lets face it

"Urging people to get rid of IE 6 is just the first of many campaigns to help developers"

developers need to help themselves here a little. OK i know they are hampered by their contracting businesses, but If websites were all built to web standards, with a small message on IE saying that the site might not display/work properly, and that they should upgrade to a standards compliant browser to ensure that there are no problems. it would result in a much cheaper development with much more maintainable code.

Some developers certainly seem to have no problem on sites presenting firefox/opera users with messages saying that you need to use Internet explorer 4 or better to view the site??

count me in (out?) that 30-40%

Dunno, I'm perfectly satisfied with IE6, myself. Does everything I need. In full-screen mode has buttons, menu and address bar, all in a very thin band across the top of my screen - can't duplicate that with Firefox, no matter how hard I try (maybe I'm doing it wrong). Have no use for tabbed browsing, either, though I can see how some people might like it. Maybe IE8 will have some compelling features that tempt me to upgrade, provided it's back-ported to w2k.

"dump IEx"

'"Dump IE" & "Dump IEx" (C), my terms are either .05c per use or $100.00 for non-exclusive right to use it.

Re: "better solution"

If it were only that easy!

Of course, you could add words like: "security risk", "proprietary" and other such things (anti-trust?) to aid the cause. Unfortunately it won't work as long as ANY version of IE has penetration over 10% (or some similar figure).

Short of some unspeakable act (there are many) that wipes out Microsoft, all we can do is dream.

Market forces and monopolies

Unfortunately, Morely's idea is a case of shutting the gate after the horse has bolted. Most website success is dependent at least in part upon visitor numbers for ad revenue and whose going to risk loosing 50% of their income from advertising for the sake of making a principled stand on web site design efficiency?

With that MS and Apple deal for IE as the bundled OS browser on Windows AND MacOS from 1997 until 2002 (it's been a long time since Apple was the champion of the consumer), MS had a monopoly on browser use which peaked at around roughly 90% share over 2002 and 2003. Thanks to the US protectionism of US based global monopolies, browser development is probably around four years behind where it should be.

Unfortunately

browsers are not exclusively used for crappy Web 2.0 internet content. They are also used for thin client front ends for many (internal) business applications, many of which will fail if forced to run on browsers which are more standards compliant.

How many companies out there want to pay to fix something which currently (as far as they're concerned) isn't broken?

I know that my company has no intention of upgrading to IE7 (or Firefox, Opera etc.). If employees want a better web surfing experience, they can ruddy well do it at home. As long as the company's business-critical applications which use a browser front end work, the internet can go hang.

40% on IE6

Perhaps the 30-40% still using IE6 are doing so because they do not like the IE7 user interface. I'm for Firefox anyway!

@ Morely Dotes

Nice idea, and I'd love to have the balls to do it on a site, but try explaining it to the client when it doesn't work on a PC in their office, with a look of dismay on your face as they put the chequebook away...

What an idiot.

I had the exact same idea myself a few weeks ago. Get some javascript everyone can use that has a little pop-up, telling IE6 users to upgrade. To suggest that someone 'stole' the idea from him is a load of utter arse.

More to the point though, IE6 isn't going away. Anyone suggesting that people should make W3C compliant sites and tell IE users to switch has obviously never made a web site in return for money, because telling 30-40% of your audience to piss off is not something favoured by any client I've met.

As people have said above, the corporates aren't moving- and that's the problem. My work has a wide variety of ugly ActiveX jobbies for all sorts of jobs. They're old and use shoddy technology, but they work. They're not getting upgraded, and neither is IE6. Don't get me wrong, I hate it, but that's the way things are...

NHS computers stuck to IE6

Some of the security stuff intended to make sure that only the correct million people read your medical records has been cunningly coded to require IE6. It doesn't seem to be anything to do with needing any feature that goes away in IE7, although use of a better browser does seem to have been prevented by designing in an Active X component, it is just that the things apparently check if they are talking to IE6, and if not demand that someone pays to restart the process from scratch.

Ah well.

really .. and what should I do ...

.. about my Win98SE machine, since they stopped supporting a perfectly usable IE 5.5 SP2 ? IE 6 doesn't display THIS site right about 50% of the time

still getting most of what I need for websites from HTML 4 and tables, which all browsers seem to read fine except old Netscape 4.x

ok ok .. XP machine has Firefox .. and I do the .php stuff with that machine .. I confess !

@Unfortunately

Using it internaly is irrelevant... If a company has that setup it probably has a lot of other rules about what can/can't be done about it... But maybe something dedicated like mozilla's prism thing(not that I'm a fan of crapzilla anyway) would work better in those cases...

@Joe

I'm in the midst of building a new site and am going for a halfway house - the site's usable with IE5 and up but I'm limiting the number of cosmetic IE hacks. If the site's viewed in MSIE there's an extra (small, unobtrusive) link on each page linking to a page explaining that the user's browser is not standards compliant (I know there are other offenders but IE is the worst). Also, the bug report form has no 'cosmetic issue' category when viewed in IE and includes an extra warning that I don't want cosmetic bugs reported if they only affect that browser.

So far I've had to add hacks for just two MSIE CSS issues that really rendered (excuse the pun) the site unusable. It's made my life a little easier at least. There are only a couple of minor cosmetic issues with the site viewed in IE that I'm aware of, but it's nice to know I don't have to care about fixing them. :)

The real problem is, as AC said in "Unfortunately" above, internal web applications that work only in MSIE. My employer has a couple of those, but the last couple of new ones introduced do work in FF2 so although this is likely to cause a bit of lag in the adoption of standards-compliant browsers it does seem to be changing.

Lo-fi version?

AFAIK the problems with IE6 are down to CSS, DOM, JavaScript etc.

If it's truly that painful to code around it's deficiencies, then it must be less effort to throw together an accessible "lo-fi" version without any of the Web 2.0 crap, and direct IE6 users there based on user agent strings.

At the same time, mobile users and those with screen readers etc might appreciate the extra choice.

John

Still using IE6

On the work network because the users are too thick to grasp tabbed browsing and are too slow to accept there are other browsers available...

I'm a dinosaur

Still running Windows ME and IE 5.5 on a Pentium 3. It works so why fix it!

Cannot Dump it

Like other people here we cannot move to IE 7 because our business apps will only work on IE 6 and the vendors don't seem in a rush to change that, cannot blame them really.

The fun bit is that this stopped our deployment of Vista for our student clusters :-)

Been told you cannot have IE 6 on Vista!!

@There's a better solution

what solution is that?

last time I checked NO browsers were entierly standards compliant.

in fact last time I checked mozilla didn't support all the html4.0 tags.

(border color light / border color light, instead choosing to either apply shading for 3d effect if they are not specified, or choosing to just render grey if the colours are specified...

so there, quit your bitching. when [insert your favourite browser here] is fully standards compliant then perhaps you'll have a point telling others that they shouldn't be using their choice as it's lesser. until the stfu.

@Hudin,

oh so you didn't notice that someone else had the idea before you? but it didn't stop you running your mouth off when someone else had the idea after you.

and i seem to remember that years ago I knew someone who put notices on his websites telling people that I.e was shite,

that same person also detected screen resolutions and made jokes at people running in low res.

you're not the first to have the idea, and you won't be the last.

/rant

Can't install IE7?

AIUI you can't install IE7 without the Windows Genuine Advantage, so there's a whole lot of people going to be stuck on IE6.

RE: @Joe

Might be better to do:

<!--[if lt IE 7]>

<script src="http://www.end6.org/js/eng_end6.js" type="text/javascript"></script>

<![endif]-->

or <!--[if IE 6]>

Firefox has its own standards problems. Try the acid2 test in FF2. Forcing only firefox use is as bad as the old "this page is for IExx" pages.

For me though, until most browsers can support standards correctly, and the w3c gives us back the target property in links, I shall continue to write html in transitional and support old IE versions as well as new browsers. Hell, I'll even support users on lynx.

WebKit gets 100% on Acid3 as of yesterday

If you want compliance, you got it: http://webkit.org/blog/ Opera is nearly there too. Beyond compliance, either of those are way faster and better looking than IE and FF anyway. FF2 is almost unusably slow, but FF3 is much better.

With a bit of luck, since MS thankfully changed their minds about standards mode, IE8 might possibly pass acid2 at launch, and thus we might finally see the end of having to put all that extra work (which our clients pay for) into downgrading for IE compatibility.

@phat shantz

My thoughts exactly. Theres money to be made.

Also - quit bitching about standards people - if more than 20% of people use something it's a standard, whether it has a seal of approval or not. Get on with life.

Oh and Firefox is just a browser people - get over it.

F11

I'm not sure they were referring to full screen mode, more that ability in IE to fit all the toolbars in one row in IE6 something you can't do in IE7 or Firefox

hmmm smells like BS

----

Real web developers write sites for IE whereas Comp Sci students who are doing some free work for their uncle 'designing' a web site tend to go overboard on the standards compliance, it's that simple.

----

What total and utter unremitting bollocks - damn - I just bit a troll.

If you go by the way in which a browser renders a page rather than by the name of that browser, IE doesn't really have market share.

IE 6 and 7 render differently so that's 2 different categories.

Opera 8+, FF2+, Konqueror and Safari render basically the same. On some sites this could quite easily get something like 25% IE 6, 35% IE 7, 39% stuff that's W3C compliant (give or take) and 1% other... meaning "IE" is not dominant.

It gets better - in most instances IE7 actually renders more like Firefox or Opera than it does IE6 - look at padding in the box model for instance - so unless you're accessing the JS DOM you could say that IE7, Firefox, Opera and so on all render approximately the same. Even giving IE6 the generous market share of 30% it's still a minority browser these days - any web developer working in the "real world" will only worry about it as a secondary consideration.

IE7 only really becomes an issue when coding web2.0 shinies using the JS DOM - and you can get around those problems by using a JS wrapper "class" and providing noscript alternatives.

The whole point of coding to W3C standards is that if YOU follow the standard, every browser on every operating system following the same standard will display your code the same - even those you've not tested. I've not tested my work site with Safari on OSX (as I don't have access to a Mac) but I've been informed it works fine with my standards compliant code (oki - I put an onresize in the body tag that's not compliant).

Re: Don't you understand what standards are?

Yes. Something that a bunch of people have written down somewhere so that everyone doing that thing can use the same, um, standard.

As for this save the developers thing - yeah, life would be so much easier if no-one ever had to worry about backwards compatability, but it's the nature of the beast really, isn't it? At least it's manageable when you're only dealing with mark-up & style sheets.

IE6 does what it says on the tin

I agree with Alistair: "Anyone suggesting that people should make W3C compliant sites and tell IE users to switch has obviously never made a web site in return for money, because telling 30-40% of your audience to piss off is not something favoured by any client I've met."

Absolutely. The arrogance of web designers bugs me. Firefox is slow. A ***lot*** of sites break in Firefox. I don't want to use Firefox and view a load of broken sites.Fix your bl***dy sites so they work in IE6 and stop bl***dy moaning.