Microsoft finally urging users to upgrade from IE6 | Hacker News Reader

Microsoft finally urging users to upgrade from IE6

news.cnet.com

62 pointssuprgeek25 comments

"Finally"? What about the much-maligned contest in Australia that encouraged people to upgrade? What about the "Browser for the Better" program that gave out meals to the poor for every user who upgraded to IE8? What about the prompts to upgrade to IE8 on most Microsoft web properties over the past half a year?

More like the author "finally" noticed.

I think my favourite anti ie6 is google landing page with the big download chrome image.

Just a shame so many ie6 people have IT overlords that mandate its use .. hopefully that will change as more convert to windows 7.

i watched their commercial on youtube and didn't see anything that would "urge a user to upgrade from ie6".

how many computer-illiterate people even know what version of ie they're using? they see the blue ie icon and assume whatever they have on their computer is what it's being mentioned in the commercial. and worse, they probably see all these safety features in the commercials and think they're even safer now.

microsoft needs to take more drastic steps to force users to upgrade. if windows' automatic updates haven't upgraded ie for them by now, they should put some kind of interstitial ad on msn and team up with yahoo (or whatever most of these users are using as their homepage) to explain (with big scary pictures) that their ie version is out of date and that they should upgrade.

> how many computer-illiterate people even know what version of ie they're using?

This is important. Remember, most people don't even know what a browser is. Internet Explorer is very cleverly named: people don't think they're opening a browser, they think they're opening the internet.

>This is important. Remember, most people don't even know what a browser is. Internet Explorer is very cleverly named: people don't think they're opening a browser, they think they're opening the internet.

It is funny that you say this. Today, I'm visiting a friend and his family. His grandma asked his sister: "what is the internet."

And her response was pretty much: "it is simple. Let me explain. It is so you can do research for homework, watch videos, and read email."

Up until today, I've only heard of such ignorance about the internet, but never have I seen it.

My first thought was: "wow, it is like that HN submission about how if you ask a kid why the sun exists, their response would be, "to make things grow.""

We cannot separate external experience from self without effort, a bit of training, and some self awareness. Something the laymen rarely wants to do. Mistaking their initial reactions as true to the world, since it is apparently true to them. The internet experience is only one example of this.

I'm dubious that any campaign of this sort could be anything other than marginally effective. The real holdouts that I'm worried about aren't staying with IE6 out of ignorance, it's a matter of financial necessity. Internal and business-specific apps are holding back a lot of these upgrades. If you have to choose between a $50,000+ development investment and staying on an outdated browser, most IT departments are going to maintain the status quo.

This is why I think Chrome Frame is such a good solution- you get all the benefits of a modern browser, without having to immediately invest in updates to essential apps. Of course this also runs the risk of being (understandably) stymied by Microsoft marketing FUD.

::sigh::

Chrome Frame is great, but there needs to be an official, Microsoft-blessed "IE6 frame" to deal with this. From what I understand, the compatibility mode in IE8 isn't good enough. People need to move onto the new browser and use a modern rendering engine by default instead of retrofitting the old browser.

Yes, it would certainly be nice if the problem was solved from both sides.

about time, don't you think?

guess they finally realized, that they aren't going to be doing too well in the future, if the only exposure to their browser will be at work on the IE6

"switch from firefox to IE? Are you CRAZY? I use that piece of crap at work all the time, it's the crappiest software I've ever used and all sites look like garbage in it. No Thank You!"

Anti Explorer is a small piece of code you can place in your site's HTML which stops Microsoft Internet Explorer (MSIE / Explorer) from rendering your page. Along-side this, a notification alerts the user he / she is using MSIE and prompts him / her to download Firefox instead.

We've all been there. We design our site with Internet Explorer in mind, only to find we have to resort to numerous hacks and complicated code to get our site looking like it should in MSIE. Numerous Web Citizens have written hacks and workarounds for MSIE, only to be dismayed at all the extra effort they had to put in to get their designs cross-compatible with MSIE.

http://anti.eire-media.com/

When I start IE6, About 1/3 of the time rather than open the homepage I have set, it loads Microsoft's IE8 download page. This doesn't seem to be new.

Is IE6 really that prevalent still? I don't work on a particularly tech-oriented site, and only about 3.5% of our visitors appear to use IE6.

In fairness, Microsoft finally has a browser that's significantly better than IE6.

We can all thank the Mozilla Foundation, Apple and Google for that!

Trouble is, "significantly better than IE6" is still a right pain for web app developers.

Deleting the browser is better than ie6...

Does windows 7 have a nice auto update like in the mac that will prevent this from happening in the future? We can't be expecting people to upgrade every 2 windows releases :).

Windows has had a good auto-update system since Vista. However, one of the biggest issues with IE 6 is that its use is still mandated by a lot of companies because they have old, unmaintained webapps that only run on IE 6.

> Windows has had a good auto-update system since Vista.

I beg to differ. The vista one might have actually updated your software to the new stuff though. But from what I remembered in XP, if you wanted the new windows media player, IE, or live messenger, you have to download them from their websites.

Also the only thing I remember from windows updates is the constant nagging restart prompt that sometimes closed unsaved work. You cannot call that good.

Oh, Windows Update on XP was terrible. And Vista's was far from perfect. But it was integrated into the OS and it did, for the most part, do its job of keeping software updated (however annoying it was about it). By 'good' I simply meant well-integrated and effective. I've had complaints about almost every auto-update system I've used.

Why not target both IE6 and IE7 users to upgrade?

Won't those who updated to IE7 also more readily update again? Getting people to update IE7 should be the easy part. IE6 is the problem.

Except for those using IE7 because it was the default in Vista. IE6 is definitely the bigger problem, however.

What was that strange word you used there? Vista? Never heard of it :)

That may be true, but IE7 is still #1 (though usage is going down slowly). They need to fix that.

Not necessarily. For the longest time, my school used IE6 on all of their computers. Last month, they finally upgraded! But surprisingly, they didn't upgrade to IE8, no, they upgraded to IE7.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com