Help kill IE6

[TechNic]

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Anyone here who has built websites will know about the tedious chore that is Internet Explorer 6. It is so archaic by today's browser standards that you have to program in a lot of extra code to try and support it. Sadly, a lot of people are still using it and they really do need to be pushed to upgrade.

Mashable has a good article here: IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On.

See www.ie6nomore.com for a handy bit of code that will do the work for you and hopefully see an end to IE6.

The campaign also has a Facebook page.

[TVC_Admin]

I have 100% sympathy with what you're saying, but this gives rise to a dichotomy:

M$ don't keep to agreed standards, RFCs mean nothing to them, they just do what they want. Sure, IE6 is an especial pain, but we said that about IE 5 and we'll be saying it about IE7 and IE 8 before long.

And without IE users, visitor numbers will disappear overnight

[TVC_H4U]

In my opinion theirs no need to help Kill IE6. Its having a painful death anyway, its easy to blame microsoft but they told me to upgrade browsers ages ago. So just the miss-informed useing computers born 2001 on windows 98 still useing it?

[breadfan]

I am resticted to IE6 at work through policy and it is painful to use, most sites like yahoo and youtube have big banners saying support will be dropped for IE6 shortly...

edit: I sneakily use Chrome portable though...

[sanjiv]

Chrome portable?? Getting it now to use at school so I don't have to use IE6

[TVC_Admin]

Agreed on all comments, IE6 is crap, But IMHO so is IE7, IE8 is a pain and I have little doubt that IE9 will be no better.

M$ have a tendency to keep fiddling and still get things wrong. Having finally stabilised 98, they subjected professional users to the horrors of 2000 (no flaming drivers, no support) and then conned the public into "upgrading" to that faeces pit they called "ME". Anything was good after that, and XP was (and still is) a breath of fresh air, only for M$ to release that bucket of necrotic pus they call "Vista". Using the law of averages, W7 should be fine, but I'm not rushing.

Damn, WFW (3.2.1) was still the best flaming product they released, but I have a long memory and a huge budget, so M$ don't give a toss about users like me. They make a fortune out of releasing their mistakes and pushing those with precious little disposable capital into giving them even more money.

The way I see it, if the guys who write the damn os can't get it right with the browser, what chance have others got? Yeah, FF is now pretty stable (down to 4 or 5 seizures a week for me) and Opera is a fair bit better, (I have no first hand experience of chrome and refuse to allow google to infest anything of mine - I trust them even less than I do M$ or smart car drivers or evangelists) but you still have to take account of the majority users - which means coding for IE

And who can blame naive users from disabling automatic updates, given the reputation M$ have got for buggering up computers?

IE6 users should be venerated in our society, they are a rare breed, these people who are sufficiently content with what they've got that they see no reason to change. Fashion isn't important to them, they'll never go out and waste their life savings on iPhones or Macbooks, they'll not go out and swap their Honda Accord and caravan for an Evo and a wind surfing board. They will change their OS's (and hence their browsers) when they change their computers. Who are we to force them? These are the generation whose obsession with pornography and who determination to save money by booking their holidays online funded the growth of the internet. These are the people who pay for the adsl connections in their middle class bungalows, the people who don't chop and change their mobile for the latest fashionable crap from China every five minutes, they are the unfashionable silent majority who keep this country running when all else is slipping into chaos. Let them keep with what they're happy with, they don't care for website gimmickry which is hardly going to change the world.

Or is it now the way of the world that we marginalise those who make us feel awkward? Happily raking in the taxes from smokers, society makes it impossible for them to continue to enjoy something that is still lawful. Same for drinkers, with constant anti-drink messages warning us of the evil drink hitting us everywhere we go? Leave 'em be, I say.

That's my rant of the day done.

[sanjiv]

I think that IE9 will be good but I think that they will probably have nicked some code off FF and Google or just copied what they do.

[CatSick]

http://www.wisdump.com/web-programmi...net-explorer-6

[TechNic]

Good link CatSick.

For a bit of context, here are some stats via Wikipedia:


So clearly IE is still dominant. That's fine I suppose - each to their own. But how many of those IE users are using which version?
IE6 = 37.88%
IE7 = 29.95%
IE8 = 33.12%
(source)

If people want to use IE then that's their lookout. We all know the relative merits of any number of other browsers above IE. But the internet is moving on and those IE6 users need a gentle poke to play their part by upgrading their browsers.
It's like people still trying to fill their cars with 4-star. Outdated, unhealthy and inefficient by comparison.