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IE6 is dead

ie6death.com

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Re: IE6 is dead

#81

Post by wil421 »

tmm wrote: post #56
wil421 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Well, unless they actually change it in group policy, this is the default action for IE when it connects to anything on what it considers to be Intranet. You can override this by setting X-UA-Compatible to IE=edge as a HTTP header on your server. The equivalent meta tag is ignored in this situation. Or you could ask IT to change group policy, but I have no idea where that setting might live.

>X-UA-Compatible to IE=edge

I believe we added this as a meta tag on the HTML pages, we didnt think of changing the HTTP header on the server.

I doubt they will be willing to change the IT group policy because the app we built has a smaller userbase than other apps. That and they are still supporting web apps from the late 90s - early 00s designed for IE 5/6.

Re: IE6 is dead

#82

Post by mseebach »

wslh wrote: post #77
kijin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i) and ii) are both excellent excuses to keep using IE6 on the intranet . But there is no excuse for browsing the public web with IE6 anymore. Especially if there's a modern browser installed side by side with IE6. Ideally, a firewall should be set up so that IE6 can't access anything outside of 10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16, and localhost.

it would be interesting to analyze the demographics of the people who are using IE6 these days. Probably IE6 is working for them and they don't even know about all the technical and security aspects discussed here.

They all work for a very large risk-adverse organisation. Any private person who ignored the repeated calls to upgrade will long since have drowned in malware.

Re: IE6 is dead

#83

Post by crucialfelix »

brazzy wrote: post #11
crucialfelix wrote: post #10

meanwhile 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/

This month alone, my site hat 3 visits each by IE 2 and IE 3, 14 by Firefox 1.5 and 11 by Netscape 4.0...

That's odd. what type of content does your site have ? Because it seems like those browsers would only be run by some tech savvy person doing it as an experiment.

I miss Netscape 3. I used to make lots of javascript dhtml/art on it and it had a very ghostly way of twitching.

Re: IE6 is dead

#84

Post by kijin »

eli wrote: post #74
kijin wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly why any hypothetical boycott of IE[6-8] will have to be an industry-wide affair like the SOPA blackout. If everyone boycotts IE[6-8] at the same time, nobody will suffer any competitive disadvantage because of their participation in the boycott.

Well, for one thing, my competition isn't just other websites. And the risk isn't just that people will find a non-blacked out site. Anyway, I'm against anything that's intentionally user-hostile as a matter of principle.

An IE6 boycott would be user-hostile in the same way that the SOPA blackout was user-hostile.

In the SOPA blackout, millions of innocent people were intentionally blocked from all those sites for 24 hours. Their convenience was sacrificed in order to apply pressure to people who actually were in a position to make a change.

The purpose of an IE6 boycott will be very similar. The purpose is not to hurt innocent workers who have no control over their computer, but to apply pressure to managers who actually are in a position to change things for the better. Even if the only change they make is to allow employees to install Chrome Frame.

Re: IE6 is dead

#85

Post by kijin »

wslh wrote: post #77
kijin wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i) and ii) are both excellent excuses to keep using IE6 on the intranet . But there is no excuse for browsing the public web with IE6 anymore. Especially if there's a modern browser installed side by side with IE6. Ideally, a firewall should be set up so that IE6 can't access anything outside of 10/8, 172.16/12, 192.168/16, and localhost.

it would be interesting to analyze the demographics of the people who are using IE6 these days. Probably IE6 is working for them and they don't even know about all the technical and security aspects discussed here.

A large part of the reason why IE6 even works anywhere outside of corporate intranets in 2014 is that we, web developers, have put in countless hours of painful and completely unnecessary work to make it work.

Re: IE6 is dead

#86

Post by wslh »

mseebach wrote: post #82
wslh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would be interesting to analyze the demographics of the people who are using IE6 these days. Probably IE6 is working for them and they don't even know about all the technical and security aspects discussed here.

They all work for a very large risk-adverse organisation. Any private person who ignored the repeated calls to upgrade will long since have drowned in malware.

But grandmothers and great grandmothers are included in those organizations? ;-)

Re: IE6 is dead

#87

Post by crisnoble »

mseebach wrote: post #82
wslh wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it would be interesting to analyze the demographics of the people who are using IE6 these days. Probably IE6 is working for them and they don't even know about all the technical and security aspects discussed here.

They all work for a very large risk-adverse organisation. Any private person who ignored the repeated calls to upgrade will long since have drowned in malware.

If that is true, then your typical consumer web site or even web app probably does not need to support IE6. If they are so risk-averse they probably will not be allowed to visit your site anyhow.

Re: IE6 is dead

#88

Post by kijin »

roeme wrote: post #59
kijin wrote: post #40

As 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 fe…

>I don't know. It does sound rather perverse to refuse service to IE6 while keeping the website fully accessible for Lynx. But it's not. By keeping your website useable in Lynx, you make it a great deal easier for handicapped people to use your site. And to search engines. And to whatever more use cases there are (low bandwidth,..). These concerns are just not valid for IE6. At least I can't think of any. Also, you c…

> Also, you can always redirect the IE6'es to the same version as for Lynx

That's an interesting idea. Just wrap all the CSS and JS references in a pair of --> conditional comments ;)

Re: IE6 is dead

#89

Post by [deleted] »

kijin wrote: post #40

As 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 fe…

[deleted]

Re: IE6 is dead

#90

Post by eli »

atonse wrote: post #76
eli wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I mean they are my customers! Right now, today, I have 10%+ users on IE6 through IE8. If I can afford to dedicate the resources to support them, I will. I don't believe in punishing users and I certainly don't believe in turning people away if I don't have to. I'm not sure about XP specifically, but I get way more than 10% of my traffic from IE6-8. IE8 alone is over 10% on some of my business news sites. Don't fo…

I'd be curious to know what that IE6 support involves nowadays. There's a difference between having certain simpler layouts (although that probably affects conversion too), and IE6 actually messing up a purchase flow on an e-commerce site.

I actually dropped support for IE6 already, and IE7 is only "best effort" and is currently pretty wonky since our last redesign. We don't release updates that don't work in IE8, though. Too many users. Luckily for us it's mostly just display issues and I have no problem removing nonessential features or sections that are too hard to make work.

But if it's breaking the flow of your site, it might well be more trouble than it's worth.

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