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?
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"?
Well, that's a retarded press release.... (Score:1, Insightful)
Some Norwegian guys == all of Europe
A press release on Wired == Big Media
Getting rid IE is good and all, but does like Slashdot hire out to India to write their article summaries? The retardation is growing daily.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:2, Insightful)
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I work for a medium-sized bank that has strict and outdated IT policies.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 to.
About Time! (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:1, Insightful)
Yes, from a web developer's point of view, IE 7 is a huge upgrade.
There are still some differences between Firefox and IE 7, but they are much smaller than the horribly broken browser that is IE6.
This isn't so much about the guy using the web browser as it is about the guy who has to write the html for it.
By the way...
I think whoever came up with HTML and CSS was smoking crack. There are so many inconsistencies and bizarre rules that it's impossible for me to believe that a sane person came up with all this.
Whenever I see an inconsistency between how Firefox and IE do something, half the time I side with IE. I know standards matter, but how 'bout putting down the crack-pipe and putting your ego in check next time you come up with "standards" that millions of people have to deal with.
I say this as somebody who writes high profile web applications that must look right in all major browsers (including IE6).
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...
It's good to see some action (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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: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.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
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.
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.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:1, Insightful)
20/100 on the Acid3 is "close"?
Acid3 isn't exactly a measure of overall compliance. For example, a couple of Acid3 tests involve SVG, but even though Webkit and Presto score 100/100 on the test, there are huge pieces of SVG that I want to use that neither browser has even implemented yet.
Webkit and Presto got 41/100 and 46/100 respectivly when Acid3 was released (now they both pass with flying colors).
Well, the test involves flying colors, so that's no surprise!
Unless all of IE's compliance improvements have been in areas not covered by Acid....
Considering some of the obscure crap in the "Acid" tests, it would not surprise me in the least. I've thrown perfectly valid webpages at Acid-passing browsers, and seen it screw them up horribly.
Do I care that Acid3 tests UTF-16? Even if a browser didn't support UTF-16 at all, it would be trivial to work around (just send some other encoding). I'd be a little surprised to see a web server actually sending UTF-16. But there's a whole bunch of stuff in the CSS specs that's really useful, difficult (or impossible) to work around, and not in any Acid test.
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.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Crockford Predicts IE6's Decline (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Time to move on (Score:2, Insightful)
I decided a few months ago when I was doing a site redesign that there was no reason to continue supporting IE6. It simply lacked too many things now to make it worth wasting my time and effort on to continue making complicated workarounds for. IE7 is a fine browser, and IE8 will be even better and is quickly approaching, so there's no reason for anyone to have not upgraded by now.
Don't get me wrong though, I feel it's very important for any developer worth their salt to support EVERY major browser. I don't care if you don't like Opera or Safari or whatever the case may be, you should code your site to work right in everything. It's really not very hard, assuming you know what you're doing. I use very little workarounds (none this last time) to make sites render properly in everything these days.
When someone visits a website and their browser isn't supported, it is simply a major turn-off. More people should realize that.
Have Win2k Users Been Forgotten? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.