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."
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.
Re:Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
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: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...
Re:Corporate users and backward compatibility (Score:2, Interesting)
IE 7 (and presumably IE 8) breaks a lot of those sites.
On that line we have the infamous "XML Islands" - widely used on BI reports (see "Financial"), giving plain interface operators a harsh time when generating customer reports. Seen a lot of companies going to IE7 and gaining bonus work hours for that. Now, the really interesting thing is the software vendors' default answer to that... basically they just don't care, since the upgrade ratio among their customers is not that great. Lots of these vendors on the next new-millenium-tech-congress. Fancy powerpoint presentations and all. Flamethrowers not allowed, though.
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:I wonder (Score:2, Interesting)
>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.
Wave
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]
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: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: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.
Apply end6.org to your web site! (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:1, Interesting)
Sadly this is how it goes in a large corporation.
We're quite large (100k+, Fortune 500) and different websites are maintained by different groups, they fall under 3 categories.
1) Flat out does not work in Firefox. Javascript is screwed up.
2) Says it doesn't work in Firefox. Works perfectly fine. (UserAgent testing).
3) Works great in Firefox but renders wrong in IE6.
All 3 e-mails to the respective IT departments get the same response "We only work with IE6".
Every single time I e-mail them an actual fix that shows them how to work. Sometimes it's something easy, but I get the stone wall.
Funny thing is our outward facing website. The one EVERYONE sees for the first time doesn't work right in IE6 because of some Javascript syntax. I e-mailed corporate IT and all I got was "That's the way it's supposed to look". "No. You PUT THE CODE in there to randomly display an image, it's supposed to display the image. Like it does on Firefox, IE7, IE8, and every other browser browsershots supports." "Nope, supposed to look like that."
Quite a bit is IE6 specific. Some of the Javascript explodes horribly in FF. Meaning pressing a button does absolutely nothing because the onclick method references something only IE6 understands.
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:3, Interesting)
IE6 for Intranet, Firefox + AdBlock for the Internet.
Yeah, umm, good luck with that. (Score:2, Interesting)
But as a web developer I quit testing in IE6 a year or so ago, and at this point I no longer test in IE7 either, since IE8 is on Automatic Updates, so any Windows system connected to the internet *should* have it, unless somebody has gone out of their way to avoid it, which is Their Problem(TM) as far as I'm concerned.
I haven't gone out of my way to *break* IE6 and 7, and in fact I haven't done any significant sweeping changes to the website at work since IE8 came out, so for now it almost certainly still works fine in IE7, and well enough in IE6 to be usable if you can ignore things like the lack of proper transparency support. The old legacy IE6 stylesheet that I developed for IE6 several years ago is still there and probably still has things covered pretty well. For now.
But, next time my boss comes to me and says, "I think we should change the website up again", IE6 and 7 will probably break. I don't test in them any more. How would I? All of the computers have been upgraded to IE8.
Web developers can't make users upgrade their browsers. But neither do we keep supporting ancient browsers forever and ever. You can upgrade or not, your choice. But don't come whining to me if the site doesn't look right in NCSA Mosaic. I try to support a wide variety of browsers, but I've got limits, and anything that came out more than three years ago is generally beyond the limits, unless it's still the *current* default browser for one of the major platforms (as was the case with IE6 well beyond three years until IE7 finally hit Automatic Updates, for instance). More than three years old and *used* to be the default browser? Sorry, I've gotta draw the line somewhere. Feel free to send me a screenshot showing the problem, but I make no promises.
Re:How to block portable apps (Score:3, Interesting)
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: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:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:3, Interesting)
I keep hoping that one day someone will release some brutal worm for IE6 that goes unpatched for months and forces everyone to upgrade. Yes, I'm that desperate to see IE6 go away.
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.
Re:Stop writing ugly hacks for IE6.... (Score:3, Interesting)
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 non-semantic markup.
There are very few required hacks to produce a usable, attractive site in IE6. No, it doesn't play nice when it comes to RIAs, but maybe that's a different problem.
FYI - "Semantic" means that your markup defines your document structure, rather than your markup defining your presentation.
Re:As Someone Who Has to Support IE6 at Work ... (Score:3, Interesting)
"This site requires the Firefox plugin for IE6".
I wish we could sneak in the back door.
Re:Just because it has users... (Score:3, Interesting)
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!
:D
Other IE6 crimes include doubling margin sizes; this one isn't too hard to workaround, but since the impact of incorrect margins can mean floated DIV blocks incorrectly placed on the page (not just a few pixels out, but completely screwed up!). Since the work around is to have IE6 specific CSS rules, this increases maintenance costs since when I make a change to the "common" CSS rules, I also have to make the same changes to the IE6 version.
Otherwise I fully agree with you though!
I'm no longer too concerned with things looking perfect in IE6; they merely need to look acceptable. But whilst IE6 maintains a significant market share (20 - 30% for me in the UK), it still adds to development costs.
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.
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:Can't; not root. (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Developers should charge more for IE6 support (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.
Re:Developers should charge more for IE6 support (Score:2, Interesting)
This is how i address it the issue for my customers in my FAQ's or if i need to email a reply on the subject
21. Will my web site work with Internet Explorer 6 (IE6)?
You may have noticed that this web site does not look right if your are viewing on Internet Explorer 6. IE6 was a good browser in it's day, but it it is almost 9 years old now. When any company has a web site created it must make the choice as to whether it will render on old technology or whether it must be standards compliant for future technology. We could have used any amount of little tricks and hacks to get web site to look closer to as it intended in IE6, but this would have been at the expense of standards compliance and valid code. We have made the decision to inform IE6 users why the site is not rendering as they expected (a situation that probably doesn't surprise them).
Please note that we can create web sites that render on a 2001 browser. But we cannot guarantee 2009 functionality and security. And given that an IE6 focused development is based around creating 'valid code', and then hacking it to work in the browser the ultimate result is a longer development process with compromised functionality for the vast amount of users.
Both Google and Facebook are sending the same message... you can use out site with IE6, but with limited functionality. We don't think continued support is viable given that web trends suggest that less than 4% of web surfers will be using this browser by the end of this year. In short we feel that the tipping point for support for this old software has passed in preference for stability in future browsers. And we are advising our Clients of the same.
However we recognise that statistics can be misleading, just because a small amount of people use IE6, it could be a significant amount of people that you are trying to target. Sometimes focusing development to a browser could be your best strategy. And we will do all we can help you with that.
It is worth pointing out that Microsoft themselves admit that IE6 is 'less safe' than later browsers
We urge you to use and encourage your employees to use a W3C Standards compliant browser such as Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome or Internet Explorer 8. These Browsers are free, and all are easy to install on any computer they are continually updated to be secure and more reliable they have more function and they are faster.
Re:/. - are you listening? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:The "understood" security risks (Score:2, Interesting)
My question is why the fuck don't 'trapped' businesses mandate, say, Firefox for web browsing, and use IE6 only for the internal crap.
In fact, hook IE up an internal proxy so it can't be used elsewhere.
IE 6 is too insecure and too broken to use as a web browser, period. If a business needs it because of internal code, fine. And the fact that they can't use IE7 or 8 at the same time means they can't upgrade, but there are other browsers out there.