Grow up already and throw IE6 away!

I like this article...

http://www.jankoatwarpspeed.com/post/2009/02/26/Grow-up-already-and-throw-IE6-away!.aspx

This is linked from that story but its really interesting as well...

http://www.larre.com/2009/02/23/the-norwegian-web-changed-in-48-hours-how-is-that-possible/

I’m from Norway and I follow this campaign closely. And I do not need to be on Twitter since the case has received major media attention, both in the scientific press and in newspapers in general.

I’m going to follow up the matter by putting up a poster on all my previous projects with the request to upgrade or to select a different browser. And for all the new simply cut out the support for this browser.

I admire that sentiment.

You views and action will hasten the demise of that POS excuse for a browser.

Then there is the flip side of course: there are users who still use IE6 and many designers/developers still take their needs into consideration. Is this a good thing? Maybe. It does mean that people are accounting for that segment of the population. On the other had just doing so means that the eventual demise of IE6 will take that much longer. IE6 is like an unwelcome dinner guest with bad table manners. The host and the other guests would love to see the slob leave, but are concerned about appearing rude.

But the fact remains that if you build charity sites for poorer nations etc then odds are a good percentage of users will be chugging along on some old version of Windows and IE6.

My favorite conditional CSS for IE6 is this #body {display: none}

Max

Quote from: Photowebmax at Mar 12, 2009, 02:24 PM

there are users who still use IE6 and many designers/developers still take their needs into consideration.

Yes, I know, and I know I exclude some users, but I have made up my mind; I will never ever again code for MSIE6!

That’s liberating. It would exclude about 1/4 of all IE visitors to the MODx site itself though. Granted, that’s only right around 17% of the traffic in total here.

I just use conditional comments and hide a message in the page saying something along the lines of "Your browser isn’t supported please upgrade it: (FF Link) (IE Link)(Opera Link). We will not provide any support if you fail to upgrade."

Granted depending on the site any my state of mind at the time I will vary the message. I leave the site in whatever state for IE6 viewers, granted I do have some IE hacks hardwired into my brain so it isn’t always that bad.

I know if I did something like discussed above I wouldn’t hear the end of it, but they don’t complain about my conditional message (I guess they never see it).

Wow, that’s so refreshing. I wish we could start something that interesting up here in Canada since we could easily qualify as a small country in terms of our population.

I’ve pledged to convince each one of our customers to include the prompt on their websites too.

Thanks for the post.

What concerns me more is IE8 and the abandon of CSS Expressions now...

Quote from: mrhaw at Mar 14, 2009, 04:58 AM

What concerns me more is IE8 and the abandon of CSS Expressions now...

Microsoft should really think hard about their browsers. I mean, how hard is it for them to come up with a more standardized rendering engine? I’m currently test-driving Chrome and it seems to be doing a pretty good job most of the time and this is Google`s first browser by the way. Microsoft has had all the time to think and rethink their browsers and we yet have to see something compelling.

I downloaded IE8 and there seems to be no big changes. The same bugs I had in IE6, and IE7 are returning, so I’m not sure what’s going on. Maybe they should open source it, like Google did.