Internet Explorer 6 Will Not Die 531
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."
As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
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I agree, so for those of us who can work to kill it off, we should.
We got your back! You keep programming for IE6 because you have to. The rest of us will just use the headers to redirect them to chrome.
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Easy peasy (Score:5, Interesting)
"If you upgrade to a newer version of IE, or Firefox we will give you 5% off next year."
You will save that in not needing to maintain for the pile of crap.
It's business, money talks.
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When that happens, your only choices are either to support IE6 or not to work for that client.
Advocacy goes a long way. The majority of people heading IT departments are reasonable people that can be talked to. In fact, they probably already share your view. It's not going to hurt to advocate to the decision makers in the company why they need to switch away from IE6, including the point that if they delay a switch not only are they going to have to switch anyway in the future, but until they do they're going to be left behind. It's pretty easy with all the other browser choices to illustrate wh
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:4, Interesting)
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)
Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:5, Interesting)
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)
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)
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:5, Funny)
I suggest you find a new job. That is a time bomb.
Wait ! Not yet ! /. and *then* find a new job. There's no sense in letting the good bits of your current job go to waste. Of course, this thing will blow in some one's face sooner or later. You probably don't want to be around when it happens.
First document it on The daily WTF and
Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:4, Informative)
Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:4, Interesting)
Sorry but I'll use my limited resources and political capital for projects that make sense to me and the business, not to make some web developers life easier.
Here's some business sense for you:
Business is all about minimizing risk. By trying to minimize current costs, you could end up spending a lot more in the long run simply because you're increasing the risk (in the form of increased damages, or increased likelihood of happening). Is it better to have a small staff work on training and upgrading a new system now, so that you are prepared to switch over quickly, or to have your entire IT staff cleaning up a mess because one of your employees visited an exploit site?
The only possible strategy for us would be to move to Firefox for general web browsing but that requires significant additional effort and buy-in from the users.
Seriously? Significant effort? I've got your strategy right here:
1. Lock down IE6 to only be usable with your enterprise applications, making it unusable for any other web browsing. (A proxy setting would make this trivial)
2. Install $BROWSER.
3. Send email to users, stating web browsing will no longer be possible in IE6, and they must use $BROWSER. If they don't like it, too fucking bad. There are plenty of qualified people looking for jobs that could do what they do for less pay.
Total effort required:
1 hour for a system admin to make a group policy change to IE.
Deploy Firefox (only hard if you don't have any sort of remote installation)
10 minutes to compose email.
Savings: The risk that some idiot employee takes down your whole network due to an exploit for an unsupported browser.
Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:4, Informative)
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.
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YEAH! That only leaves the problem of not having a budget.
Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
IE6 for Intranet, Firefox + AdBlock for the Internet.
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Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:4, Insightful)
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I keep hoping that one day someone will release some brutal worm for IE6 that goes unpatched for months and forces everyone to
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:5, Informative)
If you're so cheap that you can't download a FREE browser to see the web, fuck ye!
The excuse: "I can download a web browser for free, but I can't install it because I'm not in the Administrators group."
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:4, Funny)
The excuse: "I can download a web browser for free, but I can't install it because I'm not in the Administrators group."
The answer remains: fuck ye! [portableapps.com]
How to block portable apps (Score:5, Interesting)
The answer remains: fuck ye! [portableapps.com]
Administrator's response: Fuck executables outside %SystemRoot% and %ProgramFiles%. [microsoft.com]
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Ultimate Response:
Fuck their policy: http://blogs.technet.com/markrussinovich/archive/2005/12/12/circumventing-group-policy-as-a-limited-user.aspx [technet.com]
In short, if they don't whitelist each and every single executable that you're allowed to run, and each an every one of those programs respect policies and have no exploitable bugs, then you can defeat their policy (on Windows).
Happy hacking! :-)
Re:How to block portable apps (Score:4, Informative)
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If the network overlords are requiring IE6 in favor of Firefox, then someone needs to have a chat with them.
The software I'm developing for corporate clients is Javascript-heavy stuff, where IE6 has some performance problems (not functionality issues, just performance). IE8, Firefox, Opera etc handle it just fine. If a corporate client comes to us and has a problem because they can't execute Javascript (it's required), or things are just a little too slow to render because they're using IE6, I just get th
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Then the corp network you're trying on is probably not using these restrictions.
The place i work is very relaxed regarding executables and installs, because it is necessary to be able to test and so forth as a developer, so each user is in the local administrators group.
Yes of course i have Firefox installed, it works great and i prefer it over any newer IE, anyway if I try to download and install a newer IE than IE6, i'm not allowed to, and why? because of some internal webapps they don't want to untangle
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Leopard is $118 from Amazon [tinyurl.com]. And you can go cheaper if you buy 'used'.
Or find a friend who has a spare license left in a family pack.
Methinks thou doest protest too much.
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Your sig is wrong. I like machines that last for 10 years too but if I had a 10 year old PC (until last year, my parents used one regularily) and refused to update my OS, I would be running windows 98SE. Try running a lot of current windows apps on windows 98...it does not work as it is no longer a problem to require XP and drop 98/ME support. The point of a computer lasting 10 years is that it is still updatable to stay reasonably current. Either stick with your old OS and only use old apps
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:4, Interesting)
I switched banks because of IE as a requirement. I moved to mac and was not going to run a virtual machine just to check my balance.
When I closed the account in person the representative was mind boggled that I would close an account over that. He said "Why don't you just use windows like everyone else?"
My new bank works fine in safari, firefox, and yes, even IE.
We still have IE6 at work (Score:3, Informative)
Re:We still have IE6 at work (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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.
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"This site requires the Firefox plugin for IE6".
I wish we could sneak in the back door.
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:5, Informative)
If your site is correctly formed HTML, then it will degrade gracefully and be perfectly accessible in lynx.
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You don't need to do a browser detect to send a special CSS to IE6. Use conditional comments, which are perfectly valid HTML comments.
Dinosaurs rule business (Score:4, Insightful)
This is simply fossil evidence that confirms it, kind of like a coelecanth.
Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:5, Informative)
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)
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.
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I hear you... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ditto. I did, however, install Firefox and use it as my default browser. Some corporate apps don't work (non-standard javascript, mainly), which is why I still have to open some stuff in IE. All of my stuff works in both, some of other people's stuff works in both, and whenever I'm goofing off reading Slashdot and such, I use Firefox.
There is one guy that I work with, though, that insists on "codin
Re:Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:4, Interesting)
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!!!!!
Re:Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:4, Informative)
I'm in a similar situation. Our employees are stuck with IE6 because some internal app (not one I built!) won't support over IE6 (and definitely doesn't support Firefox). So I need IE6 to test internal pages. However, our external website is being browsed on by users with IE6, IE7, and Firefox. Firefox is no problem, that's my main browser anyway. But how do I upgrade to IE7 while still allowing myself the ability to see pages in IE6? Virtual machines are nice, but require me to "boot" a Windows instance just to test one page.
Luckily, I found Xenocode's tool: http://www.xenocode.com/browsers/ [xenocode.com] Their program loads a virtual instance of the browser so now I'm running IE6 (native), Firefox (native), IE7 (virtual), and IE8 (virtual). I can have all of my windows open at once and cycle through the browser versions as I make changes to the pages. It's a lifesaver (and free to boot).
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Some of the most inept computer users I have ever met are programmers. One in particular told me that if she didn't have kids who needed a computer for homework, she wouldn't even own one.
You may be able to maintain your system, but many programmers are worse than the non-IT people who are their customers.
/. - are you listening? (Score:5, Funny)
Pay attention to your own news site, CmdrTaco! /. 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.
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
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:5, Insightful)
f. 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
Slashdot doesn't render properly in Safari 4 or Firefox 3.5 beta4 either - the comment titles and scores aren't displayed anymore
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It doesn't render correctly with Chrome either.
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:5, Insightful)
doesn't slashdot have any bug reporting tools for us to use?
i doubt CmdrTaco is reading anything below +5 insightful ;)
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:4, Informative)
doesn't slashdot have any bug reporting tools for us to use?
Yes, yes it does. [sourceforge.net].
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:5, Funny)
There's also a weird bug in quite a few browsers where it cuts of the end o
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:5, Funny)
slashdot is rendering for (Score:3, Funny)
ie9 and firefox5
they're way ahead of the curve man
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:4, Informative)
It also doesn't render correctly in Konqueror 3.5 (AJAX everything in comments broken now) or 4.2 (front page autorefresh doesn't work).
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:5, Informative)
The comment titles and scores are being rendered (highlight the page with ctrl-a), the problem is with the CSS - the background image that runs the length of the div element containing the title is being overwritten. This:
get's overwritten by this (appears further down the document):
You'll notice the issue doesn't occur on some of the alternative stylesheets (Ask Slashdot, YRO, etc). In the meantime, you can hit 'change' in the threshold form to set things straight.
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You can try filing a bug, but Slashdot never fixes bugs. Hell, few of the ones I've submitted have even been read:
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1939528&group_id=4421&atid=104421 [sourceforge.net]
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1939531&group_id=4421&atid=104421 [sourceforge.net]
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1939535&group_id=4421&atid=104421 [sourceforge.net]
https://sourceforge.net/tracker/?func=detail&aid=1939538&group_id=4421&atid=104421 [sourceforge.net]
https://sourceforge.ne [sourceforge.net]
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:5, Informative)
Not to mention that it's 2009, but Slashdot can't even be bothered to work with Unicode yet.
Here is an em-dash: â"
Here is some Japanese: æ--¥æoeèzãã
See?
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We appreciate having /. optimized for FireFox, but would also like such consideration for the more-used IE6 browser.
Actually that's exactly what NOT to do. IE6 users need to be constantly made aware that they are using an obsolete browser. The sites being visited by the bosses need to break in IE6. That might turn things around.
It's up to you! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, you web developers. You need to explicitly stop supporting IE6. Give IE6 users a strong warning that IE6 is completely unsupported and not recommended for use, much like Game! [wittyrpg.com] has since about 2005.
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I don't know about that. When it dips consistently below 5%, maybe.
What I do though is I generally use the IE6 specific conditional header stuff to grab some css and js and make everything functional but, generally, it's a lesser experience. A lot of the eye candy is stripped and certain things just aren't as nice. It works, and it requires a lot less time than making everything work perfectly and match perfectly. That way I'm free to do fun stuff on the newer browsers and still have functionality on IE6. (
Stop writing ugly hacks for IE6.... (Score:4, Insightful)
Stop doing the hacks, and let IE6 render them ugly and broken, while compliant browsers will render them correctly.
Re:Stop writing ugly hacks for IE6.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Stop doing the hacks, and let IE6 render them ugly and broken, while compliant browsers will render them correctly.
Consider that many users will not realize it is their browser. They will simply decide your site is screwed up, and leave promptly. This is not a mistake to be eager to make in many scenarios.
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"Browser? What's a browser? I just want my internets to work! All of them! What does my browsing being broken have to do with that?
What's this explanation? Stupid wall of text; I don't have time to read all this! When I click the button, I expect my internets to come up so I can download my emails box! Why is this so hard for you geeks to understand?!? At least Microsoft can make a computer that WORKS!"
Re:Stop writing ugly hacks for IE6.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Stop writing ugly hacks for IE6.... (Score:4, Insightful)
A semantically-coded site should render acceptably, unless you are using tons of nested DIVs and crazy CSS/image methods to make a site act like something it wasn't meant to be.
Part of the problem is unrealistic expectations of users and overzealous developers. Are your rounded corners in IE worth non-semantic, difficult to maintain mark up, with poor cross-browser and legacy-browser support?
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There are multiple layers to the answer. Briefly, a basic site will work regardless. Unobtrusive methods of enhancing a site (or Web 2.0ing, if you prefer) can either use minimal hacks or degrade gracefully. Either way, unnecessary markup (the "crazy CSS/image methods" and "nested DIVs") to achieve the desired result is not semantic. Older browsers don't choke on nested DIVs; rather, they choke on the nutty stuff we try to do with them. On the other hand, screen readers or accessibility tools may choke on n
Re:Stop writing ugly hacks for IE6.... (Score:4, Insightful)
...and so will your job.
It doesn't matter that getting rid of IE6 is a good idea and this is a good ay to do it. If your job is to write websites for a company and your pages are ugly/unnavigatable/non-functioning for 40% of that companies customers, then you are not doing your job.
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Not necessarily. Your job is to consult the client in what is best for them. I've had certain situations where a client wanted some specific fancy AJAX functionality that would have been to costly or impossible to build for IE6. In those situations, its your job to present to them the situation and let them decided upon it.
Of course, I'm slightly biased so when I presented it to them, I helped them understand why the functionality was important to the site and why IE6 would not be worth building support f
in-house apps (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:in-house apps (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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IE8 doesn't have a "render like IE6 would" option; it only has a "render like IE7 would" option. If companies are still forcing IE6, it's quite possible that their intranet sites don't work in IE7, which means IE8's compatibility mode won't work either.
Also, I've heard that there are some things that work in IE7 that don't work in IE8's IE7 compatibility mode. I haven't been doing web development for awhile, so I don't know what things these might be.
Lets paraphrase (Score:2)
Just because it has users... (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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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.
One of the bigger problems I have with IE6 is that when you wrap major content blocks in DIVs and float your content to position it, IE6 will sometimes throw weird bugs where only half the DIV will show... but when you refresh, a little more of it will appear... or sometimes less. Mostly these bugs seem to be "peek-a-boo" problems, and work-arounds are often fairly straight forward but can on occasion take hours to fix!
Other IE6 crimes include doubling margin sizes; this one isn't too hard to workaround,
Stop support (Score:2, Insightful)
The only way to kill IE6 is to stop supporting it and clearly stating "If you can't see this page properly please update your browser".
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Through one of IE's numerous vulnerabilities?
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Hasten the End (Score:2)
Businesses (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
i have a complex strategy for dealing with ie6 (Score:5, Funny)
if(window.XMLHttpRequest){
}
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
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Who modded this troll? I'm thinking it was an offended ActiveX developer.
I wonder (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
There should be an HTTP status code especially for this:
HTTP/1.1 418 - Piss off, and come back when you have a proper browser.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Netscape 4 again (Score:5, Insightful)
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)
"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."
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If a single small business site doesn't support IE6, nobody cares. What we need is to make a coalition of porn sites and make them stop supporting IE6. That should do it.
BTW, I charged extra for IE6 support in one of my latest projects. As a result, I ended up doing just the back-end of the site, and some other guy did the front end. Which in this particular case, was a good thing. But YMMV depending on the project. It's a double edged sword so use this strategy carefully.
IE6 will not die (true), FF overtakes IE (false). (Score:4, Informative)
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.)
IE6 exists because of illegal Windows XP copies (Score:5, Insightful)
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:IE6 exists because of illegal Windows XP copies (Score:4, Informative)
IE7 and 8 are not available for Windows 2000, which is still in use in a lot of companies. Also, most larger companies run WSUS to manage update deployment, this means they can selectively block updates that they do not want from being deployed. This includes IE7 and IE8.
I'm sure some of the numbers are from piracy, but if you are smart enough to pirate Windows and evade detection, you are probably smart enough to use a more modern secure browser like Firefox, Chrome, Safari, or Opera.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I just checked [lmgtfy.com] and it seems that Microsoft does not require validation for IE7 any longer. They do not prompt for validation to download the IE8 installer, but at only 16 MB it probably phones home to grab the rest during install which is something a Windows pirate would probably not want even if WGA is not required.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
IE7 stopped requiring the validation at some point.
Apply end6.org to your web site! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Developers need to grow a set... (Score:5, Insightful)
"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)