Internet Explorer 6 Countdown | Hacker News Reader

Internet Explorer 6 Countdown

ie6countdown.com

31 pointsDanielRibeiro36 comments

You know, I'm moderately baffled by why MS persists in maintaining IE at all - even IE 9 is considered "the problem child" by web devs trying to use shiny New Things.

Why DO MS persist in maintaining their own browser when they're manifestly not very good at it?

At the least, couldn't they make it easier all-round by following Google's example and base IE off Webkit? Better standards compliance, cheaper development, win-win surely?

Not a flame, I'm genuinely interested in why MS persist in (what seems to me to be) flogging the dead horse of Internet Explorer.

Because there are a _lot_ of internal business apps dependent on it.

Many large businesses wrote applications using ActiveX, and still use them 10 years later. MS have promised support for all components of Windows XP until 2014, and that includes IE6.

That explains why they still support IE6, but not why they developed IE7 through 9.

I think an interesting breakdown would be instead of counties, go by language. China is bending the statistic so far that it's the only one above the world wide average. It would be much more useful to know that if I were making a website only in English how many users I could expect to use IE 6.

I remember being confused by this before, but don't remember the resolution: how is it that we're supposed to interpret that ring chart on the lower right? I think I understand the numbers written next to the countries on the ring (namely, percent of ALL internet traffic represented by IE6 users in that country—adding up to 6.3%, the number in the box on the upper right), but those numbers don't correspond to the proportion of the ring.

EDIT: For instance, consider the US. 0.6% of US users use IE6 (from the map). US usage is high, so that accounts for 1.3% of world internet traffic being US-IE6 users, which would be a bit more than 1/5 of the IE6 users. But the US segment of the ring chart is maybe 1/12 of the ring. What does that 1/12 correspond to?

This inaccuracy is a common problem with graphs and charts. The proprotions do not match in this case. Maybe the ring has been designed by a designer, constructed with old data, and now it is easy to change the numbers in the graphic, but difficult to adjust the size of the ring segments? Or maybe somebody has just forgotten to update the ring segments when the last update of the numbers was made.

Sometimes fancy, but graphically inccurate, charts are used to cheat and deceive, by representing small things larger or big things smaller. Putting a pie chart in 3D can have the effect of altering the perceived information, because if you're looking at the pie chart from above but slighly sideways, the part of the chart closer to you may appear larger, and since you can rotate the chart before rendering the final picture the choice of that part is yours.

What is the reason behind IE6 usage still being so high in the PR of China?

Pirated XP installs: http://micgadget.com/11633/why-the-chinese-still-favour-inte...

Why isn't this nearly as big of a problem in India?

pirated windows 7 installs?

I can confirm, most users think of XP as pretty old now, and they usually need win 7. The piracy condition is pretty bad, you get in store (like official store) after seeing an ad for a laptop with Linux and walk out with win 7. Consumers just don't care if OS cost is included in laptop price, they just need the familiar start button, and if isn't there (in linux's case) they'll be upset, which computer companies can't afford.

> they just need the familiar start button, and if isn't there (in linux's case) they'll be upset, which computer companies can't afford.

I guess they'll be pretty upset when Windows 8 comes out then.

Well yes and no. It is kind of easy to think that start button shifted a little to the left and only shows up when you take mouse over it. Makes sense, at least not alien as suddenly linux. Plus the windows, task-bar, control panel, etc everything is same. Just a cover of metro start menu, which they can completely ignore if they wish. I have been using win 8 as my primary OS since it was released in beta, and i introduced my mom to it, she understood basics of metro in a few minutes and never had a problem with it. Although she is a computer operator at a school so she is a heavy computer users (as compared to an average mom her age)

Seems like she's the exception to the rule. From various videos posted on YouTube of middle-aged and elderly people trying to navigate Windows 8, it seems like the transition won't be quite so smooth for everybody.

That said, my parents have been using (Ubuntu) Linux for the last 5 years without any problems at all. It's definitely reduced support calls from them (no more crashes or viruses). They're still using the same old PCs from when I first installed Ubuntu. When I visit them, I install a new LTS release, if it's available (one's released every 2 years), a process that takes about 30 minutes of my active attention.

So why hasn't that happened in China?

hacked xp installs?

Yup.

In China this is how Windows was installed:

Windows XP with the latest drivers, KB fix, updates, service packs, and Office, IM, games, tools, packed into a 300MB Norton Ghost image, boot from a USB disk (the USB disk can even act as an USB-CDROM device), everything is automated, the image-to-disk copy takes about 10 minutes. Then you have everything ready.

IE6 was installed like this like 10 years ago.

deepin,ylmf的貢獻很大。

If I had to guess, it's because their internet is so cut off from the rest of the world that modern day pressures to move away from using it don't have as much impact.

Brought to you by Microsoft. Has any company ever worked harder to get people to stop using one of its products?

>Has any company ever worked harder to get people to stop using one of its products?

Wouldn't that be a compliment to the company???

I think it is great that Microsoft are working hard to try and get people to move off a product that has passed its 'sell by' date (see obligatory reference to the "IE6 is like old milk" campaign they ran http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/05/16/microsoft_rotten_mil...).

Yup. Jumping on the IE6 bandwagon when it's been an object of unanimous hate for many years. Hey, any PR is good PR, right?

The 'milk' thing was 2 years ago. How long do they need to have been doing it for it to not count as 'jumping on the band-wagon'?

Weeeeellll, IIRC, this site launched as a part of IE 8 promo. That's been a while - a whole new version of IE launched in the meantime. Pushing for IE7 eradication would be more appropriate nowadays.

Not sure if you're referring to IE6 or Vista...

anyone for a ie general countdown ? after the ie8 http://theie8countdown.com/

we can spread iex countdown http://theie10countdown.com/

Not for every version. IE8 countdown is bit difficult at this point but eventually will be worth the effort. I wouldn't bother with IE9 and IE10. In fact, look at the font-face in the CSS, the only reason it fails in IE9 is that they did not specify a WOFF version.

I think it would be good to be able to cross reference browser usage with OS usage. For example, are people moving from IE6/XP to IE7/XP, IE9/Windows 7, Safari/OSX, Chrome/Linux etc?

Chrome Frame is a really good way to gracefully migrate IE6 users to Google Chrome.

http://www.google.com/chromeframe/

6.3% (Worldwide). By now I was expecting some (serious, aka not ironic) preservation effort to have started..

Am I the only one who thought that China (22.4%) was colored with the more sharp orange shade that is associated with the >25% in the key? I actually took a screenshot and copied the color box to confirm, the color of China is lighter orange shade that's for the right range (20-25%).

Also, why is "unknown" almost the same colour as "1-5%"? To me it seems that most of the world is unknown, including India, yet they still have statistics for India. Confusing...

Yeah, I don't know how they have stats for India, I didn't dig into the sources.

Hex color of 20-25% in legend: #FF9233

Hex color of China: #FF8A00

Hex color of orange square in the "list view": #F7921E

As an aside - for a while now OS X has been shipping with a tool called "DigitalColor Meter" which allows you to see the color at your cursor tip in RGB or Hex. I find it extremely useful for situations like this, as well as the "zoom in" feature to be able to see if there is a border on a particular element, for example.

Interesting, I did not bother to see the exact RGB values but copying the color box and pasting it near China's map seemed same / similar to the naked eye. I am on Win 7 and I thought there's nothing built-in for that except for the legendary mspaint :)

I just checked in paint and I'm surprised they have a color picker built-in!! MSPaint has finally evolved in Win 7 and I am learning that just now :) (I knew this version has zoom and a couple of other nicer options but OMG I had no idea that even the color picker is included)

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