Dump IE 6 campaign runs afoul of dump IE 6 campaign The anger and frustration normally associated with Internet Explorer tends to focus on specific areas: security, stability, and standards. But those feelings have now spilled over into efforts dedicated to "saving" developers from the aging IE version 6. Veteran developer Michael Hudin has accused a group calling itself …
Forget about IE6, IE7, IE8, or whatever.
Use a *standards-compliant* Web browser, and prominently post on your site "This Web site was designed to comply with the W3C standards. If it does not appear properly in your Web browser, then your browser does not comply with existing International standards. Please ask your browser vendor to fix it."
Problem solved.
"Urging people to get rid of IE 6 is just the first of many campaigns to help developers"
developers need to help themselves here a little. OK i know they are hampered by their contracting businesses, but If websites were all built to web standards, with a small message on IE saying that the site might not display/work properly, and that they should upgrade to a standards compliant browser to ensure that there are no problems. it would result in a much cheaper development with much more maintainable code.
Some developers certainly seem to have no problem on sites presenting firefox/opera users with messages saying that you need to use Internet explorer 4 or better to view the site??
Dunno, I'm perfectly satisfied with IE6, myself. Does everything I need. In full-screen mode has buttons, menu and address bar, all in a very thin band across the top of my screen - can't duplicate that with Firefox, no matter how hard I try (maybe I'm doing it wrong). Have no use for tabbed browsing, either, though I can see how some people might like it. Maybe IE8 will have some compelling features that tempt me to upgrade, provided it's back-ported to w2k.
I think it should come as no surprise that Web Developers generally are not fans of IE 6, so it doesn't seem like anyone can really lay claim to the idea.
In any case, it looks like stopie6.org was registered a month prior to end6.org, so it seems Mr. Hudin may have had a little 'inspiration' as well.
If it were only that easy!
Of course, you could add words like: "security risk", "proprietary" and other such things (anti-trust?) to aid the cause. Unfortunately it won't work as long as ANY version of IE has penetration over 10% (or some similar figure).
Short of some unspeakable act (there are many) that wipes out Microsoft, all we can do is dream.
Unfortunately, Morely's idea is a case of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. Most website success is dependent at least in part upon visitor numbers for ad revenue and whose going to risk loosing 50% of their income from advertising for the sake of making a principled stand on web site design efficiency?
With that MS and Apple deal for IE as the bundled OS browser on Windows AND MacOS from 1997 until 2002 (it's been a long time since Apple was the champion of the consumer), MS had a monopoly on browser use which peaked at around roughly 90% share over 2002 and 2003. Thanks to the US protectionism of US based global monopolies, browser development is probably around four years behind where it should be.
browsers are not exclusively used for crappy Web 2.0 internet content. They are also used for thin client front ends for many (internal) business applications, many of which will fail if forced to run on browsers which are more standards compliant.
How many companies out there want to pay to fix something which currently (as far as they're concerned) isn't broken?
I know that my company has no intention of upgrading to IE7 (or Firefox, Opera etc.). If employees want a better web surfing experience, they can ruddy well do it at home. As long as the company's business-critical applications which use a browser front end work, the internet can go hang.
To Kevin Thompson, thanks for pointing out the www.stopie6.org website. Naturally, I knew nothing of it at the time I was working www.end6.org and I searched high and low for other people doing something similar as I didn't want to duplicate this.
While they registered their domain in September 2007 and I registered in October 2007, I think that we both brought our sites online at the same time as you can see that the first comment on their is November 30, 2007. They also aren't really doing a widget type thing, but are more focusing on showing people how to detect IE6 from visitors
My main beef with the new guys is that their whole name is all about making the life of the developer easier. In the US, we front-end guys make anywhere from $30-$100 an hour. Even with the dollar in the toilet, that's still a good deal of money to be paid to deal with IE6, but it's definitely wasted money.
My main concern with IE6 is that some of my relatives have gotten viruses through exploits and the browser in general is just not safe for an end user to use. People aren't upgrading here and have been needing a bit of a nudge to take the plunge.
Hudin
I had the exact same idea myself a few weeks ago. Get some javascript everyone can use that has a little pop-up, telling IE6 users to upgrade. To suggest that someone 'stole' the idea from him is a load of utter arse.
More to the point though, IE6 isn't going away. Anyone suggesting that people should make W3C compliant sites and tell IE users to switch has obviously never made a web site in return for money, because telling 30-40% of your audience to piss off is not something favoured by any client I've met.
As people have said above, the corporates aren't moving- and that's the problem. My work has a wide variety of ugly ActiveX jobbies for all sorts of jobs. They're old and use shoddy technology, but they work. They're not getting upgraded, and neither is IE6. Don't get me wrong, I hate it, but that's the way things are...
Some of the security stuff intended to make sure that only the correct million people read your medical records has been cunningly coded to require IE6. It doesn't seem to be anything to do with needing any feature that goes away in IE7, although use of a better browser does seem to have been prevented by designing in an Active X component, it is just that the things apparently check if they are talking to IE6, and if not demand that someone pays to restart the process from scratch.
Ah well.
...I kept IE6 in a folder on my desktop. I usually use FF3 anyway.
The new slogan for IE8 when it comes will be 'It actually renders stuff right!' - although only if you put a meta tag instructing it to do so on your page. Come on microsoft... Wake up and smell the validation!
Just put the script in after the pointy haired client has approved the design and you've uploaded.
Ive put used
<!--[if IE]>
<a href="http://www.spreadfirefox.com/?q=affiliates&id=211203&t=219"><img border="0" alt="Firefox 2" title="Firefox 2" src="http://sfx-images.mozilla.org/affiliates/Buttons/firefox2/ff2b80x15.gif"/></a> | <![endif]-->
before :-)
This post has been deleted by its author
.. about my Win98SE machine, since they stopped supporting a perfectly usable IE 5.5 SP2 ? IE 6 doesn't display THIS site right about 50% of the time
still getting most of what I need for websites from HTML 4 and tables, which all browsers seem to read fine except old Netscape 4.x
ok ok .. XP machine has Firefox .. and I do the .php stuff with that machine .. I confess !
Boo hoo. Programming is tedious and difficult. I'm crying real tears. Boo hoo.
Those of you who program for desktops have no idea what the fuss is about.
Those of you who develop in a standard intranet environment for enterprises know that good environments use standard browsers for their thin-clients. The environment is stable.
Those of you who hawk your wares in the uncontrolled "wild-web" better know how to build durable and dynamic web applications that expose similar visual and interactive controls, depending on the hand that (web) fate deals you. The good developers who know how to do this well will be rewarded and capture greater market share of their own. Those who complain about it should learn another profession. I'd recommend trying out for Professional Microsoft Critic, but you might find a lot of competition out there.
Work is hard. Programming can be pretty tough. Good programmers do what programmers need to do. Bad programmers just move up to become bad project managers; but that's a different rant.
Learn to be good at managing the hard stuff. Then charge more money. For my part, I say, "Long Live IE6!"
I love seeing IE6. It looks like profit.
And now, there's an island of Big-endians and an island of Little-endians and they're all arguing over who hated IE6 first?
All the hot chicks in college were right. You are all a bunch of geeks!
I'm in the midst of building a new site and am going for a halfway house - the site's usable with IE5 and up but I'm limiting the number of cosmetic IE hacks. If the site's viewed in MSIE there's an extra (small, unobtrusive) link on each page linking to a page explaining that the user's browser is not standards compliant (I know there are other offenders but IE is the worst). Also, the bug report form has no 'cosmetic issue' category when viewed in IE and includes an extra warning that I don't want cosmetic bugs reported if they only affect that browser.
So far I've had to add hacks for just two MSIE CSS issues that really rendered (excuse the pun) the site unusable. It's made my life a little easier at least. There are only a couple of minor cosmetic issues with the site viewed in IE that I'm aware of, but it's nice to know I don't have to care about fixing them. :)
The real problem is, as AC said in "Unfortunately" above, internal web applications that work only in MSIE. My employer has a couple of those, but the last couple of new ones introduced do work in FF2 so although this is likely to cause a bit of lag in the adoption of standards-compliant browsers it does seem to be changing.
AFAIK the problems with IE6 are down to CSS, DOM, JavaScript etc.
If it's truly that painful to code around it's deficiencies, then it must be less effort to throw together an accessible "lo-fi" version without any of the Web 2.0 crap, and direct IE6 users there based on user agent strings.
At the same time, mobile users and those with screen readers etc might appreciate the extra choice.
John
A standard is not something that a bunch of people have written down somewhere, it's the system used by the most people. Microsoft have something like 90% of browsers and so whatever they impliment becomes the standard. Users don't want to change browser just to use a site so if the site is not IE capable then the site will lose visitors.
Silly little W3C buttons and suchlike mean nothing to the average user so it would be in firefox et al's best interest to render things in the same way that IE does. I was very enthusiastic with FF 1 but 2 and 3 are rubbish and offer no advantages over IE7 while IE7 works with all the .NET apps I use and things like Windows Update. I flirted with IE tab for a while but ditched it in favour of IE7 because tabs were the only thing that I actually liked about FF.
Real web developers write sites for IE whereas Comp Sci students who are doing some free work for their uncle 'designing' a web site tend to go overboard on the standards compliance, it's that simple.
Like other people here we cannot move to IE 7 because our business apps will only work on IE 6 and the vendors don't seem in a rush to change that, cannot blame them really.
The fun bit is that this stopped our deployment of Vista for our student clusters :-)
Been told you cannot have IE 6 on Vista!!
what solution is that?
last time I checked NO browsers were entierly standards compliant.
in fact last time I checked mozilla didn't support all the html4.0 tags.
(border color light / border color light, instead choosing to either apply shading for 3d effect if they are not specified, or choosing to just render grey if the colours are specified...
so there, quit your bitching. when [insert your favourite browser here] is fully standards compliant then perhaps you'll have a point telling others that they shouldn't be using their choice as it's lesser. until the stfu.
@Hudin,
oh so you didn't notice that someone else had the idea before you? but it didn't stop you running your mouth off when someone else had the idea after you.
and i seem to remember that years ago I knew someone who put notices on his websites telling people that I.e was shite,
that same person also detected screen resolutions and made jokes at people running in low res.
you're not the first to have the idea, and you won't be the last.
/rant
Might be better to do:
<!--[if lt IE 7]>
<script src="http://www.end6.org/js/eng_end6.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
<![endif]-->
or <!--[if IE 6]>
Firefox has its own standards problems. Try the acid2 test in FF2. Forcing only firefox use is as bad as the old "this page is for IExx" pages.
For me though, until most browsers can support standards correctly, and the w3c gives us back the target property in links, I shall continue to write html in transitional and support old IE versions as well as new browsers. Hell, I'll even support users on lynx.
If you want compliance, you got it: http://webkit.org/blog/ Opera is nearly there too. Beyond compliance, either of those are way faster and better looking than IE and FF anyway. FF2 is almost unusably slow, but FF3 is much better.
With a bit of luck, since MS thankfully changed their minds about standards mode, IE8 might possibly pass acid2 at launch, and thus we might finally see the end of having to put all that extra work (which our clients pay for) into downgrading for IE compatibility.
"With IE6...In full-screen mode has buttons, menu and address bar, all in a very thin band across the top of my screen - can't duplicate that with Firefox, no matter how hard I try (maybe I'm doing it wrong)"
For some reason when I press F11 my FF browser (v. 2.0.0.13) does *exactly* what you're describing here, although TBH I can't remember if it did this before the latest update or not.
Joel's latest post, which is unusually good for his later stuff:
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2008/03/17.html
Backward compatability IS good. You guys are essentially sticking your fingers up at people in the third world running old technology with limited computing knowledge.
Don't be so mean!
...all the clients who actually pay for the web development will demand that it works on whatever they're using.
p.s. many, many users are still stuck on IE6 because they cannot install/upgrade anything on their machine, and the desktop team have no reason to go and upgrade everyone on the network.
----
Real web developers write sites for IE whereas Comp Sci students who are doing some free work for their uncle 'designing' a web site tend to go overboard on the standards compliance, it's that simple.
----
What total and utter unremitting bollocks - damn - I just bit a troll.
If you go by the way in which a browser renders a page rather than by the name of that browser, IE doesn't really have market share.
IE 6 and 7 render differently so that's 2 different categories.
Opera 8+, FF2+, Konqueror and Safari render basically the same. On some sites this could quite easily get something like 25% IE 6, 35% IE 7, 39% stuff that's W3C compliant (give or take) and 1% other... meaning "IE" is not dominant.
It gets better - in most instances IE7 actually renders more like Firefox or Opera than it does IE6 - look at padding in the box model for instance - so unless you're accessing the JS DOM you could say that IE7, Firefox, Opera and so on all render approximately the same. Even giving IE6 the generous market share of 30% it's still a minority browser these days - any web developer working in the "real world" will only worry about it as a secondary consideration.
IE7 only really becomes an issue when coding web2.0 shinies using the JS DOM - and you can get around those problems by using a JS wrapper "class" and providing noscript alternatives.
The whole point of coding to W3C standards is that if YOU follow the standard, every browser on every operating system following the same standard will display your code the same - even those you've not tested. I've not tested my work site with Safari on OSX (as I don't have access to a Mac) but I've been informed it works fine with my standards compliant code (oki - I put an onresize in the body tag that's not compliant).
Yes. Something that a bunch of people have written down somewhere so that everyone doing that thing can use the same, um, standard.
As for this save the developers thing - yeah, life would be so much easier if no-one ever had to worry about backwards compatability, but it's the nature of the beast really, isn't it? At least it's manageable when you're only dealing with mark-up & style sheets.
I agree with Alistair: "Anyone suggesting that people should make W3C compliant sites and tell IE users to switch has obviously never made a web site in return for money, because telling 30-40% of your audience to piss off is not something favoured by any client I've met."
Absolutely. The arrogance of web designers bugs me. Firefox is slow. A ***lot*** of sites break in Firefox. I don't want to use Firefox and view a load of broken sites.Fix your bl***dy sites so they work in IE6 and stop bl***dy moaning.
From a developer's point of view, I actually think IE6 performs better than the standard in one respect. If you have a fixed width on a div in IE6 then then div will still stretch to contain its content if the content exceeds the width (hence avoiding breaking your page). However, in the glorious "standards complaint" IE7 and Firefox, if your div's content exceeds the div's width then the content breaks out of the div - thus breaking your page. So in that respect, IE6 is more robust.
About 4 or 5 years' ago I switched from IE6 to FF for the sole reason that rendering appeared faster in FF. Since then I have grown to love tabbed browsing. I now prefer to use FF on both my work and home machines. But FF is not a great product by any stretch of the imagination. It became so unstable on my home machine that I was forced to get rid and switch back to IE6. At work I have both IE7 and FF installed, I need IE for a variety of intranet sites as others have posted, but can't say I'm happy with the browser. The default layout of buttons is just silly - why would you want your core navigation buttons (forward, back, refresh, stop and home) to be liberally spread around the interface on both sides of the address box and on separate toolbars. This is why I run IE6 at home.
My impression at the moment is basically that IE is more stable than Firefox; FF has the edge on interface, and the IE7 needs a bit of an urgent redesign.
OK, I pushed at limits with this one, but IE6, Opera and FF all handle this page fine : http://www.jacobsm.com/hangman2.htm
IE7 fails, but it handles http://www.jacobsm.com/hangman.htm OK. How can the javascript engine get worse, going from IE6 to IE7?!? No wonder people don't want to upgrade.
Also, there are a lot of myths associated with FF - check out http://mywebpages.comcast.net/SupportCD/FirefoxMyths.html
Opera still crashes and GPFs, so I am not happy using it. It takes a while to load too, like FF2. So, I'll stick with IE6 and run MJ Registry Watcher to protect myself - http://www.jacobsm.com/mjsoft.htm#rgwtchr
I love this thread. Every politically correct web designer will parrot back "don't force the client to yaddayaddayadda" as The Ideal, then a good portion of them turn round and indulge in frothing rants on how best to force people to change their browser.
30-40 percent? That's a powerful amount of potential customers to be telling to piss off. I hope you're selling air when you do it. I doubt anything else is important enough for anyone to spend more than a second or two before goggle-ing for another place to get whatever it is you're selling.
Of course, if you were to include some frame-based button-disabling design and some javascript/hidden field "stay where you are" code, the would-be customer would <i>have</i> to listen. Better add a non-squelchable wav file yelling at them to change browsers too.
It doesn't help that some developers/companies are still pulling in the opposite direction to the trend towards standards compliant websites. I went to do my shopping on tesco.com at the weekend for the first time in about 3 months, and found that parts of the website now don't work properly in Firefox because what was an almost purely java site now has chunks of ASP in it. I had to switch to using IE6 just to get my shopping done.
"Microsoft have something like 90% of browsers"
Not any more they don't. Our main website's stats suggest IE is down to 75% and falling. That's still a lot, but it's no 90%, and the trend is slow erosion in the IE share. IE6 accounts for about 1/3 of those and fading fast. Our other sites tell a similar tale. Our visitors in all cases are average people, many of whom, when asked how they found our website, will answer "on the internet" or "using my computer". We're not exactly aiming at tech savvy people here, yet IE is on the slide anyway.
"Real web developers write sites for IE"
Uh, no. Real web developers write sites to work with as many browsers as possible, IE included. That generally means adhering to those "silly" W3C "standards", then hacking around what's broken in IE.
We have every right to grumble about IE6 being junk, sure we get paid for the time spent fighting it's inadequencies, but I'd rather spend that time making more clients happy with additional projects, doing productive work.
Lazy idiots who can't be bothered to do their job properly and end users who think "web development" means using Word or Frontpage, write websites specifically for IE. Which of those two are you, Simon?
"it would be in firefox et al's best interest to render things in the same way that IE does."
Genius idea! Let's implement it, shall we Einstein?
-------------------------------
/* HACK HACk HACK!1!! Display like IE does */
if ( rand() <= 0.5 && ( (dayofweek() % 2) || getwinddirectionastext() == "north" ) ) {
quirksmode = true;
buggerupthedisplaycompletely(quirksmode);
if ( nonmicrosoftstandardsdetected() ) {
bluescreenexit(1);
}
}
-------------------------------
Mr Painter, meet my friend, Mr LART. He wants to tell you what he thinks of your idea.
*whack*
Back in July 2007 a site I frequent underwent a redesign. This redesign included was a pop-up window that appeared only to users of IE6 and earlier warning them the site was not optimised for IE6 and that it was no longer supported by MS and that they should they upgrade to IE7, FF2 or Opera 9. It only appeared once a session.
Now there were many annoyances involved in this redesign, but that pop-up caused the most bitching. Some of it was from people who were legitimately stuck on work computers with IT departments that refused to allow any browsers other than IE6 on their machines. But most of it was from people who seemed to think this pop up infringed their constitutionally protected right to run an obsolete web-browser.
It was removed before they fixed any of the real problems the update caused.
A couple of weeks ago I was toying with setting up a site to host a load of rants about how much I dislike people and the things that they do. To deal with the IE development I was just going to detect IE, then serve a page that instructed the user to try a real browser and come back later.
Then again I wasn't planning on profiting or saying anything very important, plus one of the main goals of the site would be to piss off a large number of people, and IE users (Any version, see if I care...) are some people that I could do with pissing off.
Someone mentioned sticking your fingers up at IE users in the 3rd world, etc. That gives me a great idea for the jpeg on page that IE users get. And 3rd world users have much better uses of their time than reading the trash that I hope to write.
.... why not leave your damn ego aside, leave the fanboy rubbish aside, and let people use what they damn well please?
I'm a developer myself, and code my websites according to spec, and also allow for older and/or alternative shells such as IE5.x, IE6.x, Opera, FireFox etc etc etc. I'm not going to tell half of my userbase to essentially bugger off because I don't like what they may be using.
In my case, I detest Firefox, but at the same time, I appreciate that each user has their own preferences, and I respect that. Perhaps those wanting everyone else to adhere to their demands on shell usage, should do the same?.
Exactly right.
Developers can have opinions and curse and moan to other developers, but bottom line is 'make it work for all browsers' is normally what clients say thinking that they themselves use IE, but they know people with macs so to them all browsers is really those two, but if the spec says that then i take it to mean all the ones i can test in (IE 5,6,7, FF on win, linux, mac, Safari, KHTML, Konqueror).
Also most users dont care, "whats a browser" is about right.
Recently a client saw me working on their site with Firefox and Firebug to look at the AJAX requests, they asked me if that was my development environment 'like visual studio'. I laughed alot but shows average knowledge.
Just write code which supports the 'standard' - by which I mean cross browser compliant code for IE6, IE7, FF, Safari and Opera. Is that really too hard?
In my experience the problem is web developers not bothering to read up on the 'standard'. OK, maybe not the people here but those in some of the mum & pop stores.
As for Opera, FF and Safari supposedly supporting W3C 'standards', do the really? Do they support XSLT 2.0 yet?
What an absolute load of bollocks, sir. Is the 802.11g wireless standard the one used by the people with the most market share? How about the IDE/SATA/SCSI standards, or the ISO standards for business interchange, and so on, and so on? A standard is something agreed on by a group of people in order to make their products intercompatible - that is, they all run on the same base, or produce similar output, etc. Your "code for IE" approach is only ever going to create huge headaches for developers and users alike, especially when the next question would be "what version of IE are you going to code for?" IE doesn't even agree with itself, so how can it be a standard?
Real web developers - and by that, I mean those of us in the real world - code all their websites TO STANDARDS and then hack in extra annoying code to make them work in IE. That way, the website works in all browsers for all users, excluding no-one. That is the mark of a "real web developer," not some strange loyalty to only one buggy, obsolete browser made by a collection of idiots.
As for the IE6 issue, I wholeheartedly agree with those that want it and every version before it to die. IE6 has tormented me for long enough, and its inability to render anything properly has on occasion made me look a fool - if a site you made doesn't appear properly in a browser, as far as the client is concerned, that's 'cos you're crap, not because the browser's crap. I was pleasantly surprised by IE7. It's still rubbish compared to FF, Opera and Safari, but it's a damn sight better than IE6 and certainly a step in the right direction. The others were appalling, and should be retired in much the same way as a lame racehorse.
Killing IE would require all web developers everywhere to agree to redirect all IE traffic to the Firefox website after a certain date.
Encouraging/forcing an upgrade from IE6 to 7 isn't sufficient, since the only difference between them is that IE7 has tabs, almost passible font smoothing, and natively supports transparent PNGs. It's just as non-standards-compliant and family-shaming to it's developers as version 6 was. IE7 is too little too late, and should be put down.
This scenario is obviously preposterous. So I suggest instead that Google do this, which would be just as effective as everybody else in the world doing it.
If I seem angry, I am. I'm a web developer.
As a home-user Desktop PC Technician, I find that many of my customers are running less than XP SP2 (98, ME, 2000, XP SP0/1 etc) so they haven't been upgraded to IE7. This means a lot of my customers are running IE5 and IE6 by default. Many are also on Dial-up. Many have problems accessing websites with Flash, ActiveX, Java, https, etc either because their PCs are old and/or borked (hence they need me). Many don't know what a browser actually is let alone what Firefox is. Expecting EVERYONE to change isn't an option. That's why my site is written in really basic static HTML - I can't afford to alienate my potential customers with anything that might not work.
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