that you are banning all those that visited with IE.*?

Who are the holdouts running IE5/FF1 though?

"The Reg has no objection to readers using Internet Explorer. But we would welcome the death of IE6. Coding for IE6 is not enjoyable."

And its better for 7?

is still using IE 5? It'll be 10 years old in under 6 months!

Linux distributions installs Firefox/Iceweasal by default, so this may have something to do with the high usage of the Gecko engine. Still I cant believe people are still using IE5,6 especially with such major exploits and bugs! Come on people, follow the crowd, join the revolution and install firefox today. Free yourself from the torment of IE.

At our suite of retail sites I see that we have a bit above normal FF usage for most of them, but our youth-oriented site sees over 40% FF traffic.

> Coding for IE6 is not enjoyable

Ummm you missed out IE7 as well here. Get rid of that as well.

IE6 is mandatory where I work. Sorry.

No Mosaic?

I tried ff2 when it came out, but getting rid of the 'close tab' button on the far right made it a chore to use.

So when i open a lot of tabs (like for a days worth of webcomics), i can read and close each tab without having to move the pointer (trackpad on lappy).

Hell, it would still work if the tabs stayed the same size, as the little X would be in the same place.

But no.

That would be too consistent.

Yupp I own up.

I'm the one running FF1

Mainly because it come with this Linux distro( Fedora 6) and I cant be bothered to spend all my life upgrading stuff, tweaking it , finally after 4 weeks customising and getting it running just right, having to do it all again because they've released another version.

And besides... I use Mozilla 1.5 when running in windoze mode

welcome our new reg-reading firefox-using overlords, although I still worship at the alter of Opera.

How many people would constitute the 3.6% enjoyed by Opera? I do hope that's not just me!

Opera wins over FF in terms of startup time and performance when browsing with 20+ tabs open, although its inventory of Widgets is not quite as impressive. FF is getting closer performance wise, so I'll just have to be satisfied with the knowledge the FF and IE steal everything from Opera anyway. Although got to give them the credit for pr0n mode.

About 85% of my company still uses IE6 and I'm with the Reg, it is a ba$tard to code for. IE7 isn't great either but it is nowhere near as bad.

I've just got to convince IT to force an IE7 upgrade (FF or Opera preferrably) but I will settle for IE7.

Mines the one with the memory stick in the pocket containing Opera 9.6.

"Ctrl-W" closes tabs...

I use opera. I have 29 tabs open in my general interest window(when I have more open it is hard for me to see the icons and remember what is which tab), and in windows for specific tasks I keep more tabs open that work. When I shut (volentary or not) I re-open opera nad all windows re-open with all tabs intact.This has been the norm for years. I only use FF2 for google docs and to run an addon that gives me mouse over translation of Japanese(not available for FF3 ). I use Safari for plugin testing. But then for me a browser is tool I don't want to spend hunderds of hours installing add-on and answering daily upgrade messages, I just want to use it.

And yes IE6 is eviler than most MS software.

"And its better for 7?"

Yes, actually. FF has a lot of rendering bugs you know, but because people have now been indoctrinated with "firefox is standards compliant", they believe it does it right and everyone else is wrong.

Sure, IE7 and firefox disagree sometimes... sometimes ff is right, other times it's wrong. Yes, it would be easier if every browser shared the same bugs, but then that would lead to crappy code that just happens to look right on everything.

I hate it when people bash IE just because they're in the church of firefox!

Now, I'd even be prepared to use FF more, if it behaved better and it was faster to start up! I tend to double click on it, look up the site in IE, then see if FF has started, continue browsing in IE, double check, etc, etc

Flame away

Ctrl + F4.

I was thinking "If The Reg has a techie skew to its figures, who the hell's using IE6?".

Then I remembered I occasionally visit The Reg at work while using the stupid "Frontpage in a browser" web-site editor monstosity that still doesn't have IE7 or Firefox compatability. Annoys the hell out of me that all my projects have to cater for IE6 as that's what's rolled out around the business.

is the name of the extension. It is the ability to extend FF & the huge range of extensions that make it so useful. Some of the extensions like Greasemonkey allow you to write your own webpage-enhancing script, increasing extensibility even further.

Adblock & NoScript need to be shouted about as well. My boss uses IE7 at work & when i see the garbage adverts splattered ll over his screen, and all the time & resources they take up - I have to laugh.

Yes I know IE7 has extensions, but you don't hear a lot about them do you? Last time I looked (a while ago i admit) most of them were *for sale* lol.

I have access to 2 different corporates networks for my current job. Both of them have IE6 as the standard browser and no immediate plans to change this :(

That's probably where a lot of the IE6 traffic is from, legacy setups in corporates :s

"And its better for 7?"

7 at least has a semblance of understanding CSS, 6 is about as far off the beaten track as it's possible to go. We're considering an IE6 dedicated punchbag at work soon. I'm more in favour of the classic

if(IE6 == true)

{

alert("The eighties called and they want their web browser back. Now fuck off and update your shit, bozo");

}

We do still have a very large and well known client that has lots of IE6 users. Company laptops. Shameful

Yes, coding for IE6 is a pain, and yes, coding for IE7 is better.

Coding for IE7 is very easy. Simply ensure that you have the XHTML doctype, and then when the page still doesn't render correctly, tell the user to get a functional browser.

Thanks, Cade, for mentioning the non-standard IE development hell for web developers. If that same line was mentioned in every browser article, IE would die much faster and free up all that developer time for more cool things.

@And I Wonder:

Yeah, was wondering about user-agent masking also, since Opera has used that as a defense for years to web sites that cripple Opera users with bad entry scripts. (MSNBC, are you listening?) Do these stats check for the Presto engine (in Opera) or is FF and IE getting their stats padded? To get an idea of the amount of work Opera has to do to deal with mangled sites, via Opera's browserJS:

http://www.opera.com/docs/browserjs/

And userJS is another tool for Opera users also:

http://www.opera.com/support/tutorials/userjs/

@I use firefox1:

Just use Opera v9.6 since all those advanced tab features that you want are already built-in, without add-ons. (And, has Opera Link to sync your bookmarks, Speed Dial, and search engines, plus WAY more -- yes, a granular adblocker) ;))

Surely atleast half of your traffic must be me browsing the reg on my mobile in order to distract myself from work/ the world around - i'm the one on operamini.

oh, i see... this is the traffic from all the other visitors who don't love you as much.

Well, 5.1% "other" so I guess that covers it. I mainly use Firefox 3, but have to admit having used elinks a couple times; the register is actually pretty text-browser friendly. I also have my phone pointed to www.google.com as a WAP proxy and read the register through that (which probably shows some google user-agent string that'll also show as "other".

"But we would argue that Reg readers exhibit a certain technical savvy you won’t find in the general population."

You can argue all you want, won't make it true. I argue that Red readers exhibit a certain gullability in believing marketing hype for technical items you won't find in the general populace. How else can you explain the support for that buggy and bloated browser... Firefox.

Which browser site distributed a trojan for months through their official add on site? Oh yeah, mozilla.

Which browser markets itself as 'safest' yet has still not patched all the exploits on its last version? Or for that matter, the current version according to secunia? Firefox!

Two browsers, covering versions from the same period of time. One has had 172 exploits, according to secunia, one has had 41. Guess which one's firefox (HINT start high!, comparing Firefox 2.x on, to opera 9.x on)

Really trying to think why people use firefox, beyond some intrinsic and unsubstantiatable point that 'open source is better' for some reason i've yet to work out, despite working on it for 3 years.

Me? I'll keep with my safer, faster, more secure and innovative opera.

Despite what you nerds might think, IE5 is still a consideration for any serious non-nerdy site.

There are lots of people out there who bought a computer within the last 10 years and it hasn't broken down so they're still using it. They can't see any problems with the pages they browse (whether there are indeed problems or not) so they don't see the point in spending a fortune on a new one. They don't run Windows update or bother with free upgrades because, again, they can't see the point of changing anything that doesn't need fixing.

These people are often middle aged or older, a bit clueless with technology at the best of times (You can replace their old site with a spangly new Web 2.0 site and the only thing that'll impress them is the fact that you changed the font or the colours) and unfortunately are either in charge or influential. So you can't afford to present them with a site that breaks when they try it, and then tell them it's *their* fault. They very rarely own a car or TV older than their computer too, and look at you like an idiot when you point that out in order to try and explain how out of date their software is.

I have Windows Media Player 9 and I don't want to upgrade to version 11. The damn think keeps pestering me to upgrade and there's no option to disable this warning. Why do MS think it's perfectly fine to pester the user over the program that plays their MP3s but not their web browser? If IE5 and 6 were popping up a message every week telling them to get an upgrade, I'm sure more people would have, and IE5 would be closer to being dead than it is right now.

Even if we could get the Windows 95 users onto IE5.5 and the 90 users onto 6.0 it would be better, but all my logs show that there are far more IE5.0 users than 5.5.

Also, major websites could help by providing 'incentives' to change browsers sooner. The BBC still lists IE5.0 as a supported browser. If the iPlayer didn't work in it, or too many news articles were unreadable people would soon upgrade. The same goes with every other major site around the world.

Ultimately, people only dropped NS4 in the end because too many sites broke. IE5.0 does dynamic rendering and AJAX so it's still more practicable to use hacks to get it working whereas with NS4 you were up against a dead wall. And how many posters here who make websites deliberately annoy IE5 users by inserting messages to upgrade on every page, or provide an alternative stylesheet that makes the site look more boring?

>> exhibit a certain technical savvy you won’t find in the general population

you'd argue this - even after seeing the standards of comments. :-p

with FF3. At least I have it on mine.

Never use it though :)

that Adblock is very good at removing irritating ads...

Then don't do it.

When you detect IE5.5 or 6 - Tell them.

I use firefox 1 because I am stuck with that or safari on my work computer. At home, it is Ubuntu with FF3 for my browsing pleasures.

Heard of keyboard shortcuts? Or does ff1 predate the keyboard? No skating rink required!

I'm sad to say I make up part of the 16% using IE6 because I have no choice at work.

The front page really doesn't work properly on it at all, lots of overlaps.