Even Microsoft Wants IE6 Dead 285
Tarmas writes "Microsoft has launched a website intended to persuade people to upgrade their browsers from Internet Explorer 6. In Microsoft's words: 'This website is dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.' About time?"
Of course they want you to upgrade to a newer Internet Explorer.
I'm a web developer and I don't like this (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm not sure why I should potentially lower my conversion rate by hassling people to upgrade their browser. That seems like Microsoft's job, not mine.
Maybe they could use the same features that redirect you to msn.com or bing to redirect you to a browser selection page, no? In the mean time, I will just keep including stylesheets for IE6 that do some graceful degredation. It won't look great, but it won't be illegible.
Besides, it seems like most IE6 users in this age are enterprise clients who can't upgrade until their vendors start supporting new browsers, or until the interprise itself gets rid of legacy programs.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:International version? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, about 50% of the IE6 users worldwide are chinese... Actually, the top 10 countries with the highest IE6 usage are non-english... and they didn't think of approaching IE6-users in their own language? *sigh*
What they really need is a free upgrade path from the pirated versions of Windows.
Re:We can do better (Score:2, Insightful)
Perhaps there *is* more to cross-platform than fishing for meaningless "insightful" mods on Slashdot:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2023324&cid=35385012 [slashdot.org]
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2023324&cid=35384960 [slashdot.org]
Re:If only other devs used ie6-upgrade-warning.. (Score:4, Insightful)
You hit the nail on the head, and there's nothing that can be done with the disaster that is corporate intranets.
Having had to support these intranets, you have to install at least 2 browsers to have the machine able to access both the intranet sites for work, and internet sites for work. There's always a big "DO NOT UPGRADE IE" policy in every company I've worked for, the good thing about that though is that there's usually an "INSTALL FIREFOX IF A WEBSITE DOESN"T WORK" policy.
I suppose the knife cuts both ways there. IE6/ActiveX was the worst thing that companies bought into, and it's hurting them still, years later. The biggest problem there is that the IT managers are quite happy to accept their kickbacks from MS to have MS still deployed throughout their company. One would think they'd learn after the first time.
Re:If only other devs used ie6-upgrade-warning.. (Score:4, Insightful)
The problem is is that the alternative browsers like Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari is that none of those browsers contain the kind of admin features you get with IE.
What IT guys (not necessarily the actual guys down in the trenches doing the work but the PHBs in their cushy office making the decisions) would want:
1.The ability to push a browser installer (both the initial install and any upgrade installs) to the client and have them run automatically without the need to manually upgrade any clients. You cant get proper MSIs from any of the alternative browser vendors, only from 3rd parties.
2.The ability to ensure the browser wont update
(either automatically or initiated by users selecting "update") and can only be updated when IT pushes patches.
3.The ability to ensure only plugins and addons pushed by IT can be installed, upgraded, managed and uninstalled.
and 4.The ability to manage (via group policy or something similar) the features of the browser so the IT people can set settings like proxy servers and can disable features and the end-user cant mess with the settings and changes the admin guys have set.