Web wags stage IE 6 funeral
The unsung comic geniuses of the web are holding a mock funeral for Microsoft's decrepit IE 6 browser software later on Thursday. The IE 6 Funeral site announced on Monday that the browser "passed away" in a workplace injury (a reference to the role the eight-year-old browser played in the Operation Aurora attack against Google …
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Unfortunately..
Unfortunately, the IT departments of big corporation still seem to think otherwise. IE6 will cause many gray hairs for developers for years to come still.
Not dead...
...I'm just about to do a load of CSS hacks for it so still very much alive within my company's customer base I'm afraid.
Have to agree here...
We're in the same boat... it's almost as though people want to be hacked!
If IE6 is dead, I fear that the ghost of IE6-past will be around to haunt us for a long while yet. Probably until the day MS start implementing web standards on their browsers.
Beer - because I'll need one after swearing at IE6 CSS
Still alive and kicking
Reports of the death of IE6 are greatly exaggerated
Still Using IE6
Currently using IE6 on my work laptop as has been forced by our IT dept. Love the fact the funeral site doesn't render properly on this machine, must try it again later when I get home and use a real browser.
Even the NHS has a 'Do Not Resuscitate ' notice for IE6
Connecting for Health have recommended that Trusts upgrade to IE7 and the new version of Choose and Book will support IE8
Life support?
Don't you mean the NHS currently have it on life support?
rumours of demise greatly exaggerated
It is not just corporate IT departments, people with old computers are still happily surfing away with IE6 - we got 281,151 unique IE6 visitors (happily now under 15% of total) last 30 days
Surprised? do a quick test with some older family members or friends, "which Internet browser do you user?" Very few people are able to answer the question, never mind know how to identify the version... Geeks can bury what they want, won't change a damn thing as the problem will only be solved by the rate of failure of hard disks or other components on those millions of machines...
Great way to get rid of problems...
...when a client gets in touch saying a customer can't use the website (they never give any specifics in the email) just ask them to find out the customer's OS, browser and version - that's the last you'll hear of it!
Am I using old technology?
And there I was, just about to upgrade my Internet Explorer 4 - with Desktop Enhancements - to IE6. Don't I feel stupid!
A more fitting tribute
In light of the issues surrounding IE6 surely the website should be designed to only work in IE6. That would be the most fitting tribute.
Pot, kettle, etc...
TBH El Reg mocking a site because it's decided the authors fancy themselves as "Web wags"/"unsung comic geniuses" is a bit rich.
See "Playmobil Perversions", Bootnotes, etc..., then let the wag without sin cast the first stone.
butbutbut
casting the first stone is what El Reg is all about!
As Long As The Stone...
...is cast at a Killer.
But, to be fair, stoned and elReg somehow go together.
Love it
I love IE6. I use Firefox of course. But driving a Ferrari is no fun if everyone has one. It's the IE6 users that make me feel special every time I browse for porn and erase my dirty tracks with the push of a couple of buttons.
Fail
"every time I browse for porn and erase my dirty tracks with the push of a couple of buttons."
Last I checked, this is a good way to get stuck permenantly browsing porn as all the crapware shoves itself onto your system through the crap they call a browser.
And as for the tracks, isn't that what porn-mode, erm "In-Private Browsing," is for?
Fail for crappily-constructed sarcasm (please say it was just sarcasm).
for the record....
...stats from sites I'm involved in, with a global audience within finance, show a 3 way equal split between IE6/7/8 for the last month.... ie6 is still 20%-ish of total traffic.
no reason not to bury ie6 alive though.
in fact if 7+8 accidentally fell in too it would be no great loss.
One down
Now let's hope 7 and 8 go the same way even faster.
Dead, but still owns 20% of the market
I think the wailing and gnashing off teeth may be premature.
IE6 is still tracking at 20% of the install base (just behind IE8, and ten times the market share of Opera!)
http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2
Very much around
In fact, so much around that in my current company we're barred (i.e. disciplinary action if we do) from upgrading to IE7, never mind IE8. Reason is that all company intranet stuff assumes IE6.
So everyone's stuck with IE6 for internal company stuff. For anything else, everyone uses Firefox.
IE6 is the standard browser
These nerds should find better uses for their time and efforts.
IE6 is still the world's defacto standard web browser. It may not have the market share it once did, but it's what companies still use. Not IE7, not Firefox and certainly never Chrome or Safari.
So until businesses decide to move on, IE6 will be with us, and unlike Netscape 4, there's no millennium bug hype for it to be swept away with as companies panic-buy new software and upgrade a lot of other stuff in the process.
Google dropping support for IE6 on its websites isn't going to help matters either. if anything, managers will love that kind of thing because it'll leave IE6's only real use as a business tool, not a toy that employees hijack to 'play' on Facebook and check personal email in business time. Let them do it on their lunch break at their own expense on their smartphones.
Seeing the back of IE6 is going to be a much more slow and painful process than NS4, I'm afraid. Since when has what home users do and use been the deciding factor in anything worth reporting?
Perhaps the whole notion of versions is a bad idea? What about if the normal patches that software gets included new rendering modes that added support for new features, but required something like Microsoft's meta tag or HTTP field to select the appropriate rendering mode? That way updates would never take anything away from the old 'version' or break any pages so companies would include them. If all you needed to know was that adding the 'IE7' tag to your intranet, it would never break even if you installed IE16, you'd have the best of both worlds.
Yes it would be bloated and inefficient, but that's the story of big successful business.
They already do
IE8 already does this - you can tag pages in such a way they'll render with the IE7 path. There's no way to do the same with IE 6 though.
or is it a bofh reference?
"passed away in a workplace accident" - could it also not be a reference to the recent demise of simon in the latest installment of BOFH?
WAGs
Nice to hear the Wives and Girlfriends are involved. In fact is nice to see that Web denizens have wives and girlfriends.
Internet Exploder?
Bah - the one and only is Netscape Navigator. Its now 2 years and 4 days without upgrades etc but still running fine.
Cheers!
That's great!
All we need now is a way of actually un-installing it from our computers.
Goodbye IE6!
No more IE6 here as of this weekend. Now that the repaining app dependancy has been switched off we're free to upgrade to IE7! At least some of the web-based stuff I need to use will work now!
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