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YC startups unite to drive nail into the coffin of Internet Explorer 6
- ujeezy 17y agoI hate IE6 as much as the next guy, but not everyone has the option to switch: http://blog.digg.com/?p=878 http://blog.digg.com/?p=878
- drusenko 17y agoFrom my comment on VB: "That's exactly the idea. Even if a bunch of the remaining IE 6 users are corporate, hopefully a few of them will become aware of the fact that their browser is almost 9 years old and start putting pressure on IT to upgrade." The more prompts that are posted across the web, the more pressure the IT department will be getting to get their ass in gear and upgrade their decade old computer systems.
- jgilliam 17y agoI've heard that IE6 is prevalent within the federal government.
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoI'm guessing most of the remaining IE6 installs are inside corporations and government departments and are necessary to run legacy internal web applications.
- drusenko 17y agoAgain, same reply: "That's not an excuse. IE 8 comes with a "compatibility mode" feature where any site can choose to use the IE 6 rendering engine by setting headers or meta tags appropriately."
- RyanMcGreal 17y agoGreat! Explain that to IT. :)
- fname 17y agoTrue... but not by choice since some government agencies are still using Windows 2000 (which doesn't support IE7+). Some might say a move to FF would be beneficial, but the overhead of having to manage and secure FF is far greater when they can just stay on IE6.
- pg 17y agoThis is the biggest example I've seen of the network of YC alumni organizing to do something. YC itself didn't organize this or even know about it. I've been looking forward to seeing what this type of network can do that a traditionally hierarchically structured organization can't.
- lawrence_ll 17y ago2^n chicks at the same time, man.
- vaksel 17y agoI dunno, Google seems to have beaten them to the punch and no matter their culture, I'd still call them a traditionally hierarchically structured organization
- rantfoil 17y agoWhat punch did we get beaten to, exactly?
- whatusername 17y agoDoesn't google show Chrome ads on google.com and youtube.com for users with IE6. They have a couple more page views than the YC alumni network.
- gdee 17y ago>> Doesn't google show Chrome ads on google.com and youtube.com for users with IE6. They do. I for one, wish they'd stop doing it for FF users too though. It's getting really annoying.
- vaksel 17y agothe whole convincing people to start abandoning IE6 thing
- psawaya 17y ago
- there 17y agofrom the comments: You do realize that a large portion of people that are using IE6 are at work where they have NO control over the browser... i hear this every time the ie6 argument comes up, and yet, i've never heard from someone that actually works in one of these IT departments that can vouch for this. who are these unsympathetic robots who, while ironically working in an IT department, are so out of touch with technology that they fail to understand their users are stuck using insecure, out-of-date software that is now increasingly being blocked? are these users still using 500mhz machines with windows 98, too?
- alaskamiller 17y agoNot even the US military subject itself to the stupidity that is IE6.
- ddispaltro 17y agoIBM's "supported" browser is still only IE6 last time I checked which was about a year ago...
- tripngroove 17y agoI applaud everyone who participates in this for having the gumption to add some inertia to the situation. It's ok to give the plebs some incentive to user better, safer technologies. And furthermore, three cheers for the realization that small, progressive companies can use consumer impact to positively change the greater technological environment and accelerate the pace of widespread adoption. Booya!
- brandon272 17y agoUnfortunately, there are a huge number of corporate environments that have virtually no reason to upgrade their browsing platforms. Many of these environments don't even really have a technical reason to not do the upgrade, they are just administered by overworked staff and upgrading IE6 to something newer and safer is just at the bottom of the list. The bottom line is that until the end users who have to use IE6 every day become inconvenienced enough (in the form of sites blocking them out, not warning them) or the people who pay these IT admins actually think it's a priority, we're not going to make much headway on this issue. With that said, I think that initiatives like this are a great start. What I would like to see is a distributed technical effort to encourage upgrades, which is what they are doing, followed up a technical effort to block access to IE6 starting on a specific date. Let the note of encouragement that participants place on their sites let users know that unless their browser is upgraded, they will be unable to access the site as of June 1, 2010. Eventually these IT admins will be placed in the position of having to choose between keeping IE6 to support their legacy intranet applications and upgrading IE6 because third party sites have started to implement functionality that IE6 doesn't support.
- jon_dahl 17y agoOne of my clients ships software to such an organization - several of our users had IE6 installed when Training day rolled around. Interestingly, rather than going through Tech Support to request an upgrade to IE7 (which takes a while), the users opted to just download Firefox.
- trapper 17y agoYou are luckier than us - some of our customers machines are so locked down that they can't even change the date let alone install firefox. We even tried using portable apps on a usb stick, no luck there either! Arrgh.
- andyking 17y agoSomeone installed Firefox on a computer at a non-profit radio station I was involved with not so long ago. The owner of the station sent an email to all saying that if he found out who had installed the "firefox trojan" on the office PC, he would "sue them and call in the police". A few days later, all computers in the building had been downgraded from IE8 to IE6 and locked down so users couldn't even reboot. It's now official policy in that company that if anyone puts their own USB drive into an office computer, they'll be asked to leave the station. There is electrical tape stuck over the USB ports. That's the sort of mindless, dribbling paranoia you're up against.
- jcdreads 17y agoSo I wonder why Opera isn't that list of suggested replacements? Minority browser, for sure, but it has worked pretty well in my few stints with it.
- bradgessler 17y agoI think you answered your own question: "Minority browser, for sure ..."
- drusenko 17y agoThere's only so much space to design a widget that works for 640x480 resolution. We're already recommending 4 browsers, many others didn't make the cut (Opera, Konqueror, Flock, etc)
- rawr 17y agoOooh, look out! A bunch of companies with no established user bases are going to boycott you! This will get the grannies to upgrade their computer machines for sure.
- emmett 17y agoIt's not a boycott, just a dismissible nag message. Did you read the article? Also, the number of people from these startups is approximately (data from quantcast): 4.1 million (jtv us) + 1.3 million (weebly us) + 1.7 million (reddit us) + 1.3 million (posterous) + 0.5 million (disqus us) = 8.9 million US people. Global reach is probably 2-3x that much, but quantcast doesn't offer global numbers for all of them (JTV has 26 million globally). I'd say that counts as an established user base.
- Jem 17y agoPerhaps I'm misreading your analysis but it seems to me you're suggesting that the US visitor count for each of those sites is 8.9 million people total? I would suggest it's actually much lower - the chances are that the people who use reddit are the same sorts of people that use posterous and disqus (and so on). You're potentially counting 1 person who uses all 5 sites as 5 separate people. The problem I see is that - particularly for reddit, posterous and disqus - the audience is mostly technical (or at least fairly Internet literate). These are not the types of people who need to warned about IE6.
- deleted 17y ago[deleted]
- mattmaroon 17y agoIsn't just about everyone left using IE6 a corporate user whose employer won't let them upgrade? While I'd love to see the death of IE6 & 7 as much as anyone, I think most people using IE6 probably have firewalls that block Reddit and Justin.tv. On the other hand, this certainly cannot hurt.
- nico 17y agoWow, I hadn't checked my site stats for a while, I thought IE6 browser share was a lot higher. For me it's ~18% of total visits, ~30% IE7, ~12% IE8, 30% Firefox, 7% Chrome, 2% Safari.
- fhub 17y agoFor 'drop in code', it would be nice if they cleaned it up a bit... Removed redundant whitespace in css, redundant white space between divs and used better quoting e.g. the following <a href='#' onclick='javascript:this.parentNode.parentNode.style.display='none'; return false;'> could be written as:- <a href='#' onclick="this.parentNode.parentNode.style.display='none'; return false"> Wouldn't be suprised if the same effect could be created in 1/2 the size (pre deflate/gzip).
- Klonoar 17y agoWhat if we already provide a notice for all IE6 users to switch, just not using your widget? We've been advocating that all users drop IE6 at http://webs.com/ http://webs.com/ since December. Are you only listing those who've thrown up your widget?
- cakesy 17y agoNo, they have scoured the entire web, all trillion websites, and analyse who has been doing what. Don't worry, your logo will appear in a few minutes.
- Klonoar 17y agoWhile I heartily support your attempt at feeling significant by coming across as an arrogant prick, my original question was moreso along the lines of "are you guys restricting the featured sites to those using the code you've provided?". I haven't seen that explained yet, hence why I asked. ;P
- quellhorst 17y agoI plan on doing this for my startup also.
- gcheong 17y agoMaybe they can tackle Apple's app store review process next.
- makecheck 17y agoI wonder how many organizations use separate test environments; because parallelism is really useful for this kind of migration. In the case of IE6, it would mean setting up some machines with $NEXT_GEN_BROWSER and some side servers with copies of the antiquated "web" apps. Gradually, everything that's broken without IE6 is fixed by tinkering with the side copy that no one is really using. Sometimes, the company's been really stupid and doesn't even have source code, etc. so "tinkering" might really mean "try something new entirely", but at least they'd be showing interest in modernizing (however long it takes). The simple fact is that all companies should have this kind of "beta flow", in which they can basically try whatever they want (time permitting). Today it's IE6, tomorrow it could be something entirely different; there will always something new that "might" vastly improve efficiency, and a company that can give these things an honest trial is way ahead. I cringe when I see change-averse IT groups, because deep down I know they're shooting themselves in the foot.
- ErrantX 17y agoOnce again this is fairly pointless. The vast majority of machines running IE6 have requirements that see no advantage to an upgrade. Example: corporate machine where the internet is not used - in that case an IE upgrade is pointless, but the employee might still surf the web. How many home users are still using IE6? I doubt all that many TBH.
- c00p3r 17y agoStill using IE6 means avoiding forced updates from MS, so, they probably were disabled security updates. It means they are the source of bootnets and hosting for trojans and viruses.