Microsoft celebrates the death of IE6 Microsoft is celebrating the news that Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) use in the US has officially dropped below one per cent of internet visits. In March, Microsoft assembled a team to push for the destruction of IE6, and have succeeded in reducing the market footprint of the browser. Currently 7.7 per cent of worldwide internet …
that were designed specifically for IE6.
They are effectively screwed - they can't upgrade the browser because the web services won't run on the new versions, and they can't upgrade a given web utility because the upgraded/replacement version won't run on the IE6 that everybody has.
Thus any upgrade has to be absolutely everything at once - browser and *all* Intranet services.
To make it worse, a lot of these IE6 services are legacy with no support or upgrade path at all, so would need to be completely replaced to allow the others to be updated.
Thus a way to make IE8/9 handle their legacy applications transparently is quite valuable, as it gives them an upgrade path to escape the clutches of IE6, and then the risk of updating individual web services is greatly reduced.
> They are effectively screwed - they can't upgrade the browser because the web services won't run on the new versions, and they can't upgrade a given web utility because the upgraded/replacement version won't run on the IE6 that everybody has.
Fortunately there is a solution (partial at least) with chromeframe, at least for sites with the correct header or tag.
Although I was surprised that youtube reported that ie 6 with chromeframe was out of date. Why can't they use their own products?
But at the end of the day the new guy/gal should have the chops to put together a long term plan. IE6 has been on a steady decline now for YEARS this story was not news to me. Planning for these types of major system changes is why a Manager is supposed to be a strategic thinker and also why they are supposed to be paid more than their employees. If the new leader of that team has failed to see the shift in Technology then I think it is time they walk the plank.
Pirate flag because it just felt right with all of this talk about Mutiny, Death and walking the plank...now if only there was a bottle of Rum.
"that were designed specifically for IE6."
And people don't learn and are doing the same for IE7. I was involved with a project just recently for an insurance claims processing system. The chosen browser - IE7. I tried to point out that GWT (the chosen development platform) output code for other browsers, and wouldn't it be a good idea to ensure that the CSS for the app worked with other browsers at least as a contigency? Nope. The app was being deployed to IE7 and that was that.
The insane part is there were no benefits to doing this at all. Even in a controlled deployment it's not hard to install another browser as part of the deployment, e.g. a version of Firefox. And chances are by doing so the performance would have been better too so everyone would have won.
I expect someone will eventually command that the app should now work with IE8 or Firefox and wonder why it takes 6-12 months of additional work and expense to make it happen. That's corporations for you.
Is there any straightforward way to do transparent authentication in Firefox as easily as you can do with IE and IIS servers? Because that can be a very useful function for Intranet applications.
Or is it like Group Policy support - something that Mozilla.org doesn't think businesses should care about?
Developing for a specific (and already deprecated) version of a browser is a bit dumb. But the development of "Thin App" technology means it needn't be quite the dead end that it used to be - if you absolutely need to, it's now possible to run an instance of IE6 or IE7 alongside IE8 or IE9, or even on an non-windows desktop.
Browsers are being updated far too quickly nowadays and most of my add-ons no longer work with the latest and greatest versions. Problem is, my add-on functionality is a necessary part of my work day and using older versions is needed as a result.
FireFox especially has to slow way the heck down on their release cycle. Two major releases in three months is asinine.
I'm using Firefox right now on a netbook thanks to being away from home and the performance is good. I used to use Opera with turbo mode on to squeeze as much bandwidth out of my 3G allowance but Opera really is a slug on this same setup. GMail and other complex sites are intolerably sluggish with Opera suggesting layout inefficiencies.
I'd potentially use Chrome instead of Firefox though I haven't had cause to switch away.
well they are having to constantly update the browsers to support the new support the new phones, ipads, TVs, notebooks, fondles, keplunks, etc
what we really need is a cessation of all technology for 5 years. Can't the world just agree to pause for a bit? Do we really need TVs in 3D or TVs with hand gesture support? Technology is really going into gimmick territory now.
it's all becoming a bit piss
IE8 is the switch over point where MS started to get their act together as far as standards go (with IE7 a big jump forward over IE6, but not there yet). IE9 is, imo, where they build on the base of IE8 to make something pretty good. I honestly prefer it over Firefox for default browsing. (Though I use Firefox for almost all web-development). Opera is also very good.I'd honestly put things in the order IE9 or Opera, followed by Firefox. IE10 is looking very impressive.And I remember Mosaic, so I've been around browsers for a while.
Try running the ACID3 tests (acid3.acidtests.org). You won't ever get 100% because it doesn't support all the standards that ALL other browsers support. For example background gradients, animations, etc.
And it's full of bugs - e.g. Peekaboo's back.
There's a difference between just "using" it and developing with/for it.
The devil is in the details. No only has the score got to reach 100, but the result must be pixel perfect with the reference image. For me, IE9 is failing to dropshadow some text, for example. There may be further issues, but I've no idea what "smooth animation" is supposed to look like in the context of the test. Maybe I'll take a closer look later.
Which is why I put detailed information in my post, as opposed to just copying the score. The site *does* report 100/100 for Opera, IE9 and Firefox all (in contradiction to what the original poster wrote). Opera is the only one that gives a pixel for pixel equivalent to the reference version (though it also takes twice the speed of IE9 which was the fastest of the three browsers). The point is not that any browser is perfect, but that the grossly biased original post that tried to make it sound like other browsers all scored far better than IE was wrong. IE9 drops a border thickness by a pixel and loses the drop shadow on some of the text. Firefox leaves red text on the screen that is supposed to be hidden (worse, imo, but I'm not pushing an agenda of one browser being objectively better than any other). Opera is, as usual, excellent.
It's not that any browser is utterly flawless. It's that the original poster made it sound like there were great big differences in quality of implementation and a poster who *correctly* observed that the site reported 100/100 which the original poster said it didn't, got modded down by some people. Presumably because they didn't like his facts. Bias is bad. I use Firefox for development because Firebug and the Web Developer toolbar are fantastic. I use IE9 for browsing because it renders things right (every real world thing it's come across) and is the fastest browser I've used. I don't use Opera because every time I accidentally middle click it sends the entire bloody contents of my clipboard off to a search engine and I can't find out how to turn that off. All browsers have plusses and minuses. But to reflexively mod down posts that report facts in favour of a browser because you have some snobbish dislike of the company, is just tragic. Such people should bugger off back to Slashdot where they can all pat each other on their back for their prejudices.
Really, IE9 is fine.
Leaving aside whether Acid3 is a way to tell me whether or not I like a browser, BOTH IE9 and Firefox 8.01 report 100/100 on the acid3 url you provided and both fail in other ways. IE9 loses the drop-shadow around the title lettering and the border width around the colour blocks hasn't been resized. In Firefox, the styling on these two elements is right, but you actually get content that is supposed to be hidden plastered on the screen. Opera gets 100/100 and both of these elements correct.
Seriously, have you actually tried this in IE9 or did you just decide to write the above based on your assumptions? The Acid3 test is a death trap for browsers, using every uncommon practice and trick it can to break the rendering. And having compared the results for Opera, Firefox and IE with the reference guides, only Opera is perfect (despite all three being given 100/100 for score). Of IE and Firefox, anyone inclined to believe your post should try it for themselves, because IE has some two minor style losses and Firefox displays text that shouldn't even be shown on the screen!
Just admit that you have a bias when it comes to browsers.
Yes. Windows 7 64-Bit. I've just tried on Ubuntu for you and on that platform it correctly hides the red text, though I have Firefox 8.0 on that platform so weirdly, the higher version number (8.1) on Windows gets them wrong. You really don't want to try the IceWeasal incarnation on Debian, btw. Just tried that one out and although it gets the drop shadow, hidden text and border thicknesses right, it actually has UTF-8 encoding errors and wrong <head> information - far more serious imo, than not having a drop-shadow.
Anyway, an interesting result. I would have thought Firefox should still render things the same regardless of platform, but it seems it is variable (or else the newer version number has more flaws than the older one).
One last observation: clicking on "A" reveals that both FF8 and Chromium failed 0 tests, but took too long on some tests (less than 30 fps) and test 80 took numerous attempts (136 and 140 for FF and Chromium respectively).
How relevant is that for the man in the street, though? Or the dev?
Relevant to the man on the street, or even most developers? Not relevant. 98% of your HTML and CSS is going to look pretty much the same in any of the main browsers. I bash out pages in Firefox, do some quick comparisons in IE7,8,9, Opera and a webkit based browser before release, but very seldom do I actually need to go back and change anything for the sake of one of these other browsers. I can think of one instance in the past year. (Admittedly, I am not primarily a web-designer, but I do quite a bit of it) and that actually had to do with form submission rather than layout.
Still, it is nice to be compliant as much as possible and so it's interesting to see how they perform in Acid3. I think browser writers are now coding to the test as far as Acid3 is concerned, mind you.
"IE9 is, imo, where they build on the base of IE8 to make something pretty good."
IE9 may be many things, but it builds on a base that is sufficiently unrelated to IE8 that it will never run on Windows XP.
Speaking of which, are Microsoft planning to launch a "Kill XP" campaign? I hear that its market share remains defiantly above 1%.
IMO that is the whole name of the game. One which Sun knew and lived like no other, perhaps to the point of taking it a little /too/ far at times but even so.. Solaris 10 easily ran code from older Solaris versions.
The big problem however is that coders and admins usually know about this. But the people in the GUI departments seem more focused on "selling" their products these days than to check up with what their users really want. I often wonder; is it really about a "better user experience" or to apply changes for the sake of it so that people might pick up the product because its "new" ?
Now; that isn't bad perse, not at all. If only they would realize that there are also plenty of people around who are happy with the product as it is now. Often it would have been little trouble to maintain the GUI as it was, but no; the need for change has arrived!
It keeps amazing me how some people seem totally baffled at the results. Many people who don't like change yet are enforced into it often find an even bigger change; by ditching the entire product alltogether to look for something else ("if I have to adapt the way I work I can as well check up on the competition").
To a certain extend I think the same thing applies here. Trying to "force" people into something is very likely going to drive a lot of them away from the product.
Finally; this move also shows a little hypocrisy. After all; IE6 is shipped with Windows XP, Windows XP is supported until 2014 as such the same applies to IE6, even though they'd rather see you upgrade to 7 or 8. So this move is a rather strange one IMO.
I was just looking up 'spleen disorders' on Alta Vista. The top 2 "Sponsored Results" ?
"Spleen Disorders Sale - Up To 75% Off Spleen Disorders Now. - Free UK Delivery On Select Items"
and
"A Liver Disorder Prices - We Have Millions of Products - A Liver Disorder on Sale"
I sh1t you not. There's nothing the interwebulator won't try to sell to you.
...is there are so many of them and they take so long to become ratified,
How many broswer makers started rolling out HTML5 support long, long before it was a standard.
And what is a standard?
H264?
Flash?
MP3?
Yes i.e.6 broke a lot, but when you compare it to the utter shite that was netscape navigator, it was either broken "standard" or a utter shite browser.
It's ironic that it took a nasty broswer (i.e.6) and a monopoly to kill of a crap browser (Netscape) to come up with something decent and a new era of browsers.
PS I use Opera, Firefox, Iron & i.e.9. Some do some things better and others. I simply choose the best for the job.
I have the black Midnight Madness IE 3.0 t-shirt -> on a 33.6 US Robotics modem. Had about four downloads going on a Win95 Cyrix 686 133mhz, 8mb, 20GB HD machine. Was a long night lol.
IE3 was the beginning on the end for Netscape, only reason I downloaded IE was because it was *different*. There wasn't a hell of a lot out there back then - Netscape and then the text browsers (mozaic?), that's it.
Sent via Firefox 9.0.1
;)
Mosaic wasn't text based.
I know for a fact that it had image support (though it was limited, SVG wasn't supported, neither was TIFF, and Im not quite sure about BMP) and it had a GUI, so by either of the two definitions of text-based browser, it doesn't quite fit.
Lynx on the other hand was/is a true text based browser.
I can confirm this - Mosaic certainly had image support. It was the first Web browser I ever saw running, in one of my old university's computing labs in the autumn of 1994, under Windows 3.1. I remember watching a photo (of U2, IIRC) slowly loading in the Mosaic window on the PC next to mine, and thinking I had to find out what this program was.
I've spent pretty much my whole working life with the Web, and that was where it all started...
Not sure that's an issue. AFAIR you can still download the full installation pack for 8 with a bent XP.
What might help more is if corp admins would allow those users who *don't* use HalfArsedAccountingShitApp 1.0 to upgrade, rather than defending their standard, IE6-ridden desktop image as if it were Holy Writ.
*spits on Microsoft-only developers*.
This is what happens when you get f@g developers who don't know jack shit about fuck all.
They write web applications that only work with a Microsoft browser.
FUCK DEVELOPERS WHO SHIT ON INTERNET STANDARDS.
FUCK WEBSITES THAT RELY ON IE6.
Typical Penguin or Apple Bothering fanboy with unresolved anger issues.
Don't try to reason with them. If you really want to get a rise out of them insult Saint SJ or Saint RMS depending on their borderline religious fanatical devotion to either of those two individuals. They're like the Penguin Taliban and Apple-Qaeda. You'll get downvoted every time you post for the rest of your life for your insolence.
In the real world, you have to learn to use and work with every environment out there whether you like it or not. Your boss tells you to write some shoddy half-baked ActiveX crap, you do. You may not like it but you do it.
Dolts like that just make me roll my eyes anymore.
So it's alright to insult other peoples "faiths" then? I take it you consider it acceptable to use the mocking names "Penguin Taliban" and "Apple-Qaeda", and not consider them insults to the millions who do use those systems and don't bother other anyone else with their opinions? So is it also OK to use the N-word, call people under the Jewish or Hindu faiths for example, silly names too?
Sorry but the second you resort to childish name calling you lose all credibility and lower youself to the level of the rather pathetic original poster.
Grow up!
Oh hi! Yes as it happens I understood "site" to refer to a physical location but good point on highlighting the possible ambiguity given the context. A truly literate person would have probably avoided it in the first place by using a different term in the interest of clarity, but I realise that nobody is perfect.
Other than that, how's your medication going?
Think about it this way. If an internal site is truly secure (as I believe the MOD requires for some of their sites), then it will probably only be accessible on a server that has no access to the internet (preferably no physical connection, rather than just relying on a switch or firewall to protext it). It will also only be accessible on computers that have been thoroughly locked down (no USB support etc), and with enough security in the building to stop anyone just walking in.
If all the above is true, whether the browser is secure or not is irrelevant, it's unlikely to be hacked.
surely not ie6 has been around for years and now Microsoft has pressed the kill switch well more a less lol. good job i don't use ie internet explorer for short hehe i use Google chrome its the best ever browser. think its time company's moved away and joined Google chrome. as for ie well its a buggy browser anyway its made buy Microsoft what do you expect. anyway have fun Microsoft trying to get ie market share cause all the other browsers are taken over baby lol.
Looking at my visitor stats for the last quarter, I see the following. 8.x 36%, 6.x (the infamous one) is in second place with 24%, third is 7.x at 20%, 9.x finally shows at 17%. I get even older stuff, with 1.75% still using 5.x, 0.25% still using 2.x, 0.1% each using 3.x and 4.x.
I did get a single visitor claiming 10.x
As to overall browser use, again over the last quarter, it's 33% IE, 25% Firefox, 19% Chrome, 5% Safari, another 4% mobile Safari, 3% Opera, and Android with 1.4%. There were some visits by Blackberry users, but well below 1%.
Looking at the OS versions, XP takes first with 31%, Win 7 at 27%, Mac OS 11%, Vista 7%, Linux 3%, iPad 2.4%, iPhone 1.6%, Android 1.5%, Blackberry 0.4%. I still get visitors running Win 98,95,ME, and about one visitor a week still running Win 3.x
Seriously, "Standard HTML5"? :D HTML5 is a mess due to backwards compatability requirements and kow-towing to people who couldn't bring themselves to even comply with *transitional* XHTML standards. There is no browser that fully implements HTML5 and no-one seems to really agree on precisely what counts as the complete specification anyway. Surely you are having a laugh.
When you say "allowed their new browsers to be installed on older versions of their operating systems", do you actually mean "done substantial additional work for free to make their software work on ancient legacy systems?" Or do you actually think they set about plotting how to make their software not work on Windows 2000 because, somehow, it would have if they had "allowed" it to.
My vote definitely goes with the latter. In the time-frame of interest, just about every third-party software vendor in the known universe managed to write apps that also ran on 2K, even if they used XP-only features for a few things. It wasn't hard then and the equivalent trick isn't hard now.
Really? Well if the beta runs okay on Windows 2000, then maybe it wouldn't have taken too much additional work to make it run on that O/S but it still would have meant a lot more costs in terms of testing. I know that I would throw a major fit if as I was writing a software application, my manager came along and told me "by the way, make sure it works properly on Windows 2000". I imagine you would too. Better to just say 'no'.
We had a website for a conference we were organizing, when people mentioned they could not read certain bits. We checked and rechecked our HTML (which we had run through various validators etc). We then asked what browser they were using: answer IE6. I forget which W3C standard made IE6 bork, but we could not be arsed to change it.
We simply added a statement stating that our site was optimized for Firefox/Opera/Safari/IE7 and left it at that. As it was a conference for computer scientists, we assumed they would be able to install a decent browser.
... IE6 to view this site, and type this.
We use IE6 at work for our internal Intranet systems. Everything we use is built for IE6. We have no way to install other browsers either, so this means we struggle to browse a lot of 'modern' sites. I couldn't scream loud enough about this.
Article: "Surprisingly, South Korea – one of the most wired countries in the world – still has over 7 per cent of users on IE6"
Actually, *I'm* actually surprised it was that low! South Korean IE6 use is (or was) notoriously high.
This dates back to the late-90s when their government- considering the current 40-bit SSL inadequate for e-commerce and being unwilling to wait for the 128-bit version- created their own e-commerce encryption system called SEED. This was originally available via Netscape plugin or an ActiveX control, but only the latter was kept up-to-date.
SEED is apparently widely-used in Korea (though not really anywhere else), and as ActiveX is IE-specific and more problematic (i.e. secure!) in later versions of IE, IE6 has been very resilient there.
Having looked this up, apparently it's changed recently, with the Korean government themselves trying to get people to move off IE6. Still, it shows you how long the millennial IE6-centric situation has survived post-Firefox.
I'm really surprised that in a browser related article's comment section almost no one seems to mention Chrome, concentrating instead on Firefox. Last time I checked Chrome is about to overtake Firefox in usage, and for good reason in my opinion: it's faster and gets out of the way, it's very stable and a pleasure to use. I switched a couple years back and never looked back, except when I'm on a Mac, then I use Safari which I think is pretty decent too.
Not to say that Firefox is a bad browser at all, or that the gargantuan task it performed by being the first real alternative to IE to become popular is without merit, rather the contrary.
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