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."
Re:What about... (Score:5, Informative)
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, 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....
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.
Re:IE7? (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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:"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 :)
Re:What about... (Score:2, Informative)
Actually many of the participating pages tell you to get Firefox, Opera, or a newer version of IE. This includes some commercial web sites.
Microsoft-Free Fridays (Score:4, Informative)
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:2, Informative)
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.
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:zzz (Score:3, Informative)
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 applicable, because mailto is not a GET request in the first place. What exactly is setting method to POST even supposed to do? POST to your email client instead of GET? How do you start up a program with POST rather than GET? Get and POST are HTTP requests, and mailto is not HTTP. Doing a mailto in an HREF is the standard way to do it [google.com].
I can't believe we're even having to have this debate. IE is imposing a non-spec limit on the wrong type of URI in a way that breaks the standard way of doing a common function. That's a bug.
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, 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".
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
Microsoft supports the campaign (Score:2, Informative)