing better than to see IE 6 die a quick death.

    • Re:Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:4, Interesting)

      by thedonger (1317951) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:11AM (#28181619)

      I think there is an overwhelming amount of fear/misinformation among corporate IT and their seeming inability to allow IE6 to die. Fear of the unknown. And maybe a little laziness/love of the status quo.

      Two years ago a client of mine (a very large corporation) nearly shit when I set their web site to require 128-bit encryption. Apparently the law of the land forced IE6 and lower encryption for no other reason than it would be way too much work to move 50,000 people to a new standard.

    • Re:Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Vu1turEMaN (1270774) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:48AM (#28182279)

      My favorite is Kintera's Site Designer. To use it, they require "Internet Explorer 5". Basically, only IE5 or 6 work with it. Their calendar-based addon popup completely crashes IE7 or 8, doesn't even come up in Firefox 1, 2 or 3, and Chrome justs doesn't even load the page.

      Yet for some reason, my organization is paying them 100k a year to manage a large non-profit's site! LOLOL!!!!!

  • /. - are you listening? (Score:5, Funny)

    by dazedNconfuzed (154242) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:04AM (#28181509)

    Pay attention to your own news site, CmdrTaco!
    Though this is a site for nerds, that doesn't mean that everyone has abandoned IE, or is at least running the latest incarnation thereof. Some of us, for various reasons, are pretty much stuck with using IE6 for browsing /. and are faced with a pile of mis-rendered & incompatible pages (I'm thinking the user account page in particular). We appreciate having /. optimized for FireFox, but would also like such consideration for the more-used IE6 browser.

  • Stop writing ugly hacks for IE6.... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by xgr3gx (1068984) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:06AM (#28181531) Homepage Journal
    And IE6 will go away quickly.
    Stop doing the hacks, and let IE6 render them ugly and broken, while compliant browsers will render them correctly.

  • in-house apps (Score:5, Informative)

    by Lord Ender (156273) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:07AM (#28181535) Homepage

    IT departments have no budgets right now. Testing all the in-house apps with IE8 would cost money. Even telling people to press the "render in IE6 mode" button would be quite expensive in terms of calls. So they're just blocking the update.

    • They don't even have to do that, IE8 has a list of incompatible sites which can have updates forced to it through AD. Corporate IT puts the entire intranet zone in that list, pushes it out, and magic, everyone can use IE8 and have it render their broken-ass webpages designed by retarded fucksticks (yes I do have major anger issues against anyone building with IE6 as a target). Individual apps can be checked out by IT and/or adventurous users one by one and moved off the list if it works in IE8 mode.

      I'm a believer in standards compliance with graceful failure. Write it for proper browsers, then do the absolute bare minimum to make it usable in the shitholes of the internet. If you can, place a notification on those pages explaining their experience is not optimal due to them or their IT department not clicking the goddamn update button. They don't get the nifty stuff, but they get a working site and encouragement to solve the problem thus making the internet better for the rest of us.

  • Just because it has users... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by mini me (132455) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:09AM (#28181583)

    Just because it has users doesn't mean that you have to support it. Internet Explorer quickly rose in popularity in the first place because web developers blatantly stopped supporting Netscape, even though it had the majority market share at the time.

    Futhermore, the thing to realize about IE6 users is that they do not care about the web. They don't care that your website has pixel-perfect accuracy, for instance. So why waste your time optimizing your website for their benefit? The natural degradation designed into the HTML specifications still allows them to access the content in a limited fashion. That is all that they want. If they wanted to see more, they wouldn't use IE6.

  • Businesses (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Andy Dodd (701) <atd7@nOsPam.cornell.edu> on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:14AM (#28181667) Homepage

    Businesses often stay about one version behind on Microsoft products, or in some cases about a half cycle behind. They wait for a given MS product to get service packed out the wazoo before deploying it.

    For example, my employer is just starting to roll out Office 2007 very slowly, and based on my experiences and many other reports, this is typical at most businesses.

    Similarly, they are just rolling out IE7 now, when IE8 just came out.

    So it's not surprising that IE6 still has a major deployment base considering that IE8 just came out and that many companies stay about one revision behind.


  • if(window.XMLHttpRequest){ //proceed as normal
            }
    else
            {
            if(window.ActiveXObject){
                    document.write "Error 404 Page Not Found"
                    }
            }

    i haven't had any problems with ie6 since i implemented this holistic approach

  • I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)

    by SmallFurryCreature (593017) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:17AM (#28181715) Journal

    Old crap tends to stay around, until something kills it.

    What if someone develops a html 5 webapp, using a speedy browser as a base that becomes a killer must have app? Then MS will have no choice or be known as the OS vendor whose browser ain't good enough.

    MS isn't trying to limit IE for nothing, it hopes that nobody dares create a webapp that simply doesn't work under IE. Google has shown with Chrome they are thinking of pushing the envelope, wonder what they got in the pipeline that needs Chrome.

    IE6 will die when using it hurts the user. Personally, for private web-apps, ie ALL ie is dead. It is amazing what you can make a webapp do when IE support is dropped.

  • Stop the artificial life support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Opportunist (166417) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:21AM (#28181789)

    A company I work for dropped support for IE6 (not only but also because of my pressure) about a year ago. The impact was minimal. People who came to their page with an IE6 or earlier were asked to update, and they did. According to the logs, people who arrived at the page with an IE6 soon came back with IE7/8 or other browsers.

    Why?

    So far, it seems people don't frankly care what browser they're using. They're just using what they have. And they're usually quite willing to update to something "new and improved", they just don't know that it exists. Now, the average user that visits this client's page isn't too computer savvy (the company is in the adult education sector, the usual visitor of the page wants to be educated), and from the questionary I attached to the booking process nobody was really "annoyed" that they were asked to update. Many were actually happy to learn something new and "better" is out there for them.

    So don't be shy to tell your visitors "hey, there's some new browser out, you might wanna use it for a better browsing experience". People like it.

  • Netscape 4 again (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Tridus (79566) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:26AM (#28181889) Homepage

    The last time something like this happened, it was everybody wishing Netscape 4 would die. But it kept shambling across the Internet like a zombie for years.

    At this point, IE6 will die when the computers still using it get replaced.

  • Developers should charge more for IE6 support (Score:5, Interesting)

    by atfrase (879806) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:38AM (#28182101)
    There seems like a pretty clear free-market solution to this problem: developing sites that support IE6, with all the requisite hacks and workarounds, is harder. It takes longer, and should cost more. If developers just attach an appropriate premium to this extra work, businesses start having a financial incentive to stop demanding it.

    "Well boss, I got a quote for that intranet app we need developed, and it turns out our IE6 requirement adds 35% to the total cost." "Hrm.. and what's your estimate of the cost of migrating?" "Migrating would cost us more than the 35% on this one project. But looking a year or two out, paying that kind of premium on all future development contracts, switching is way cheaper, and will probably reduce IT expenses for security issues to boot." "Right. Start working on that."

  • This is misrepresentative and a sign of false hope; IE has lost no ground to FF according to that chart:

    IE7 + IE6 + IE8 = 43.51 + 18.23 + 8.26 = 70.0% share
    FF3 + FF2 + FF1 = 18.58 + 1.45 + 0.17 = 20.2% share

    This is unchanged from the average (71.6% v 19.84%) or the oldest data in Dec '08 (70.8% v 20.8%).

    There is no growth here, just the obvious resistance to change in the corporate world, which will be more reflected in Windows (IE6) than anything else.

    .

    We'll only really see the demise if IE6 when the corporate world fully adopts the next OS, which would be Windows 7, a year or three after its first service pack (assuming MS plays it smart). That means we're stuck with IE6 for at least another 2-3 years.

    (Yes, I know that a large percentage of corporate deployments are still on Windows 2000. If they're moving to XP but aren't already too far along, it will hopefully be with IE7 or IE8, or even something else entirely.)

  • Think about this: if you have a legit copy of Windows XP you're HARASSED to upgrade to the latest version. If you have an illegal copy, you're either smart enough to ignore the harassment, or you constantly fail the required product validation before upgrading.

    I think this proliferation of IE6 is because it was the last upgrade that didn't require validation. It lives on through piracy, which also promotes insecure computers that don't have the latest updates.

    • Re:Developers need to grow a set... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ledow (319597) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:19AM (#28181745) Homepage

      "I checked the site statistics for my site and IE6 went from 15% of the hits in April to 0% in May."

      Well, duh, because no sod can see anything in IE6 - visit once and never come back again.

      This is the sort of crap that Opera has thrown at it - email a complaint to MSN, the BBC, any large website about parts not working in Opera (although they all do now), and you only ever got "nobody uses Opera to visit us"... OF COURSE NOT! BECAUSE IT DOESN'T BLOODY WORK!

      It's like saying "Since we started banning unhappy people, our store recorded that 100% of customers in the store were happy with us!"

    • Re:Developers need to grow a set... (Score:4, Informative)

      by netsavior (627338) on Tuesday June 02 2009, @09:55AM (#28182425) Homepage
      this kind of idiocy pisses me off. I have always had weird browsers on cellphones and other devices... I would rather see a partially broken page than a stuffed shirt jackass page telling me to install a browser that CANNOT be installed on my device or work laptop.

All trademarks and copyrights on this page are owned by their respective owners. Comments are owned by the Poster. The Rest © 1997-2009 Geeknet, Inc.