Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, I'm afraid reports of IE's death have been greatly exaggerated.
Third time's the charm?
The exaggeration of IE6's death has been greatly exaggerated.
IE6 is dead
31–40 of 185 posts
Re: IE6 is dead
#32It would be better if IE, period, was dead. Otherwise we're just switching one terribly obsolete IE for another terribly obsolete IE.
We are writing enterprise web application that uses WebGL for displaying complex 3D models and we think that IE11 is damn good. Thus, I've no idea why are you calling it terribly obsolete.
I had moaning about how backwards IE11 was earlier this week, but last week I was moaning about Safari and the week before it was Firefox.
We've reached the point where I'm spending about equal time dealing with bugs in different browsers instead of IE being the source of 95% of all pain.
This is a good thing, but I sometimes miss being able to just hate on Microsoft :)
Re: IE6 is dead
#33Reports of its death are, from my experience, greatly exaggerated. It's still fairly widely used in businesses; as they say "if it's not broke, don't fix it." (Despite the fact that it is broken on many sites.) For anyone that wants to use a modern CSS framework that supports IE5.5+, check out Min ( http://minfwk.com ). Disclaimer: I made it.
I know this is a bit pedantic but it's definitely not 'fairly widely' or 'quite a lot' or 'some', there's a tiny, tiny percentage of businesses using it.
Our UK website, not aimed at tech savvy, had 0.13% IE6 over the last 2 months compared to 0.32% the year before and when I last looked a significant proportion of that is bots and scrapers pretending to be browsers anyway.
Half our traffic comes during the business day (we actually see a significant switch from desktop to tablet/mobile at around 6).
For all intents and purposes, certainly for consumer websites, it's dead.
For those interested, our IE7 is at 1.72% (we stopped testing IE7 a couple of months ago as we don't have the resource and it was already converting badly any way).
Re: IE6 is dead
#34meanwhile IE 5 is alive in Wichita Kansas. Error message received today: HTTP_USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt) because the old thing doesn't like URLs without a protocol: //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js <WSGIRequest path:/ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js/
what's the benefit of excluding the http:? I'd never seen that prior to a few years ago when the jQuery links started doing it.
Re: IE6 is dead
#35It would be better if IE, period, was dead. Otherwise we're just switching one terribly obsolete IE for another terribly obsolete IE.
We are writing enterprise web application that uses WebGL for displaying complex 3D models and we think that IE11 is damn good. Thus, I've no idea why are you calling it terribly obsolete.
Give it a year.
Re: IE6 is dead
#36It would be better if IE, period, was dead. Otherwise we're just switching one terribly obsolete IE for another terribly obsolete IE.
MS has made updating the browser a lot easier than it used to be in recent versions. So I don't think we're going to run into any major issues where we have to wait for a new version of Windows to gain popularity before we see a browser version die off.
Re: IE6 is dead
#37At my employer, they finally pushed a full blown enterprise wide upgrade to IE10 with IE11 just around the corner (August). Unfortunately in parallel, they could not get enough people to submit sites that needed compatibility mode, so to prevent massive help desk problems they decided to push USE COMPATIBILITY MODE FOR ALL SITES. This basically downgraded everyone to IE7 mode permanently. So much for progress...
My Employer does this also, all sites are our intranet switch IE into IE7 compatibility mode. Does matter if the need compatibility mode or not. We recently released a version of the web app I am building and I wish you couldve seen the horror on our faces when we saw the app in IE 7 mode.
Re: IE6 is dead
#38Reports of its death are, from my experience, greatly exaggerated. It's still fairly widely used in businesses; as they say "if it's not broke, don't fix it." (Despite the fact that it is broken on many sites.) For anyone that wants to use a modern CSS framework that supports IE5.5+, check out Min ( http://minfwk.com ). Disclaimer: I made it.
[deleted]
Re: IE6 is dead
#39meanwhile IE 5 is alive in Wichita Kansas. Error message received today: HTTP_USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt) because the old thing doesn't like URLs without a protocol: //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js <WSGIRequest path:/ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js/
what's the benefit of excluding the http:? I'd never seen that prior to a few years ago when the jQuery links started doing it.
It's a protocol relative link. So if the page is served over http, it'll be an http link, and if the page is served over https, it'll be an https link. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_relative_URL#Protocol-...
Re: IE6 is dead
#40As others have pointed out, IE6 isn't dead yet. Any person or business that is stubborn enough to use IE6 nowadays is probably also stubborn enough to keep using Windows XP for another year or ten.
And I'm afraid a lot of us have been complicit in the unusually long life of this dreadful monster, as well as of its just-as-dreadful offspring, IE8.
By "us" I mean everyone who has ever developed a website in the last few years and consciously tweaked the code to make it work in an old version of IE. Or anyone who claimed to discontinue support for IE[6-8] but quietly kept fixing IE[6-8]-related bugs in their spare time.
Because every time a website tweaks its code for compatibility with an old version of IE[6-8], IE[6-8] gets another drop of unicorn blood to sustain its life. Since the majority of websites even today work relatively well in IE[6-8], the inconvenience of occasional breakage does not outweigh the inertia of IE[6-8] users. Even among people who call themselves programmers, I know of plenty who just don't bother to install updates. They won't act until their pants are on fire.
If we really want to kill IE[6-8], we need to set fire to their pants. We can't just sit back and count the days until somebody else (Microsoft) mercifully kills IE[6-8] for us. How about we all agree upon a certain date on which we intentionally break our websites and services for IE6 users? We should bring as many websites on board as possible, just like what happened with the SOPA blackout. Any IE6 user who tries to visit any marginally popular website on or after that date will be refused service and told to 1) upgrade to Windows 7+ and IE 10+, 2) install another browser, or 3) nag their bosses to let them do so. That's right, no Google, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Wikipedia, no reddit, no webmail, no lolcats, no porn (!) anymore for you. Within a month, IE6 will be wiped off the face of the planet forever, and whatever remains will be safely confined to intranets. Just like smallpox. Three months later, we repeat the blackout for IE7. Six months later, we boycott IE8 as well.
Don't we, the HN crowd, have the power to pull off a boycott like that?
Will it be an ethical thing to do? Will it even be legal?
I don't know. It does sound rather perverse to refuse service to IE6 while keeping the website fully accessible for Lynx.
But I do look forward to the day when website developers collectively decide to stop being a slave to browser market shares and take the business into our own hands once and for all. Because IE[6-8] deserves it. It has hurt us all a thousand times more than the outgoing CEO of Mozilla has ever hurt gay couples. We can't just sit and wait for it to die. We need to point our keyboards at it and shout Avada Kedavra with extreme prejudice.
/daydreaming