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We *Like* Our Internet With a Side of Revolution

Internet Explorer 6 will be SEVEN years old on August 27th, 2008 will be EIGHT years old this fall. It came out a few weeks before the Twin Towers fell. It came out before the Nintendo GameCube. It came out before the first iPod.

It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon… say like, March 2009. That’s roughly a little more than 6 months. Feel free to join me. If your company is dropping support for IE6, let me know and I’ll gladly post it up. I’m also on twitter, http://twitter.com/sxtxixtxcxh, if that works better for you.

Check out the marching category to see who else is phasing out Internet Explorer 6.

If, for some reason, you’ve found yourself here using Internet Explorer 6, you can help yourself by downloading Firefox, Safari, Opera and/or Internet Explorer 7 (there’s a beta for IE8, if you’re feeling adventurous).

Google has recently gotten into the browser game, and (if you’re on Windows) you can download a beta of their unbelievably fast Chrome.

Update: IE 8 has been released. Are you going to support three different versions of Internet Explorer?

188 replies on “We *Like* Our Internet With a Side of Revolution”

I’d love to be able to cut all my special IE6 code out of my site. But I can’t yet. My solution is a jGrowl notification. I’m open to suggestions about the wording.

For those who can’t cut IE6 users off at the knees, but who would like to encourage them to switch or add a browser to their machine, this may be a good solution.

If IE6 users start getting notifications like this, they may add a browser or bug the IT department.

Every little bit helps.

—

You are using Internet Explorer 6.0.

xxxxâ„¢ performs many calculations, so it works best with modern browsers such as IE7, IE8, Firefox, Opera, and Google Chrome.

If you have another browser, please switch to it now.

This version of xxxxâ„¢ does support IE6, but some operations will be very slow. Please be patient.

>>BTW, I do not understand why IE6 doesn’t upgrade automatically to the most up to date version? This would be profit for all of us, even for M$ because less people would change to FF.

I know of companies who have built in-house web applications that rely on broken IE6 bits and don’t work on IE7. It’s a REAL mess we’ve got here.

For those people, the best solution is IE6 for the Intranet and FF for the Internet.

Death to IE6…

The anti-IE6 squad seems to have been gathering some momentum lately; 37Signals announced that they are phasing out support of the aged web browser, as well as Facebook and MobileMe. Even a website has been constructed, IE Death March, to revolt agains…

I fully agree that its time to kill IE6, however I do not think that outright dropping it will work, the client effect. Therefore, I propose IE6 get TAXED to death. Meaning that if a client wants IE6 compatibility it will be immediately flagged as an added cost beyond normal scope.

IE6 is like a used condom. Just don’t use it, don’t even touch it, don’t even think about what it would be like to use it. It’s disgusting, and should be thrown away.

How’s that for the best description ever written?

I hate IE as much as the next guy, but dropping IE6 is a designer indulgence; you can only countenance such an extreme measure when your site is a personal one and you don’t really care about your users.

theCounter.com has IE6 at 37% market share. Are you seriously considering alienating that many visitors?

If you care about readership or income from your website, or if you are making a website for someone else, then you must continue to support IE6. The alternative is lunacy. Can you think of any business that would deliberately alienate 37% of its customers?

Having said that, you don’t need to make your website perfect in IE6; just make it good enough: good browsers get the full effect, and IE6 gets a slightly inferior version.

I know that hacking for IE6 is a misery, but you have to ask yourself why you are making the website. Are you making it for yourself? Fine — do as you please. Are you making it for users? Then serve them first, and put your own needs second.

@Mike Hopley:

IE6
Sept, 2006 – 81%
Sept, 2007 – 50%
Sept, 2008 – 37%
Sept, 2009 – ?

IE5
Sept, 2001 – 80%
Sept, 2002 – 47%
Sept, 2003 – 34%
Sept, 2004 – 13%
Sept, 2005 – 4%
Sept, 2006 – 2%
Sept, 2007 – 1%
Sept, 2008 – 0%

Your point is valid, but ignoring a downward trend is also lunacy. Every developer will have to weigh the benefits and every project will be have different needs. As pointed out by others, many grid based CSS frameworks and javascript frameworks do a LOT of the work for you, and for the most part, if you’re using them and a couple of the minor CSS tweaks for IE6, you probably won’t even have a problem.

By Post Author

I got into web design in October of 2007, and haven’t given the slightest look to making my site or any site I’ve worked on look nice on ie 6. If it worked on ie 6 great, if not I didn’t care.

Add me site to the list if you will 😀

I should correct myself: the numbers from theCounter.com are misleading. See this post for details:

http://www.thewebsqueeze.com/forum/Web-Development-in-Genera-f56/Thecountercom-Stats-Misl-t2773.html&hl=thecounter

Using Net Applications’ numbers instead, the figures are more optimistic: IE6 is at about 25%. 🙂

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/report.aspx?qprid=3&qpcustom=Microsoft%20Internet%20Explorer%206.0

This is still too high for me to drop IE6, but at least the knave’s doom approaches faster than I thought.

well IE6 has been a nightmare for a lot web designers these past
years.
Ie7 continued the tradition have most of the time to work around its problems
But what is going on IE8 beta looks even worse
Even apple.com site does not render properly
i had really tried hard to download qucktime
(the download button was covered with overlapping text)
So i suggest to kill all IE project altogether
Take care
Ioannis
P.S. try googles chrome
everything runs smoothly even on the first beta version!

Not sure if you want to add this to the “IE6 can’t do”s, but it cannot disable single options in a select. I believe IE7 can’t either, but IE6 certainly cannot.

[…] bugs, hacks κτλ είναι μια παγκόσμια κίνηση που λέγεται IE Death March. Είναι μια θαρραλέα πρωτοβουλία που έχει σαν σκοπό την […]

Other things you can’t do in IE6:

div.class1.class2 (multiple classes bug)
div ~ p
div + p
div > p
div:hover

Yes, I’d love not having to support IE6 anymore. Yes, IE6 has many flaws and many things it can’t do. Yes, it’s an outdated browser and there is even an alternative, if you want or have to stick to a Microsoft product. BUT: as long as so many users are surfing with this browser, I can’t afford to ignore them. We should not encourage each other not to support that browser, instead we should encourage users and especially corporations which do not allow the installation of software to move on. We should also encourage Microsoft to pester these corporations with upgrade recommandations until they finally do it. If you don’t offer Hamburgers anymore, people will only complain and regard you as a jerk. But if you manage to make people ask for salads and other healthy things, you don’t have to deal with Hamburgers anymore. Ok, I admit it, not a perfect example, since I love burgers too much… But you certainly get the point. We have to get rid of the demand for IE6 compliance. THEN we don’t need to support it anymore. Rest in peace, but rest soon…

ie6? heck drop support for ie in general. I know a lot of people still use ie7 and will end up using ie8. but if nothing ever looks good, or works with it, they will eventually switch to a different browser.

IE 6 is far more reliable then IE 7. I suggest you idiots close down this site, and make a new one when IE 8 releases. Seriously, IE6>IE7, and if you guys ever used it, you fucking know this. Fucking moronic attention whores. Who gives a shit anyway, All you fuckheads are doing is telling people to switch to FF or other.

2009 will display non-standard-browser notice on websites for IE6 users in EU. Thank You!

I dislike IE 7 because of its anti-alias-ness.
IE 6 was much better.
IE 7 being accidentally installed (banned in my dad’s company) made me switch to Mozilla.

IE7 will die off before IE6 does. People already using IE7 are used to the crappy interface, and IE8 is more of the same, so it’s no big deal – the adoption rate will be fast, like when IE6 replaced IE5. Meanwhile, IE6 users will cling to their familiar interface with features like (gasp!) the movable toolbars they’ve enjoyed since IE3 and (heaven forbid!) stop/reload buttons grouped logically with other buttons. If they make IE any less customizable and any more javascript-buggy, they’ll have to start calling it Safari!

I believe you’re preaching to the choir. Should be saying this on the evening news, since it’s most likely those can-barely-turn-on-the-computer surfers who are keeping IE6 alive.

Totally freaks me out when I look at some of our client’s site stats and see 20-35% IE6 users.

That’s too many visitors to walk away from, so we find hacks to make things render well in wheezing-geezer IE6.

The only thing you guys can come up with is some nonsense about CSS selectors, big freaking deal. Really Its like I think Nintendo is the shiznit but I dont appreciate idiots being advocates to the cause. Please provide a valid reason for Ie being banned other than these simple work around issues.

We all know you just ahte Microsoft so much. Dont forget what happened when you wanted to support Google because you ahted yahoo so much. Firefox, Opera, Safari.. God, really. All my benchmarks still make IE the best browser, and this is probably coming from the C++ dropouts running to Web Development, you should be used to inconsistencies by now.

Really, suck it up, because the more I see people quibbling about non-issues the more I feel like the Elites are right for wanting to guide us. Please STFU

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