Norwegian Websites Declare War On IE 6 349
Eyvind A. Larre writes "A large and rapidly growing campaign to get users to stop using IE6 is being implemented throughout Europe. 'Leading the charge is Finn.no, an eBay-like site that is apparently the largest site for buying and selling goods in all of Norway (Finn is Norwegian for "Find"). Earlier this week, Finn.no posted a warning on its web page for visitors running IE 6. The banner, seen at right, urges them to ditch IE 6 and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.' The campaign is now spreading like fire on Twitter (#IE6), and starting to become an amazing effort by big media companies to get rid of IE6! The campaign also hit Wired some hours ago."
"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Is IE 7 really an improvement? If they're going to tell users to upgrade, why don't they encourage a standards-compliant browser?
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Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Informative)
If by "quite close", you mean "still the least standards-compliant browser available", you're right.
Why not simply encourage them to download Firefox? Or Chrome? Or Opera? Or Safari? Or freakin' iCab, if they're on an old Mac?
Upgrading to IE7 is just going to make them do the same again when IE8 comes around, and it's still going to force me to boot Windows just to test in IE. If I was in that position, I would actively block IE6, and have a large banner for IE7 users suggesting Firefox.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Interesting)
I guess if you do not give them Microsoft's option, the other side gets pissed off.
In fact a while ago I've created a little script called killie6 [sourceforge.net], when I posted on linkedin group to ask professional opinion about it [linkedin.com], many declared it desceptive, violating user's choice, etc, etc.
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I get 100 mbit fiber for $65/mo in a small town in Iowa. WTF is taking the rest of you so long?
I'd like to know what town you're in. Everywhere else in Iowa is practically 28.8k dialup.
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I grew up in Los Angeles. Anything under 1,000,000 people is small by my standards you insensitive clod!
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Look, if you try to compare a wooden club, an iron mace and a black powder rifle, you know which is the winner. Let's not talk about submachine guns here.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Informative)
I guess you have never heard of a Microsoft-only shop, or of business users who (a) often cannot control what is on their work PCs and (b) make up a large proportion of PC users.
I help run a site for government (and some non-government) users in various agencies. About 80% of my users (by page hit) are IE6 and another 14% are IE7. Firefox is mainly used by non-government clients of my website.
The government users have no say over their desktop configuration. And if you have never had to deal with the IT section of a large government agency you don't know the obstacles and bureaucracy (and random malfunctions) to simple things like "Just use Firefox" or "Update to the latest version of IE". These are projects that can take *years* to accomplish.
Sometimes entire state governments can be locked down into a single "solution" - most likely a Microsoft-only one. Then it is IE all the way, and version upgrades will take ages to filter through.
There is no "simply".
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If I was in that position, I would actively block IE6, and have a large banner for IE7 users suggesting Firefox.
Spoken like a man who doesn't earn a significant portion of his annual income from web-based enterprises.
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If they are using IE6, then they probably like IE.
If they are using IE6, they probably don't know anything about alternate browsers, or browsers in general.
Simply asking them to upgrade to IE7 is the most logical and considerate thing to do,
Or we could ask them to be logical and considerate of us.
some people actually prefer IE over the other browsers.
I know, I have met such people.
I've also met people who prefer Vista. And I've met people who actually like Clippy.
Trust me, you are not the majority.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Informative)
20/100 on the Acid3 is "close"?
Webkit and Presto got 41/100 and 46/100 respectivly when Acid3 was released (now they both pass with flying colors).
Unless all of IE's compliance improvements have been in areas not covered by Acid....
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20/100 on the Acid3 is "close"?
In a way yes. The acid tests are by no means comprehensive. Acid 2 focuses primarily on CSS and Acid 3 focuses on DOM/ECMAscript. A browser can completely tank acid 3 and still render most things just fine. (I use noscript and don't notice ill effects on most websites)
Acid tests aside, IE7 is certainly not the best browser out there, but it is way the hell better then IE6 and probably an easier sell to those still on IE 6.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Informative)
If we measure "better" in percents of all features (not just those in the ACID tests), then:
Browser: ......... IE6 ..| IE7 ..| FF2 ..| 73% ..| 90% .......... 51% ..| 56% ..| 92% ..| 13% ..| 24% ............... 50% ..| 51% ..| 79% .... 99% ..| 99% ..| 100%
HTML / XHTML . 73%
CSS 2.1
CSS 3 changes . 10%
DOM
ECMAScript
http://www.webdevout.net/browser-support-summary?IE6=on&IE7=on&FX2=on&uas=CUSTOM [webdevout.net]
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
But don't you agree it's the best effort on their part to date? I would say so.
Yes, but "best effort" != "close"
"closer", maybe.
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It's a shame that the Acid tests draw developer effort away from more important bugs that us web developers really care about. Good lesson, though: if you want developers to care about a bug, don't bother filing a bug report. Just make a colorful animation with a 0-100 score to shame them. They'll ignore real bugs that other users filed years ago in their bug db, just to get the darned thing up to 100/100.
There's a lot of thruth in this. One of the big problems with coding against a standard is "how do you know when you pass?" Coloful animation or no, a third party providing testing services for any standard is a wonderful thing, provides a metric that's easy to market, and of course distracts from the "real" standard. That's why standards committees rarely provide such tests: no matter what the standard says, the test will be taken as normative in preference to the standard.
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It's a mixed bag, some things are better in IE7 than IE6, but IE7 also threw in a bunch of new problems. For example, if you use opacity on any element, IE7 permanently turns off cleartype for all of the text inside that element and permanently disables PNG alpha support for that element and all of its children. Both very irritating problems if you care about IE users.
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You keep using that word. I don't think it means what you think it does.
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Im a web developer and I find almost nothing that works better in IE 7 than IE 6. Javascript is still the same thing, no support for for each loops nor iterators, the setAttribute() function is still useless, dynamic CSS only works correctly with the element.style.cssText attribute and a lot of other IMPORTANT improvements in Javascript is still missing.
I always have to spend more time supporting IE, and supporting both of them at the same time is a piece of cake, because they're hardly any different. Most
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Informative)
If you think IE8 is anywhere near standards-compliant then you need a serious reality check, it's not quite as horrible as IE6 and IE7 but it's still fucking painful to work with. I recently created a website just for shits and giggles, completely standards-compliant, worked perfectly in Safari/WebKit and Opera, needed some minor tweaking in Firefox, barely rendered in the IE8 beta (and it looked nothing like it was supposed to look like), produced a "blank" page in IE7 and IE6 asked me if I wanted to download it (application/xhtml+xml).
I wish all these incompetent web developers would defending IE, IE8 is still a complete failure when it comes to standards compliance but lots of people who have no idea what they're talking about are hailing it as an awesome browser because it's not completely and totally broken in every conceivable way. It's like saying "My 2009 Ford is awesome, it only randomly explodes every 200 miles or so instead of every 10 miles like my 2008 ford...".
/Mikael
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Yes, it's a huge improvement over IE6. Tabs alone make it much nicer IMO. Of course, here at work, IE 6 is all that we're allowed to have installed without a signed exception from management and IT.
Of course, it's still a pile of fetid dingo's kidneys compared to some of the competition. I'd rather see the sites encourage users to upgrade to FF, Opera, or even Safari or Chrome rather than just tie them to IE...
Let's expand it, eh? (Score:2)
Hmm...sounds like we need to expand this push to get rid of IE6, into something much larger.
Get rid of Windows? A nice plus in your case would sound like getting rid of management.
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I can see why companies would want to support browsers whose compatibility issues they are knowledgeable about. it now seems like the known issues in IE6 are way too many to keep their sites compatible with IE6.
IE7 and FF(2 and 3) are quite a significant improvement over IE6. And then there are companies that build some web interfaces using Java and VB and mix up several technologies which makes their sites to malfunction regardless of which brower or OS you choose. The payroll system in our university has
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You have to remember that even if you use Firefox, there are plenty of vulnerabilities in ie that can affect you just by the fact that it is installed, even if you don't actually use it to surf the web.
Even if you use firefox/opera/whatever, you should still upgrade IE
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh come on. Every time I have to make a webapp work across all browsers, 9 times out of ten, if a bit of code works perfectly fine in every browser but one, that one is IE. And IE7 is still chock full of problems. Random example (I could point to hundreds): As a home project, I'm in the middle of cross-platform debugging for a Google Maps-integrated electric vehicle simulator [rechargeamerica.net]. If you design a vehicle in it (rather than just using a preset), you can submit it to me to consider for inclusion as a preset. It's emailed so I'm made aware of it right away and have a chance to scour over the numbers that they're providing to make sure it makes sense. The easiest way to do this is just with a mailto HREF that supplies a body. Fine, right?
Well, IE (incl. 7) has a tiny GET limit, and this applies to mailtos as well. It only allows 2083 characters. By comparison, Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc are for all practical purposes unbounded. 2083 characters is too small to hold all of the vehicle stats, such as the tables of how efficient the drivetrain and battery pack are under hundreds of different conditions. So, IE throws a cryptic error when it sees it. There are workarounds, of course, such as a web form that submits mail by CGI, but you know what? No. I'm getting sick of pandering to a lousy browser in project after project. I've in general decided to take the same approach that these sites are taking: disable any feature that IE has trouble with, and tell them to use a better browser if they want to have that feature available to them.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:4, Informative)
Well, you should stick to the HTML spec. GET requests should never cause an action, like sending that mail. POST requests are designed to allow actions. I don't know about the byte limit on POSTs, but I know you can upload files of several MB. Should be enough for an email.
There is a reason for distinctions between GET and POST. A webcrawler for instance should be able to safely follow any link/form with a GET request. If you trigger mails with a GET request, you can easily get the googlebot to accidentally send you some email.
Also, you may want to read up on the HTTP/1.1 RFC, which states that a GET request can be of unlimited length, but that clients and servers should beware as there is no guarantee that all software supports more than a 256 bytes long URI. This is one thing you shouldn't blame on Microsoft, as this limitation is fairly ancient, older than any copy of IE :)
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GET requests should never cause an action, like sending that mail. POST requests are designed to allow actions.
Oh come on; that's the standard way [google.com] of launching emails: <a href="mailto:address?subject=Subject&body=Body">Mail us</a>. It's not really a GET request; it never gets sent to a server. It's just a way to tell the browser, "bring up an email client". And any crawler that doesn't recognize mailto is an idiot. There's not even an "HTTP" in there.
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>Well, IE (incl. 7) has a tiny GET limit, and this applies to mailtos as well. It only allows 2083 characters.
Ah, I see. So you were talking about only mailto's. Silly me, thought I read something about GET in your mail. Especially when it's in another paragraph than where you mention mailto's
In short (Score:5, Insightful)
To sum up:
1) There is no spec limit for GET lengths. Microsoft decided to make one up. And they made it tiny.
2) mailto is not a GET request. According to the spec [faqs.org], "No additional information other than an Internet mailing address is present or implied." Microsoft decided to interpret it as a GET request, probably due to lazy coding.
3) HTTP/1.1 RFC applies to *http*. Mailto is not http.
Their choice of behavior is both in violation of specs *and* a big annoyance. And it's just one random example out of hundreds that I've encountered. 9 times out of ten, if one browser isn't working and every other one is, that one is IE.
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i also program for browsers, and i hate ie
but your example sucks
you should be doing posts, not gets, for large chunks of data
no matter what ie's limits are
get submissions really shouldn't be bigger than 256 characters
for many reasons
http://www.cs.tut.fi/~jkorpela/forms/methods.html [cs.tut.fi]
Mailto (Score:2)
Mailto isn't GET. It's not even HTTP. It's just a URI shortcut for "open an email client". Mailto in an HREF is the *standard* way of spawning an email client. And IE's 2083 character limit is something that they made up that is not called for by spec anyway, and it interferes with perfectly legitimate uses [google.com].
zzz (Score:2)
<FORM Action="mailto:xyz" METHOD="POST">
there's dozens of reasons why you don't want huge gets
in the link you just supplied me, the very first reply hints at some of those reasons
do some research. find out why cramming huge amounts of data into a get is plain wrong. i sent you a link before, read it to get started. (just don't "get" started ;-)
this issue is well and above beyond a mark against ie. ie sucks for thousands of reasons. but this is not one of them
if ie never existed, for reasons of basic h
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GET is a type of HTTP request. Mailto isn't HTTP. Why isn't this the beginning and end of this conversation right there?
Show me one proxy server in use today that limits GETs more than IE. As though that's a valid justification -- limiting, what, 85% of the computers on the net because some proxy might possibly do it for them?
As stated, there are perfectly legitimate reasons for a long GET URL -- Google Maps being a good example (they have to limit it to be compatible with IE). But that's not even appli
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Informative)
Maybe because it is a HTML (version 1?) standard for GET and the other browsers ignores it?
No, it isn't. Even Microsoft [microsoft.com] admits as much.
RFC 2616, "Hypertext Transfer Protocol -- HTTP/1.1," does not specify any requirement for URL length.
It's their own made-up lousy limit.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:4, Interesting)
Browser implementation, web standards, and hell, even programming languages, APIs and file formats are more evolved than designed. Think of a community of bacteria growing on a petri dish competing for resources and occasionally swapping genes. You'll end up with organisms very different from the ones you started with, and they'll probably have some quirky mechanisms in them.
Like in this culture, today's technology ecosystem is the cumulative result of lots of incremental changes that seemed like the right thing at the time. It's no surprise that we're dealing with the technology equivalent to such inexplicable evolution results as our retinas being wired backwards, the male urethra going right through the prostate (which is very prone to swelling), the birth canal being narrow enough to often cause the mother's death, or thymine (one of the components of DNA) being prone to forming dimers and corrupting the cell's machinery. Again, the decisions that seemed like the right thing at the time result in a system that's thoroughly confusing and that in retrospect appears insane.
the only think i can conclude from your post (Score:2)
is that biochemistry majors shouldn't code browsers ;-)
i keed, i keed...
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Well the problem here is that we couldn't start with HTML 4 or CSS.
HTML has a lot of backwards compatibility, which is sometimes its own Achilles heel. I believe this is the same thing with Windows and I really hope software vendors join the club and start producing more Vista compatible software.
Options? (Score:4, Insightful)
I think whoever came up with HTML and CSS was smoking crack ... I say this as somebody who writes high profile web applications that must look right in all major browsers (including IE6).
Hey, good for you for not being one of the ones who finally masters it and then so declares it good. :) There are many more in the Give up and use tables [giveupandusetables] camp than masters of CSS positioning.
My initial reaction to HTML, almost 15 years ago, was "this is unnecessarily hard". :)
I do like the ideas in CSS for decoration (though not the classing syntax), but CSS positioning is so hard as to be nearly unusable. Larry Wall's maxim of "easy things should be easy, hard things should be possible" clearly wasn't followed. There's a school of thought that goes like this:
and then reactionaries who say:
and that doesn't make sense either.
If anybody has a favorite meta-language (e.g. ideas like MarkDown) that's easily rendered into HTML/CSS, please comment.
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What about... (Score:5, Insightful)
I guess suggesting FireFox or Opera is too big a leap for an established corporation.
Is "I recommend Internet Explorer" the new "Nobody ever got fired for buying IBM"?
Re:What about... (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:What about... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's more like: "...all our custom VBS-based apps that we can't afford to get rid of is IE-based, therefore so is your job."
And if you think there's unavoidable lock-ins now, wait'll SharePoint gets its tentacles into the enterprise at large... "what, no Outlook integration? No automatic login from Active Directory!? We can't have that! Forget your wiki thingy, hire a SharePoint guy already, and let's get this thing rolling! You're wasting my time here!"
Call me a troll if you like, but damn - it's a very slick way to make sure the folks in Redmond have continued income for at least the next decade...
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Pretty much. If it weren't for shitty VB script features in Office, many would have ditched it long ago.
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They might as well be burning the money, but - no. They're investing it in ways that ensure they are stuck with the whole family of Microsoft products.
It really is a typical short-term business solution, with serious long-term financial implications. Many, many companies could recoup the cost of investing in use of oth
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Take a look at the site in my sig in IE. I've been telling IE users for years to upgrade. As I do it for a hobby and not for the money (though the money is nice) I don't care about turning some visitors away. And coding for Firefox, then cleaning up in Opera takes me only two or three hours at most. IE? Two or three days of cleanup after that. No, thanks
By the way, before Adsense removed the Firefox referrals program, I was making more money on Firefox conversions alone from that one site than I was making
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I guess suggesting FireFox or Opera is too big a leap for an established corporation.
I don't understand what it is about corporate environments and IE6. My company's IT department forces everyone to use IE6.
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Because many Intranet developers (not all) are inept boobs who shouldn't be allowed anywhere near a text editor, much less some what-you-see-is-all-you-get software like dreamweaver. And since corporations have invested big bucks into stupid software developed by cretins, they cannot afford to upgrade. Doing so would mean rewriting these apps. And that like costs money or something.
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Internet Explorer can be locked down with group policies, Firefox & company cannot. :(
Also, at the two previous megacorporations I've worked at IE6 was not "forced" on anyone. You simply needed it to actually work, because all the corporate internal webapps were IE6 only...
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Actually many of the participating pages tell you to get Firefox, Opera, or a newer version of IE. This includes some commercial web sites.
Oh really? (Score:2)
That must really put a sting on MS...
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I understand it's a straigh cut-and-paste from the Wired story, but is it possible for the Slashdot "editors" to actually do some, you know, "editing"?
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Way to spoil your own joke. =(
But thank god they're not using wasps...
Good luck with corporate destkops! (Score:2, Insightful)
I work for a medium-sized bank that has strict and outdated IT policies. All Windows XP workstations are set up with non-admin accounts, including developers. IE 6 is installed and we're not allowed to update to IE 7.
I don't even have a Windows PC at home, but at work, I'm officially effectively forced to use IE 6 (even though I've found a way to install Firefox as a non-admin user).
It's employees in companies like mine that will not be able to convert to IE 7 or another browser, even if they really want
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It's a bit like where I work, the IT dept. is acutely aware of the advantages of Firefox and they'll allow you to install it but the PHB's tell us all of our intranet is IE6 'compliant' and that's Good Enough.
That'll change quite rapidly when their favourite golf or investment site baulks at IE6 :)
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About Time! (Score:5, Insightful)
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I have a copy of IE6 and I'll never give it up. I need it for testing IE6 bugs.
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I have a copy of IE6 and I'll never give it up. I need it for testing IE6 bugs.
Ditto for me. I fire up Virtual PC with an instance of XP with IE 6 (and an older version of FF for the hell of it). That way it can do it's worst and I'll just shut it down. Saves me a lot of grief.
As an aside, IE6 needs to die in a fire. Especially concerning the png alpha-transparency issue.
Re:About Time! (Score:4, Insightful)
Just do what I used to do, when I was doing web development (and they payed me for it) - Disable CSS linking for IE6 altogether by not sending the <link type="text/css" rel="stylesheet" ... />. If you use PHP, just read the HTTP user agent header and if it is IE 6, do not output the LINK element. If you are as good as you seem to be, catering for webstandards and all, chances are your webpage is readable WITHOUT stylesheets, and NOBODY has complained to me yet about bad looking black on white webpage. It is when things stop working they complain, but when there is no style at all they see, there is nothing to complain about. Webpages are free, since visitors seldom pay to see them, I do not feel guilty discriminating against a web browser, since it cannot display stylesheet properly anyway. The rest of CSS quirks that work differently in Firefox and Opera can be worked out, but IE6 is just too alien for my web-dev tastes. I used to ask for extra money to do IE6 web-dev before, but of course nobody wanted to see that part of the budget, so instead they get a no-style (X)HTML page which works. Even in Lynx, with proper mime type and headers. If your boss or a client threatens to break your kneecaps for leaving out IE6 support brutally like that, make a simple stylesheet from scratch just for IE, small one, with fonts, colors and backgrounds, no fancy box model usage and selectors it has not even heard about. It might end up looking decent, ant it only took you a quarter.
So IE 5 is still good then (Score:2)
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Twitter? (Score:2)
Who cares about users (Score:2)
IE7? (Score:2)
Can someone please give me a rhetorical answer of what is so good about IE7 that's not already there in Firefox, and why I should waste my time and resources upgrading....
Re:IE7? (Score:4, Informative)
IE is built into a lot of places in Windows. Help displays, Windows Explorer uses it, etc.
By upgrading, you upgrade those displays too.
IE6 (IIRC) has issues, and probably has unpatched or undiscovered security issues that will root your computer if you run across the wrong stuff.
Even if you never use IE for anything, you should upgrade it and keep it patched. It's free, and doesn't hurt anything and you can continue to use whatever your favorite browser is.
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You're not a web developer then?
IE7 is a pile of dog crap compared to Firefox. But compared to IE6, IE7 is a chocolate bar.
IE6 is getting to be like 8 years old. Think of how much the web has changed in 8 years. I cannot think of any real web developers who *like* IE6. It fails at even the most mundane stuff.
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IE6 is 10 years I think. And yes it is a load of crap. I recently was in a project where the client wanted the neatest web2.0 dhtml mumbo jumbo, but they demanded that IE6 also was supported. Speaking of hell and wasted developer hours! ...
It took 30-40% more time to support that pile of
What about IE4? (Score:2)
Because I'm still running a on a Macintosh Performa. It's only worth selling someone in ebay and the like if you can use the computer you're selling to post the auction.
It's good to see some action (Score:4, Insightful)
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>IE7 has been out for a while at this point and there isn't any reason for anyone to be running IE6. It
I'll let my win98, P3 box with 128 megs of RAM know right away. IE7 has this silly idea that it won't run on Win98. Ubuntu, similarly, doesn't think much of 128 megs of RAM. RIMM modules being hard to come by, the situation isn't likely to improve any time soon.
I know it's outdated hardware. It does everything else I require of it. I just don't do anything "secure" on it and evidently I won't be su
Will /. Join the War on IE6? (Score:2)
Title says it all
Maybe we should have a poll?
as someone who needs to code for many browsers (Score:2)
good
please drive ie6 usage into the basement, so i don't have to support it anymore. i don't want to have to refer to ActiveXObject, when I want an XMLHttpRequest, ever again, thank you
on a related note, i have a recent server log that indicates someone just visited my site in january with IE3
IE3!?
some sort of masochist?
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IE3!?
Possibly. It came bundled with Win95OSR2, so it might be someone with a really old system that never upgraded anything.
Its more likely someone with a fresh install of Win95 or NT4 for testing purposes somewhere. Probably who is trying download a more modern browser but is having trouble finding one because microsoft.com, windows update, etc pukes on browsers that old.
Come on Microsoft! Windows update should detect the really old browsers and redirect to a PLAIN html page with downloads for NT service
So, the Ebay equivalent in finland is (Score:2)
norwegian.fi ?
Funny... (Score:2)
...I've been doing this on my personal site for years, but never thought big commercial ones would do it. Then again, the amount of man hours lost on IE6-related issues just for me personally is huge, and I can't even begin the think globally...
IE 7 does not install in Windows 2000 (Score:2)
Would they also expect me to upgrade my entire otherwise perfectly functional operating system, just so I can install a different version of Microsoft's mostly useless browser? The better choice is not to use Internet Explorer at all.
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Addendum: Wouldn't this be yet more fine evidence that Internet Explorer has been and is too closely embedded in the operating system? IE7 won't even install, but Firefox and Opera have no issues at all with Windows 2000 (this is being submitted from FF3). What is it about IE7 that makes it so utterly dependent upon Windows XP?
Not "Throughout Europe" (Score:2)
Popular culture throughout the world may struggle against IE in all its forms but we have no hope while ill-educated MBAs wearing expensive suits are in charge.
Here in the UK, for example, our health service has millions of PCs. We are told we must run IE6 because the national programme will not run on anything else.This is tested and found to be incorrect but that is what the Suits command.
Apparently, it will not run on FF although I haven't heard of it tested with IEtabs
Crockford Predicts IE6's Decline (Score:5, Interesting)
In his latest blog entry [yahoo.com], Douglas Crockford postulates that companies using IE6 are probably among the less efficient and competent ones, and therefore among the more likely to be weeded out by the invisible hand as times get tough.
Hope he's right.
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In the last year, I have worked for two major corporations, who even in this economic climate, are doing pretty well. Both were still stuck on IE6 and still are as far as I know. I generally tend to think Crockford is right on, but I don't think he is here.
There are so many apps targeted toward IE6 (by this, I mean they pass the "hey, it works in IE test".) I don't think IE6 has achieved its dominance my means of stupid corporations, anyhow. I think it has achieved its dominance from stupid web develope
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companies using IE6
What about "government agencies using IE6"?
Unfortunately, they are more likely to survive the invisible hand of the economy than private corporations at present. Some 80% of my website page hits are from government users with IE6.
I won't object to the claim that the government agencies using IE6 are among the less efficient and competent. But that won't stop them from surviving.
Microsoft-Free Fridays (Score:4, Informative)
How about a Sheep in Wolf's clothing? (Score:2, Interesting)
The place I'm at runs IE 6.0. I think it's due to user inertia and resistance that it doesn't get switched over to Firefox. What I'd like to see is a version of Firefox that emulates the visual appearance and workings of the IE 6.0 interface (down to the title bar, icons, etc.), but under the hood and all the rendering is really being done by the latest FF. Updates would just go in automatically with no user intervention.
Seems simple enough, and there are some themes/skins for FF that purport to do this,
I've done this in my website (Score:2, Funny)
There's a nag screen for IE6 users.
Since I've implemented it, the usage has been down, from 23% to 12%. And the january statistics shows the for the first time the percentage of firefox users is greater than the IE* users.
I've lost clients? Maybe.
I'm a happier person? Sure.
Go ahead, make my day... (Score:2)
The corporate image I use has IE6. No choice by me. IE7 is in the works, but no ETA and not a high priority.
We live inside a pretty robust firewall and proxy server, and I don't use the system outside the office unless I'm VPN'd in through the proxy. Infestations are rare and so far always caused by bypassing the proxy. No one on our team is aware of any malware getting into our systems, other teams have different experiences.
It's not like I can choose at work. At home, it's Firefox mostly and IE7 other
Re: (Score:2)
Don't be rude to India. Yeah, call center zombies with thick Hindi accents are a pain to deal with, but at least they know how to follow flow charts!
Re: (Score:2)
Yes, its a pain. I only speak Hindi with a thick English accent and they have trouble understanding me.
As for retardation, we could have done with more of that in Victoria recently.
Re: (Score:2)
Some Norwegian guys == all of Europe
Yep, but it's spread far and wide in Norway at least. I never even knew finn.no was part of it, because first I saw it on hardware.no then on our biggest national newspaper vg.no, and I'm not talking about at night. I'm talking about today while on a break from work where they still run IE6. So I expect the IE6 stats for Norway to take a big plunge.
Re: (Score:2)
Geez, don't you understand English? You must be an Indian working in a call center in India. For AOL.
Re:OS Support (Score:4, Informative)
[IE6] is the most up-to-date browser for their version of Windows.
Most up-to-date IE; but certainly not the most up-to-date browser.
Firefox 2 is slightly newer than IE 7, and it runs on Windows 98.
Re: (Score:2)
Except that the campaign in Norway is being run by:
- All major newspapers
- The state broadcaster
- The major consumer websites
- At least one bank/insurance company