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IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

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Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#31

Post by yuhong »

redthrowaway wrote: post #16
jerf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I don't know if you've noticed the pattern over the past 15 years, but there's always another "obsolete" browser. You can't "win", it's just about the progress. There is no point in the past 15 years where you've been able to just code to the latest beta of your favorite browser and nothing else.

Not much progress going from one non-html5-compliant browser to another. It still means everyone's stuck having to support flash and other proprietary plugins. IE9 at least allows us to move forward with modern standards.

It is not just new stuff like HTML5. XHTML 1.0 is already 11 years old and is not supported in IE8, forcing it to be served using the HTML MIME type and parsed as HTML. Often XHTML served this way becomes invalid even if it was originally valid. I wrote an article on Reddit about this.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#32

Post by nathanwdavis »

> And while you're at it, find a designer friend to create a banner that wont make your users want to poke their eyes out with a stick.

I think that's the idea - startle the IE6 user with a logo that is so atrocious that they give in ("Uncle, uncle, OK, I'll do it!!")

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#33

Post by smackfu »

generalk wrote: post #27
jerf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I don't know if you've noticed the pattern over the past 15 years, but there's always another "obsolete" browser. You can't "win", it's just about the progress. There is no point in the past 15 years where you've been able to just code to the latest beta of your favorite browser and nothing else.

That's true, but on the other hand, as TFA points out, IE8 is the latest that a WinXP user can ever get from Microsoft, which is two-years old and practically outdated now. Linking IE6 users to IE8 is progress, sure, but useless given that they could be running Chrome or Firefox, which are actually modern browsers.

And how old is Win XP?

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#34

Post by stanleydrew »

Natsu wrote: post #28
jerf wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hey, I don't know if you've noticed the pattern over the past 15 years, but there's always another "obsolete" browser. You can't "win", it's just about the progress. There is no point in the past 15 years where you've been able to just code to the latest beta of your favorite browser and nothing else.

> Hey, I don't know if you've noticed the pattern over the past 15 years, but there's always another "obsolete" browser. He's saying that they'd get a more modern browser by going to something other than IE, given that their OS can't possibly support the latest version of IE. We know there's nothing you can do to be up-to-date forever.

> We know there's nothing you can do to be up-to-date forever.

Except install Chrome.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#35

Post by aidenn0 »

jerf wrote: post #12
mrcharles wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The issue is less that they link to their own browser, and more that the likely outcome is that it will push the adoption of another nearly obsolete browser.

Hey, I don't know if you've noticed the pattern over the past 15 years, but there's always another "obsolete" browser. You can't "win", it's just about the progress. There is no point in the past 15 years where you've been able to just code to the latest beta of your favorite browser and nothing else.

Except for the fact that when IE6 got mass adoption it wasn't obsolete, it was modern.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#36

Post by EnderMB »

My bosses aren't the most tech-savy people on the planet, but even they realise that it costs them more to pay their developers to build with IE6 in mind than to simply supply people with IE6 a unstyled page to use.

Developers need to cut the nonsense and just stop supporting IE6 completely. Hell, our sales tripled (three purchases) from IE6 users when we unstyled their pages. In this day and age there is no need to support such out-of-date browsers.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#37

Post by Joeri »

rbanffy wrote: post #17
recoiledsnake wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And replace it with what? Companies that will charge 30% of all the money for content that goes through their devices?

False dichotomy alert! Getting rid of Microsoft doesn't imply going to Apple. You must realize that there are other entities in this market, frequently offering better products, often for free. Getting rid of a company that despises fair competition, that promotes bogus standards in order to confuse the market instead of doing something it once did adequately: build products its users want, would be quite good for th…

What market? It's damn hard finding PC's preinstalled with linux (that have normal sized screens), and it's not easy finding compatible devices for those PC's.

Sure, nerds always have choice, but for joe sixpack it's microsoft or apple. There is no other choice.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#38

Post by okaramian »

yuhong wrote: post #29
generalk wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's true, but on the other hand, as TFA points out, IE8 is the latest that a WinXP user can ever get from Microsoft, which is two-years old and practically outdated now. Linking IE6 users to IE8 is progress, sure, but useless given that they could be running Chrome or Firefox, which are actually modern browsers.

Yea, I think the real problem here is that IE9 is not available for XP, which is the newest version of Windows shipping with IE6, so they are stuck upgrading them to IE8.

Or that people are still running on an OS that came out a decade ago.

My company is B2B and we stopped supporting IE6 at all around the time I started working here. We just suggest clients either upgrade or deal with it.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#39

Post by alexyim »

maukdaddy wrote: post #11

Do geeks always need something to bitch about? Microsoft is at least making an effort to do as most people wish, getting users to upgrade from IE6.

I disagree. I think he mentions a really valid point. Getting users to upgrade from IE6 is good thing, but it's even better to upgrade to Firefox or Chrome instead of IE8.

Re: IE6countdown.com – a wolf in sheep's clothing

#40

Post by coderdude »

SwellJoe wrote: post #30
maukdaddy wrote: post #11

Do geeks always need something to bitch about? Microsoft is at least making an effort to do as most people wish, getting users to upgrade from IE6.

I want them to upgrade to a modern browser. IE8 aint one.

IE8 is leaps and bounds better than IE6. In IE8 you barely even need to tweak sites to get them to look right. I'd be tickled pink if IE8 was all I had to worry about. IE9 is going to be much better than IE8 -- by leaps and bounds -- but it's still in beta. At least the release candidate is out. Some people are never satisfied and always need something to complain about. I'm sure you'll find something else once IE9 is out (it doesn't work on their 10 year old operating system).

Edit: So much idealism in this thread and not enough people being realistic.

Here are the facts:

-Web developers hate IE. All versions of it.

-We live in a world with IE.

-Microsoft IS NOT going to suggest that people download Firefox or Chrome.

-It IS NOT in their interest to do so.

-The next best thing is for them to suggest IE8 and then IE9.

-It is in the users' best interest who don't know any better and it is in Web developers' best interest that people are at least using something better than IE6 or IE7

-Windows XP is 10 years old.

-The only thing that's going to be holding back users from upgrading to IE9 is refusal to upgrade their decade-old operating system.

-It would be like people being mad at Apple because the latest version of Safari isn't compatible with OS9.

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