IE6 is dead
ie6death.com
ie6death.com
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.
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.
There is most definitely additional work required to support IE8.
For anyone that wants to use a modern CSS framework that supports IE5.5+, check out Min (http://minfwk.com). Disclaimer: I made 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).
Not really. Probably many fortune 500 companies (I know several) continue to use IE6 and pay for virtualizing IE6. That's a significant amount of money in licenses and support. That's why companies such as VMware or Symantec have this feature in ThinApp and SWV.
http://www.modern.ie/en-us/ie6countdown
UK, 0.5%, is higher than the US, 0.2%.
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...
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.
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.
Do all the banks agree to shut out XP on their sites? Legal requirement?
PS. They also don't support linux
IE represents 10.45%
Out of that:
IE6 .28%
IE7 2.03%
IE8 19.81%
IE9 16.57%
IE10 16.15%
IE11 45.13%On utilitydive.com (covering the utility/energy industry) it's 35% IE and of that 40% is IE8. IE6 and IE7 are much less, but they also don't really work with our latest redesign so it's a bit hard to tell.
IE represents 25.00%
IE6 0.11%
IE7 3.20%
IE8 34.39%
IE9 32.94%
IE10 16.48%
IE11 12.87% IE6 0.07%
IE7 1.33%
IE8 19.44%
IE9 18.67%
IE10 16.24%
IE11 44.25%IE: 32% - 11: 42% - 10: 16% - 9: 18.4% - 8: 20.2% - 7: 2.4% - 6: 0.07%
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
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 intentionally break a site for them.
And is 10%+ of the Windows install base really XP???
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 forget IE8 shipped with Windows 7.
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.
But if it's breaking the flow of your site, it might well be more trouble than it's worth.
I work with some enterprise customers and they seem to be mostly IE8 or IE9. We have one dreadful customer who still wants IE6 support but we've officially dropped IE6 & IE7 support. We still do direct hacks as part of consulting for that customer.
A disproportionate number of our most important users are running IE8. I don't know if it's because they're still on XP (and thus can't upgrade past 8) or some other reason.
I'm not an expert, but I think it's so much that IE9 auto-updates as Win7+ does a much better job of pushing updates that include new browsers.
Perhaps we can take the hit for you. We could cause your customers to stop using IE[6-8] by specifically not fixing the sites to be backwards compatible. Your users will note that although your site still works in IE6, every other site won't. Then if we can drive down the 10% IE6 users of your site to 1%, then will you stop spending time making things compatible for it?
Anyway, I'm against anything that's intentionally user-hostile as a matter of principle.
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.
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.
That money could be spent on improving the user experience for people with good browsers, developing new services, lowering prices, or any number of other things that would directly benefit the 90% of your users who have actually entered the 21st Century.
I'd suggest that most organisations that only had to support 10% IE6 use in the past have already actively made the decision not to support it any longer (I know that happened a couple of years ago for all the orgs I was working with).
For other companies, their customers are 90% on IE6. I know that's a hole of their own making, but in some cases it's a massive undertaking to dig out of. There's money to be made in supporting those guys :)
I just checked my usage, and I only have 8% using IE period -- all versions. Of those, only 8% are on IE8 or under -- which is only 0.6% of all users.
It's actually kinda interesting to see the variations between industries like Healthcare vs Construction vs Utilities. If I get time maybe I'll write up a blog post.
It's really not as simple as stated above. It's not up to us to kill it off.
If they attempt to access using older browsers, we bring up an explanation page taking them to an ever green browser of their choice.
Do you know what percentage of your revenue these customers generate?
Maybe it's 10% of your user base, but 0% of your profits. Or 50%. You won't know until you run the numbers.
Or - more realistically - you could actually consider 10% of your customers a large, valuable chunk whatever the ROI and accommodate them.
Your choice.
As most sites follow some kind of 80/20 rule, be careful to dismiss a small percentage of users if they fall in the critical 20%.
Then again, if you have data that shows IE6 users are just parasites, get rid of them.
IE6 is certainly nowhere near as capable as modern browser but if you don't need fancy HTML and whamodyne JS then maybe it's not such a handicap after all?
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 can always redirect the IE6'es to the same version as for Lynx, so you're not really refusing service...shrug
That's an interesting idea. Just wrap all the CSS and JS references in a pair of <!--[if !IE 6]> --> <!-- <![endif]--> conditional comments ;)
No, two things:
i) It's not about being stubborn. Companies have invested a lot of money and time to run critical applications. Even if they have the money the risk of migration is high.
ii) They have already migrated to newer browsers! they just run IE6 side by side with modern browsers using application virtualization.
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.
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.
Hopefully, one day I will be the crotchety old man complaining about how the new kids never had to worry about IE8 issues.
After all, that's the whole point of progress. How dared our ancestors complain about working 12 hours a day in dangerous coal mines when their own ancestors worked 16 hours a day under even more dangerous conditions? IE4 vs. NN4 was trivial by comparison with that, but the general principle holds.
You've also got https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/ie-tab/hehijbfgiek...
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.
Few people choose to use IE6 of their own free will. Most IE6 users are stuck with IE6 because a large bureaucracy told them to do so. And when talking about large bureaucracies, I find it entirely appropriate to talk in terms of positive and negative incentives and reinforcements because that's the language they understand the best.
And I agree with you that, in some sense, we really haven't changed much in the last 10-20 years. There's been massive quantitative improvement, but that doesn't necessarily translate to qualitative changes.
But you're not the only one
IE6 will keep living in the enterprise space, and many parts of the world. I hate it but it's really never going away.
> we need to set fire to their pants.
I remember going to a friend's house for dinner. He had spent all day upgrading the version of Linux on his laptop, and wrangling with a large number of thorny technical issues. After hours, he boasted to me of his success.
"Look! When you type ls it now displays the results in color!"
That was the best he had to show for a whole day of kludging around. He seemed to feel he had done something virtuous -- the equivalent of walking ten miles to school, perhaps, uphill both ways, in the snow. It seemed to me that he had merely wasted his time.
Damn me as lazy if you wish.
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/
I miss Netscape 3. I used to make lots of javascript dhtml/art on it and it had a very ghostly way of twitching.
[1] Well you can, but no one will fetch them.
20 slide deck: http://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=http%3a%2f%...
docs: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn640687.aspx
good blog post: http://love2dev.com/#!article/The-New-Internet-Explorer-Ente...
IE6 is alive and well in many large companies.
We have to support IE7 on some of our software, only dropping IE6 a year ago or so ... Other software minimum requirements is IE8, hoping to drop it by the end of this year.
Anything that runs IE4 by default is well past end-of-life and is probably riddled with viruses.
IE8 is the latest version of IE that can be installed on XP, I would assume that most people using IE8 would be XP users.
If anyone has data on IE8 OS versions I would be interested.
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.
(i always wondered why some libraries treat jan as 0 but the first day of the month as 1)
Besides, the acid tests are more a worse case scenario and may not be indicative of real-world cases.
- 100%
- Animation is smooth, no stuttering
- The final rendering matches the provided imageMaybe you are using integrated graphics or your graphics driver in on the FF blacklist? Platform?
There has to be some reason why--
Is there one for IE7?
Today is also the end of unpaid support for XP (which I assume includes IE7 - IE8).
Needless to say, but I'm still using XP.
Quite a few of those are likely to be IE6 users, primarily due to governments and bureaucratic corporations.
Interesting (see footer) how many of those site were out there.
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid1 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:About_Tasman_IE5_Mac_OS_X....
On a positive note, now that Microsoft has officially withdrawn support for Windows XP, IE6 may meet its long overdue death faster.
The end of MS support doesn't seem to have caused any mass migrations off of windows XP, and it will be a long time until it's less popular than windows 8.
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 :)