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."
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.
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:/. - are you listening? (Score:2, Informative)
It doesn't render correctly with Chrome either.
Re:Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:3, Informative)
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.
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."
We still have IE6 at work (Score:3, Informative)
Re:in-house apps (Score:2, Informative)
Just a quick correction: IE8 Compatability mode renders using the IE7 engine.
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.)
WinXP (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Developers need to grow a set... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:2, Informative)
It works fine in the WebKit nightlies, at least as far as comment titles and scores (Don't see any other problems either). I'd venture to guess it's a problem with the Safari 4 build - webkit itself has been updated a lot since then, and should therefore be working when Safari 4 final comes out.
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.
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.
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.
Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:4, Informative)
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:/. - 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?
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).
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:3, Informative)
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 or switch to new one for new apps (or buy a new computer)
Re:IE6 exists because of illegal Windows XP copies (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:How to block portable apps (Score:4, Informative)
Re:IE6 exists because of illegal Windows XP copies (Score:3, Informative)
IE7 stopped requiring the validation at some point.
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].
IE6 End-of-Life is 13-Jul-2010 (Score:1, Informative)
Microsoft will no longer provide any updates for IE6 come 13-Jul-2010. That means no security patches which means many businesses will have to move to something else. My company will tell our clients that come that date.
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps/#Internet_Explorer
Re:Developers should charge more for IE6 support (Score:1, Informative)
So, what you want me to do, as a freelance developer, is tell the guy who signs my paycheck that I refuse to work for him because he wants to support an application that I'm not found of? If you don't see the problem with this let me suggest that you go back to junior college and take a couple business courses. As a manager I would see it as you saying "I'm an employee of yours and I refuse to do what is best for your company. Instead I'd rather take the easy route and risk alienating your customers."
If I were to hire you and you gave me that spiel you'd be out on your ass and I'd let others know about it too. Have fun finding work for anyone who can pay real money for your *cough* services *cough*.
Re:in-house apps (Score:3, Informative)
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.
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:1, Informative)
They did that, it got abused, so they stopped.
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:2, Informative)
The latest SeaMonkey works as far back as Windows NT 3.51. There's no excuse. I use it without problems on Windows 95. OpenOffice before version 3 works fine on Windows 95 as well.