IE6 Upgrade Warning | Hacker News Reader

IE6 Upgrade Warning

code.google.com

41 pointsnreece36 comments

The library code made me sick. Look at all the globals and where is the indentation and organization? http://ie6-upgrade-warning.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/ie6/warn...

Edit: Wow, the main function, e, (great name, definitely not going to collide with other names) has >50 var statements. I don't think the guy who made this library knows that you can var a, b, c, d;

Maybe open up a bug report? http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/issues/entry

From the looks of it, the author is a junior coder or new to this sort of JS library code. He may not know any better, but keep in mind he's just looking to help by releasing this-- we were all newbie devs at one point.

Overall, I'm not a fan of disparaging any code people release for free. There are too many developers who keep useful code locked away on their disks because they're afraid people will mock their work.

Don't get me wrong, it's very helpful for potential consumers to know about the issues you mention, but there may be a better way to phrase your criticism.

Sorry for coming off so rude. Anyway, I was just going to send a message offering it up for the author due to it not being that large of a codebase and was going to offer to make neater version of the code. I'm going instead to send a bug report as you suggested as that seems best for tracking it.

Unfortunately, here in Greece the situation is so ugly that not even those warnings have any change of convincing people to upgrade. I can imagine most of them simply closing the window. Among the reasons for this is that we've got a huge pirated windows xp installation base, uneducated users that ignore anything non-microsoftic and think that taking the ECDL makes you a computer scientist, and there is a large amount of amazingly badly written IE-only web apps. Open source is much less known here than in other countries. Our only hope is for people to upgrade to Vista, in order to receive IE7 automatically (hey, did I just say that?)

I don't know why people keep on trying to aggressively get rid of IE6, it will die of it's own accord anyway.

Even according to the W3c's web stats (http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp), who are probably early adoptors, IE6 has 17% market share. IE6 still has more than Opera, Safari, Chrome and IE8 put together.

I don't see that it makes any business sense to annoy a large section of your users, just to save a little bit of development time. I know for example in some internet cafes in Eygpt in December last year they were still using IE6 and no warning message is likely to fix that soon.

I say just fix your sites until it's 2-3% of the market, like when Netscape 4 died.

When I saw this page, it hit me: all browser logos are round.

Is there a reason for this?

I'm guessing it's just the desire to look like the IE logo. Even others are round: Maxthon, Flock, xB Browser. Netscape also went from square to round:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape_classic_logo.png

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Netscape.svg

Also, Phoenix/Firebird wasn't round:

http://www.martijndevisser.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/...

I think a lot of program icons went from square to round (or irregular) once transparent backgrounds caught on.

Good observation. It could be because the "world" in www is round.

Technically, Opera, being the independent sort, is more of an oval.

Two thoughts, and an obvious third comment.

First, because the browser logo started out as the status indicator in NCSA Mosaic and in the '90s browsers, before UI designers started thinking about screen real estate. The animated logos in these indicators needed to display indefinite progress, so they were elaborate spinners, and spinners are round.

Second, because the globe is a visual metaphor for the world wide web, and circles figure prominently in navigation, which is a design motif for browsers.

Finally, because the first major commercial browsers (Netscape and IE) had circle logos, so circles became part of the marketing vocabulary for browsers. You could do a square logo now, but it'd stick out.

Note that the original Mozilla browser logo was not a circle. AND WHERE IS IT NOW?

From the title/domain, I thought that the upg warning was from google. Is there a solution to this problem? Would adding cases such as code.google.com be worthwhile?

Browser versions are really messed up. IE8, Opera 9.6 are out already and Chrome 2 is not released for general public yet.

By the way it's interesting to know how the newly released IE6 for Windows Mobile reacts on conditional comments like this. Does anybody have an idea?

thats the way we do it, force the suckers to upgrade or deny them service!

"Shut up, I'm at a public library, I don't have a choice."

And hundreds of similar reactions to pretentious frontend web developers who assume that every computer is a personal one.

but maybe if enough major sites start doing stuff like this, IT will finally upgrade browsers.

Sadly, inside corporate environments this is unlikely to be the case. Big companies often have web apps that are broken in anything other than IE6. These IT departments will fight the upgrade until it is the only option. I would not be surprised if the vast majority of IE6 users are people in big companies forced to use it. At my previous employer they were STILL writing apps that only worked in IE6 last year.

Ah, so these Upgrade-IE-warnings are actually anti-procrastination tools in disguise! :-)

But you don't have to make a choice -- you can pick both. Why not install Firefox for main browsing and keep IE6 for use with their old apps? This gives you a more productive (IE6 doesn't have tabs...) and secure browser for primary use, and the old browser to use with legacy software.

Most corporate environments don't allow you to install software that isn't authorized. As developers we're normally given full administrative control over our systems but that's not the norm in most moderate to large companies.

Maybe that script should point out the browsers that don't require admin, eg chrome & portable firefox

It's not just about being physically able to install something (i.e. having admin privileges), we aren't allowed to install (or even write) anything that is "network aware" for security reasons.

Exactly right, due to "security concerns" you were not supposed to run anything other than IE6. In this case, "security concerns" are defined as: "the club by which a corporate IT department can beat down a reasonable request without being forced to have an intelligent discussion". All machines had monitoring software that phoned home regularly to tell IT what software you were running.

Most average employees just need to get their work done, so they are not going to risk a fight with the IT machine over a browser. To non-geeks, it's just an annoyance, not a major blocker. Better for them to save their energy for a fight that matters (like getting an exception to the 100 megabyte email quota).

I'm a corporate IT guy, we're on IE7 and chrome (for it's application style shortcuts) and my users get about a gig in their inbox, but only if they need it. We had to wait to upgrade to ie7 but eventually the webapps we needed to use decided to "certify" ie7. Before that point we upgraded a few people for testing and nothing seemed broken but we still needed most everybody to run a "supported" platform.

Nah, even the worst IT department isn't that clueless. If they've still got IE6 deployed, it's for a reason.

Trust me, you don't want to know.

If I'm not going to support IE 6, I'd rather have something like this than for my site to just be broken.

Ever heard of "wasted clicks"?

"I'm not going to support IE 6"

I think you're missing his point...you should support IE6. We all know it sucks, but why risk alienating 20% of the Internet just because you don't want to take the time to make sure your site complies?

It may not be 20% of the internet, depending on who actually uses your site/app. Check your analytics.

Point of reference, (Mibbit)

  IE6: 5.7% IE7: 11% IE8:  1%
  FX1:  <1% FX2:  3% FX3: 63%
  SF:    2% OP:   5% CH:   6%

Really cool how Chrome has overtaken Safari, Opera, and IE6 (Admittedly it's a webapp, for which Chrome is well suited).

Also Firefox does a really great job of upgrading its users to the latest version.

At the moment I support IE6, but I'll probably stop soon. It's just too much extra work for not a lot of payoff.

If it takes twice the work.

Anyway I would just add a small notices on the top of the page saying something like you have an old browser, so this page may not render correctly.

I concur. Yesterday I spent an hour building a dropdown menu for a client that rendered correctly in Safari 2+, Firefox 2+ and Opera. Then I spent two-and-a-half more hours getting it to render correctly in IE6 and 7, rendering my page invalid in the process. Ick.

Yesterday I spent 10 minutes implementing the 'Son of Suckerfish Dropdowns' that works in all of those browsers. Why make more work for yourself if there are solutions already out there? :)

(I am of course assuming you mean a standard css navigational drop-down menu - you didn't specify.)

Might not public libraries be one of the places MOST in need of upgrading? Ditto to corporations.

[Aside: Can you imagine how many other dysfunctions/vulnerabilities are likely to exist in a system still using IE 6? ]

OTOH: I haven't noticed that GOOG itself is taking such a bold (hostile?) move to disrupt surfers still clunking along on IE6.

This is not Google's project. It is simply being hosted on Google Code.

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