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:"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.
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.
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.
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, but they don't go far enough, or aren't polished. They end up looking a little crufty (for instance, they don't get rid of the structure of the forward/back buttons in the latest FF).
If somebody came out with a seamless "sheep in wolf's clothing" solution for IE 6.0 -> FF, it would be a lot easier to get users to adopt it. Does that help wider FF adoption? No, but I think that's a separate issue from pure user "acceptance."
I'll be joining the campaign (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:3, Interesting)
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 of the CSS issues gets solved by using Javascript. However that margin/padding bug is still freakin me out.
This ANTI IE campaign is still utter bullshit as long IE 7 is a suggested upgrade, IE7 is basically a minor patch to IE 6 and a new skin.
Re:"Upgrade" to IE 7 (Score:3, Interesting)
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