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IE6 is dead

ie6death.com

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Re: IE6 is dead

#91

Post by metadept »

eli wrote: post #45
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…

> If we really want to kill IE[6-8], we need to do something more drastic, and do so with extreme prejudice. How about we all agree upon a certain date on which we intentionally break our websites and services for IE6 users? Maybe for a blog, but I'm not telling 10%+ of my customers to piss off. If the cost of supporting them outweighs the value of their business then I won't support them any more. But I would never…

While it's certainly a good general policy to not abandon significant segments of your user base, this is not a conflict of user ignorance vs developer laziness. The real question is whether preserving IE6-8 functionality is actually a good way to serve your customers. The resources you dedicate to retaining that 10% might be better used to improve your service for the other 90%. Focusing on modern browsers will also help to attract new customers who won't lock you deeper into these technical shackles. While this doesn't have to mean directly antagonizing people, it may involve making the site unusable and 'ruining' the experience for some.

Re: IE6 is dead

#92

Post by mattmanser »

xixixao wrote: post #53
mattmanser wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Does your traffic come primarily from the UK / Europe? I imagine the situation is much worse in the US.

Why would you imagine that?

http://www.modern.ie/en-us/ie6countdown

UK, 0.5%, is higher than the US, 0.2%.

Re: IE6 is dead

#93

Post by moron4hire »

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…

What you're really saying is that we in the software development and hardware engineering industries have completely failed to provide a compelling, positively reinforcing reason to upgrade. In response, you suggest negative reinforcement, take something away from these "people" [1] rather than give them something.

What did I do with my Pentium II 266MHz machine with less hard drive space than I have RAM now? I (played games) | (listened to music + (wrote code | wrote papers)). What do I do now on my quad-core supercomputer? I (play games) | (listen to music + (write code | write papers)).

What code did I write back then? Low level graphics operations in C. What do I write now? Low level graphics operations in... JavaScript. Now, instead of using an integrated debugger to suss out memory leaks, I get to use printf statements to suss out... memory leaks. [2]

We've made computers smaller, we've made them prettier, we've made them take less energy, but we haven't made them particularly more useful. At some point, the PC became Good Enough. And unit sales took a well studied drop.

That might be one of the biggest ironies of the monumental deluge of software patents these days: we live in an era that hasn't invented anything novel in 10, maybe even 20 years!

[1] You do seem to talk about them like they are animals

[2] Progress indeed.

Re: IE6 is dead

#95

Post by bunderbunder »

kijin wrote: post #84
eli wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worker…

The purpose of SOPA was to call attention to a bill that had enormous implications for the world at large.

The purpose of deliberately breaking IE6 support would be. . . what? To tell customers that we don't like old clunky technology? Seems just a teense less noble, don't you think? Especially in response to a situation that the free market can easily handle unmolested.

If you want to not have to worry about IE6 anymore, all you have to do is stop worrying about IE6. You don't need my help to do it. Though, if the only thing stopping you is fears about alienating customers I'd certainly be glad to help there - just send 'em my way. Can't say I even know how to support IE6 anymore, but if they've been able to cling to it this long I imagine there's a good chance their money's green enough to make it worth my time to re-learn.

Re: IE6 is dead

#96

Post by iamthepieman »

I do mostly contract work in the U.S. for state and local governments. The RFP's (Request for Proposals) always say something about using HTML5, responsiveness and the latest web standards.

And sometime shortly after (and sometimes before) project kickoff we always see that a large percentage of their employees are using IE8 and we have to support it.

I make a point of describing in detail what kind of resources will be required to do both a modern website/app using the latest standards and one that will support IE8. I mention that, for the most part, they are mutually exclusive and I will effectively have to build the site (at least the "modern" parts of it) twice and this will cut back on the features I'm able to implement within the project budget and timeframe.

This usually makes the customer take a closer look at their actually IE8/XP install base and I've had several customers decide they would speed up migration from IE8/XP and remove the support requirement for that browser.

Just doing my small part to help kill IE8 - one small government agency at a time.

Re: IE6 is dead

#97

Post by moron4hire »

kijin wrote: post #85
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.

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.

This is the job you signed up for. It's a site easier situation now than 15 years ago. You think supporting browsers is hard now? (I can't believe I get to be the crotchety old man in this thread). Perhaps you don't remember the NN4 vs IE4 days. NN4 didn't even have a DIV tag, it had a LAYER tag, and IE4 didn't have the LAYER tag, it had DIV. The only way to support both with all of the DHTML junk people wanted (like they want the damn-near equivalent malarky out of HTML5 today) was to emit separate markup for each browser from the server. You got to maintain two different versions of the site for desktop users.

I just really don't have any sympathy for you. It's not anything approaching hard these days. These days, you just write everything in a compiles-to-javascript language it figures out the browser compatibilities for you. That shit didn't EXIST. You were considered an ASSHOLE if you did anything with JavaScript.

Re: IE6 is dead

#98

Post by dclowd9901 »

iamthepieman wrote: post #96

I do mostly contract work in the U.S. for state and local governments. The RFP's (Request for Proposals) always say something about using HTML5, responsiveness and the latest web standards. And sometime shortly after (and sometimes before) project kickoff we always see that a large percentage of their employees are using IE8 and we have to support it. I make a point of describing in detail what kind of resources will…

I would think the myriad security holes ie8 presents would be compelling enough a reason.

Re: IE6 is dead

#99

Post by iamthepieman »

dclowd9901 wrote: post #98
iamthepieman wrote: post #96

I do mostly contract work in the U.S. for state and local governments. The RFP's (Request for Proposals) always say something about using HTML5, responsiveness and the latest web standards. And sometime shortly after (and sometimes before) project kickoff we always see that a large percentage of their employees are using IE8 and we have to support it. I make a point of describing in detail what kind of resources will…

I would think the myriad security holes ie8 presents would be compelling enough a reason.

Especially now that there are no more security patches. But if you've never worked for a government agency then you might be surprised at:

1. How little management cares about technology as long as it's working.

2. How competent/paranoid some of the sysadmins are and how severely locked down some of these networks are because of it.

Re: IE6 is dead

#100

Post by crisnoble »

As a dev I have been trying to convince the project managers of the following theory of people who use IE6/7/8.

They must fall into one the following categories

1. Windows XP, which does not allow them to upgrade to IE9 AND do not know that other non-sucky browsers exist

2. They work for a company that requires IE8

3. They are masochists who love pain)

4. They are sadists who enjoy dealing out pain to Web developers.

Proposed solutions were:

1. Tell them that other browsers have better experiences.

2. Point out that they can usually get around this by using a Chrome frame. Also point out that IE8 is riddled with insecurities and give them a form letter for their IT department asking for an update.

3. They love pain, there is nothing we can do about this. They probably enjoy having incomprehensible boxes instead of icon fonts on half of the sites they visit. Grids be dammed, they love misaligned columns.

4. They probably don’t even use IE8, they (or their botnet) just use a User Agent String that mimics it. These people are asshats, should be ignored at all costs.

I felt this was a quite pragmatic approach, needless to say we still support these users and their shoddy experience.

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