IE Death March

Eugene of Хватит IE6 (Enough IE6) says:

Hellow. Visit enoughie6.com, here you can find list of websites, developers of which have ceased to support IE 6. Thanks.
-Eugene Getmanenko

Of course, it’s all in Russian, but those of you that speak Russian (or PHP) might be able to find something useful there.

Microsoft will be releasing IE8 today.

REDMOND, Wash. — March 18, 2009 — Today Microsoft Corp. announced the availability of Windows Internet Explorer 8, the new Web browser that offers the best solution for how people use the Web today. It can be downloaded in 25 languages at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8 starting at noon EDT on March 19.

-Microsoft Press Release

For those of you who were waiting for 8, yesterday was the last day of supporting IE6. In a few minutes, you’ll be able to download IE8, though until then they’re still serving the beta.

Félicien says:

I have created a PHP script that pushes users to switch to a relevant browser. It works as follows: A user triggers her browser to ask for your page (across the Web). The page is different depending on the user agent. A message only shows on the web page only if the client uses a “bad” browser. The message can be anything. By default it proposes to switch to Firefox.

The script is free to be re-used. -Félicien Breton

Kill_IE7 emailed:

IE7 will be 3 years old in Nov this year, since it was released in 2006. You should continue your campaign and switch focus to IE7 soon to reduce IE7 usage before it becomes another IE6 mess.

Say by the end of 2010, drop all support for IE7? IE8 isn’t really much better either since it doesn’t support many key standards compliant features like SVG, CSS3, Canvas etc. Better to encourage everyone to use another browser instead of IE.

Oh ye of little faith. Notice I didn’t name the site ie6deathmarch.org.

With any luck, Microsoft will be releasing IE8 at MIX 09 (to add fuel to that fire, check out Countdown to MIX09: Internet Explorer 8 Says Hello World on the MIX09 website).

Once IE8 is out, it’ll be even easier to justify dropping support for IE6 to the powers that be, assuming you haven’t already joined the IE Death March.

Alex says:

Hi,

thanks for creating this great project! -Alex Lawrence

He also threw together a bit of markup you could use: http://www.alex-lawrence.com/work/html/ie6-death-march-code-snippet

Thanks Alex!

On twitter, I asked, “What will you do with IE6 after IE8 is released?” and got a couple responses:

throw it in the garbage
sugeek 4:05 PM Feb 19th

Personally, just before I read that, I vowed not to support three versions of IE.
jlemoine 4:33 PM Feb 19th

The same like now!
venlix 1:14 AM Feb 20th

Continue to make things at least function, because the IE7 users will be the ones to upgrade to 8. 6 will probably live on.
danmcgrath 7:05 AM Feb 20th

Message users that IE-freakin-8 is out, and stop working to make it do things modern browsers do. They get the degraded stuff.
ryanmcgrath 7:46 AM Feb 20th

So.. what are *you* going to do?

A couple of Norway’s popular sites (http://finn.no and http://vg.no, see Trygve’s comment) just kicked IE6 to the curb and a couple IE Death March readers were kind enough to bring it to my attention. Thanks Pelle and Trygve!

Pelle Wessman of http://voxpelli.se/ says:

Just wanted to let you know about the currently ongoing norweigan revolution against IE 6: http://search.twitter.com/search?q=IE6 -Pelle Wessman

Trygve Li says:

Interesting things are happening in Norway at the moment (started yesterday), large scale websites are recommending IE6 users to upgrade. Even if the percentage of IE6 users are well above 20%.

I’ve written a little bit about it here:
http://www.trygve-lie.com/blog/entry/bye_bye_to_ie6_in

Best regards
-Trygve Lie

Brennan sent me a link to handly little javascript utility he put together, that you could use to turn people using Internet Explorer 6 away.

How about a <7 version?

Here’s after seeing Mike Hopley’s comment, I realized I’d need a graphic to illustrate my point:

By this time next year, if IE 6’s usage pattern continues to match that of IE 5, IE6 will be around 13%. The numbers come from TheCounter (and could probably be more granular… perhaps when I have more time).

This chart brought to you by: Google Chart API (hand rolled!) and the letters “I” and “E”.

Fellow marcher Jeff Starr uses a couple conditional tags to save some bandwidth and some sanity.