20 ms·
IE6 is dead
- kijin 13y agoAs others have pointed out, IE6 isn't dead yet. Any person or business that is stubborn enough to use IE6 nowadays is probably also stubborn enough to keep using Windows XP for another year or ten. And I'm afraid a lot of us have been complicit in the unusually long life of this dreadful monster, as well as of its just-as-dreadful offspring, IE8. By "us" I mean everyone who has ever developed a website in the last few years and consciously tweaked the code to make it work in an old version of IE. Or anyone who claimed to discontinue support for IE[6-8] but quietly kept fixing IE[6-8]-related bugs in their spare time. Because every time a website tweaks its code for compatibility with an old version of IE[6-8], IE[6-8] gets another drop of unicorn blood to sustain its life. Since the majority of websites even today work relatively well in IE[6-8], the inconvenience of occasional breakage does not outweigh the inertia of IE[6-8] users. Even among people who call themselves programmers, I know of plenty who just don't bother to install updates. They won't act until their pants are on fire. If we really want to kill IE[6-8], we need to set fire to their pants. We can't just sit back and count the days until somebody else (Microsoft) mercifully kills IE[6-8] for us. How about we all agree upon a certain date on which we intentionally break our websites and services for IE6 users? We should bring as many websites on board as possible, just like what happened with the SOPA blackout. Any IE6 user who tries to visit any marginally popular website on or after that date will be refused service and told to 1) upgrade to Windows 7+ and IE 10+, 2) install another browser, or 3) nag their bosses to let them do so. That's right, no Google, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Wikipedia, no reddit, no webmail, no lolcats, no porn (!) anymore for you. Within a month, IE6 will be wiped off the face of the planet forever, and whatever remains will be safely confined to intranets. Just like smallpox. Three months later, we repeat the blackout for IE7. Six months later, we boycott IE8 as well. Don't we, the HN crowd, have the power to pull off a boycott like that? Will it be an ethical thing to do? Will it even be legal? I don't know. It does sound rather perverse to refuse service to IE6 while keeping the website fully accessible for Lynx. But I do look forward to the day when website developers collectively decide to stop being a slave to browser market shares and take the business into our own hands once and for all. Because IE[6-8] deserves it. It has hurt us all a thousand times more than the outgoing CEO of Mozilla has ever hurt gay couples. We can't just sit and wait for it to die. We need to point our keyboards at it and shout Avada Kedavra with extreme prejudice. /daydreaming
- eli 13y ago> If we really want to kill IE[6-8], we need to do something more drastic, and do so with extreme prejudice. How about we all agree upon a certain date on which we intentionally break our websites and services for IE6 users? Maybe for a blog, but I'm not telling 10%+ of my customers to piss off. If the cost of supporting them outweighs the value of their business then I won't support them any more. But I would never intentionally break a site for them.
- vinceguidry 13y agoThese people might be using Microsoft software, but it would be a stretch to call them Microsoft customers. When was the last time they actually coughed up any cash? Besides, this is a bed Microsoft made, so they need to lie in it. The longer people stay with XP / IE 6-8, the worse the Internet gets for everyone. M$ is the only company that can do anything about it, and it's in their best interest to, so they just need to quit dilly-dallying and just do it already. And is 10%+ of the Windows install base really XP???
- eli 13y agoNo, I mean they are my customers! Right now, today, I have 10%+ users on IE6 through IE8. If I can afford to dedicate the resources to support them, I will. I don't believe in punishing users and I certainly don't believe in turning people away if I don't have to. I'm not sure about XP specifically, but I get way more than 10% of my traffic from IE6-8. IE8 alone is over 10% on some of my business news sites. Don't forget IE8 shipped with Windows 7.
- atonse 13y agoI'd be curious to know what that IE6 support involves nowadays. There's a difference between having certain simpler layouts (although that probably affects conversion too), and IE6 actually messing up a purchase flow on an e-commerce site.
- 13y ago
- JetSpiegel 13y agoReports of IE6's death are greatly exaggerated.
- masukomi 13y agoWe run a SAAS app. We recently saw IE4 in our logs. Not a single one of our customers has upgraded past IE8. IE6 is alive and well in many large companies.
- dictum 13y agoConsider the possibility that someone was playing with old browsers.
- pjmlp 13y agoI joined a new project where IE 8 is the lowest required supported browser.
- Gmo 13y agoThis is nothing unusual when you do SaaS aimed at business customers. We have to support IE7 on some of our software, only dropping IE6 a year ago or so ... Other software minimum requirements is IE8, hoping to drop it by the end of this year.
- xyzzy123 13y agoOr their user agent header...
- astrodust 13y agoWindows 2000, maybe? Anything that runs IE4 by default is well past end-of-life and is probably riddled with viruses.
- sirwitti 13y agoit was unconscious for quite a while, so why did it die today?
- Bootvis 13y agoBecause it is off XP life support now.
- PeterisP 13y agoXP has life support turned off, however, it'll still survive for a few years despite that. The end of MS support doesn't seem to have caused any mass migrations off of windows XP, and it will be a long time until it's less popular than windows 8.
- Bootvis 13y agoYes, I'm afraid reports of IE's death have been greatly exaggerated.
- NKCSS 13y agoThe Dutch government recently signed a contact to have MS keep supporting XP with security updates, so it's not dead at all.
- stefs 13y agothe second badge at the bottom (the small one) has its own countdown timer. seems there's an off-by-one-month bug. (i always wondered why some libraries treat jan as 0 but the first day of the month as 1)
- a3n 13y agoTotal guess, maybe 1 is thought of subconsciously in the implementers minds as a name, while number for months are so unlike the month name that they're thought of more like an index.
- dexcs 13y ago"Never passed the ACID test" :) Made my day!
- pmelendez 13y agoThat is actually unclear to me though. ACID1 was even included as an easter egg in IE5 for the Mac [0][1] [0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid1 [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:About_Tasman_IE5_Mac_OS_X.png http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:About_Tasman_IE5_Mac_OS_X....
- szatkus 13y agohttp://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRvAAYjmqkE http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xRvAAYjmqkE
- crucialfelix 13y agomeanwhile IE 5 is alive in Wichita Kansas. Error message received today: HTTP_USER_AGENT': 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Windows NT; DigExt) because the old thing doesn't like URLs without a protocol: //ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js <WSGIRequest path:/ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.8.2/jquery.min.js/
- brazzy 13y agoThis month alone, my site hat 3 visits each by IE 2 and IE 3, 14 by Firefox 1.5 and 11 by Netscape 4.0...
- crucialfelix 13y agoThat's odd. what type of content does your site have ? Because it seems like those browsers would only be run by some tech savvy person doing it as an experiment. I miss Netscape 3. I used to make lots of javascript dhtml/art on it and it had a very ghostly way of twitching.
- toxican 13y agowhat's the benefit of excluding the http:? I'd never seen that prior to a few years ago when the jQuery links started doing it.
- hesselink 13y agoIt's a protocol relative link. So if the page is served over http, it'll be an http link, and if the page is served over https, it'll be an https link. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_relative_URL#Protocol-relative_URLs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protocol_relative_URL#Protocol-...
- bigiain 13y agoAnd it breaks unexpectedly (and sometimes hilariously) when people use it in html email, it turns into a file:// "link".
- owenversteeg 13y agoReports of its death are, from my experience, greatly exaggerated. It's still fairly widely used in businesses; as they say "if it's not broke, don't fix it." (Despite the fact that it is broken on many sites.) For anyone that wants to use a modern CSS framework that supports IE5.5+, check out Min (http://minfwk.com http://minfwk.com). Disclaimer: I made it.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- wslh 13y agoYes, my company precisely does work in running IE6 in newer operating systems such as Windows 7. A case study of why and how we helped Symantec in this area is here http://blog.nektra.com/main/2014/02/12/nektra-escalation-support-for-symantec-workspace-virtualization-swv/ http://blog.nektra.com/main/2014/02/12/nektra-escalation-sup...
- mattmanser 13y agoI know this is a bit pedantic but it's definitely not 'fairly widely' or 'quite a lot' or 'some', there's a tiny, tiny percentage of businesses using it. Our UK website, not aimed at tech savvy, had 0.13% IE6 over the last 2 months compared to 0.32% the year before and when I last looked a significant proportion of that is bots and scrapers pretending to be browsers anyway. Half our traffic comes during the business day (we actually see a significant switch from desktop to tablet/mobile at around 6). For all intents and purposes, certainly for consumer websites, it's dead. For those interested, our IE7 is at 1.72% (we stopped testing IE7 a couple of months ago as we don't have the resource and it was already converting badly any way).
- wslh 13y agothere's a tiny, tiny percentage of businesses using it. Not really. Probably many fortune 500 companies (I know several) continue to use IE6 and pay for virtualizing IE6. That's a significant amount of money in licenses and support. That's why companies such as VMware or Symantec have this feature in ThinApp and SWV.
- pjmlp 13y agoIt was replaced by IE 8.0, long live the king! :(
- WatchDog 13y agoWith the death of XP I would expect to see a usage drop, not only in IE6 but in IE7 and IE8 too. IE8 is the latest version of IE that can be installed on XP, I would assume that most people using IE8 would be XP users. If anyone has data on IE8 OS versions I would be interested.
- JohnMunsch 13y agoFor our app I've been monitoring IE8 usage for the last month. It is almost exactly one-for-one with XP users (YES!) and dropping a little at a time every day. When I first started looking the rolling 30 day average was roughly 15%. It has since dropped below 12%. I would imagine by the end of the year and a wonderful rash of XP viruses and worms, a lot of our customers will have had to drop both of them.
- pjmlp 13y agoExcept it is the browser that comes by default in Vista and Windows 7 installations at the corporate level, so XP has little influence on it.
- higherpurpose 13y agoIt would be better if IE, period, was dead. Otherwise we're just switching one terribly obsolete IE for another terribly obsolete IE.
- ivan_gammel 13y agoWe are writing enterprise web application that uses WebGL for displaying complex 3D models and we think that IE11 is damn good. Thus, I've no idea why are you calling it terribly obsolete.
- dorward 13y agoI had moaning about how backwards IE11 was earlier this week, but last week I was moaning about Safari and the week before it was Firefox. We've reached the point where I'm spending about equal time dealing with bugs in different browsers instead of IE being the source of 95% of all pain. This is a good thing, but I sometimes miss being able to just hate on Microsoft :)
- jenscow 13y agoGive it a year.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y agoYes, then there will be IE12.
- ivan_gammel 13y agoWe'll have IE12 by that time.
- toxican 13y agoMS has made updating the browser a lot easier than it used to be in recent versions. So I don't think we're going to run into any major issues where we have to wait for a new version of Windows to gain popularity before we see a browser version die off.
- spydum 13y agoAt my employer, they finally pushed a full blown enterprise wide upgrade to IE10 with IE11 just around the corner (August). Unfortunately in parallel, they could not get enough people to submit sites that needed compatibility mode, so to prevent massive help desk problems they decided to push USE COMPATIBILITY MODE FOR ALL SITES. This basically downgraded everyone to IE7 mode permanently. So much for progress...
- wil421 13y agoMy Employer does this also, all sites are our intranet switch IE into IE7 compatibility mode. Does matter if the need compatibility mode or not. We recently released a version of the web app I am building and I wish you couldve seen the horror on our faces when we saw the app in IE 7 mode.
- tmm 13y agoWell, unless they actually change it in group policy, this is the default action for IE when it connects to anything on what it considers to be Intranet. You can override this by setting X-UA-Compatible to IE=edge as a HTTP header on your server. The equivalent meta tag is ignored in this situation. Or you could ask IT to change group policy, but I have no idea where that setting might live.
- wil421 13y ago>X-UA-Compatible to IE=edge I believe we added this as a meta tag on the HTML pages, we didnt think of changing the HTTP header on the server. I doubt they will be willing to change the IT group policy because the app we built has a smaller userbase than other apps. That and they are still supporting web apps from the late 90s - early 00s designed for IE 5/6.
- spydum 13y agoYou cannot override "Use compatibility mode for all sites". It's a master switch. No X-UA-Compatible header, No meta tag, and no DOCTYPE will save you from this scourge.
- olegkikin 13y agoJust checked the analytics on a non-IT website: IE represents 10.45% Out of that: IE6 .28% IE7 2.03% IE8 19.81% IE9 16.57% IE10 16.15% IE11 45.13%
- eli 13y agoEveryone needs to do their own math, though. I run a network of news & information sites for business professionals in different industries and the numbers vary a bit, but are almost all much "worse" than your numbers. On utilitydive.com (covering the utility/energy industry) it's 35% IE and of that 40% is IE8. IE6 and IE7 are much less, but they also don't really work with our latest redesign so it's a bit hard to tell.
- apaprocki 13y agoHere's bloomberg.com: IE represents 25.00% IE6 0.11% IE7 3.20% IE8 34.39% IE9 32.94% IE10 16.48% IE11 12.87%
- jackmoore 13y agoThat's really interesting, how did you get these statistics (do you work for Bloomberg, or do they have this publicly available somewhere)?
- apaprocki 13y agoI work for Bloomberg. (And yes, I verified that web guys didn't mind sharing the numbers :))
- capnjngl 13y agoAn apparel client in the US over the last 90 days: IE6 0.07% IE7 1.33% IE8 19.44% IE9 18.67% IE10 16.24% IE11 44.25%
- malyk 13y agoOn a general consumer website since the start of 2014: IE: 32% - 11: 42% - 10: 16% - 9: 18.4% - 8: 20.2% - 7: 2.4% - 6: 0.07%
- mehrdada 13y agoThe zombie certainly still continues to live on shitton of computers across the globe running unauthorized copies of Windows XP for customers who couldn't care less about official support from Microsoft as they never had it in the first place. Yeah, unfortunately.
- sotiris-k 13y agoAs a Web Developer I do not count those people as a potential target group. Or even a subgroup for that matter.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- KhalPanda 13y agoGreat, now we just need to kill IE7... and 8, 9, 10, 11, ad infinitum. :-)
- toxican 13y agoI'd be happy with just 7 and 8 for now. 9+ has usable support of CSS3 at least.
- TazeTSchnitzel 13y ago10+ has WebSocket and strict mode. I'm happy!
- joaodavidmateus 13y agoTime to start http://www.ie7death.com/ http://www.ie7death.com/
- noel82 13y agoThere are at list other 3 version over the 6 that should be erased from the Earth surface. Just assuming someone would keep the last 2. Not me.
- NicoJuicy 13y agoActually, XP has a shorter life-span time here in Belgium (online banking activities are blocked for Windows XP), so people actually buy a newer PC or upgrade their PC for a newer Windows.
- Aardwolf 13y agoAlternatively they could change the user agent?
- NicoJuicy 13y agoThey could do so, but non technical people don't even know what that is :)
- alxndr 13y ago> in Beligium ... online banking activities are blocked for Windows XP Do all the banks agree to shut out XP on their sites? Legal requirement?
- NicoJuicy 13y agoThey say it's because the updates make the OS less secure. So they are all going to disable Win XP because of vulnerabilities. PS. They also don't support linux
- blueskin_ 13y agoTell that to the 23% of people still using XP. Quite a few of those are likely to be IE6 users, primarily due to governments and bureaucratic corporations.
- bluedino 13y agoWe have a large client with over 2,000 'zombie' XP/IE6 machines out there. Ugh.
- amjd 13y agoI have only two words to say: if only. On a positive note, now that Microsoft has officially withdrawn support for Windows XP, IE6 may meet its long overdue death faster.
- awda 13y agoHuh, I just went to the acid3 test in Firefox 28 and it failed. (Animation wasn't smooth, final rendering did not match expected image at all.) Is this surprising? I thought acid3 was a fairly old test.
- talmand 13y agoI ran the acid3 test on my Firefox 28 on OS X and it passed 100/100. Besides, the acid tests are more a worse case scenario and may not be indicative of real-world cases.
- voidlogic 13y agoI just went to acid3 with Firefox 28 and got 100%...?
- awda 13y agoI got "100%" too, but there's multiple criteria for passing: - 100% - Animation is smooth, no stuttering - The final rendering matches the provided image
- Crito 13y agoOn Chrome (Version 32.0.1700.77) it went to 69/100, then a moment later continued to 99/100. I reloaded the page and that time it went all the way to 100 smoothly.
- voidlogic 13y agoIt was smooth for me and matches the reference rendering. Maybe your machine is under powered (Netbook or something?)?
- awda 13y agoXeon E3 1240 v3 (Haswell) ;-).
- 13y ago
- clutterjoe 13y agoIs it 2010 already? http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/04/ie6.funeral/ http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/03/04/ie6.funeral/
- iamthepieman 13y agoI do mostly contract work in the U.S. for state and local governments. The RFP's (Request for Proposals) always say something about using HTML5, responsiveness and the latest web standards. And sometime shortly after (and sometimes before) project kickoff we always see that a large percentage of their employees are using IE8 and we have to support it. I make a point of describing in detail what kind of resources will be required to do both a modern website/app using the latest standards and one that will support IE8. I mention that, for the most part, they are mutually exclusive and I will effectively have to build the site (at least the "modern" parts of it) twice and this will cut back on the features I'm able to implement within the project budget and timeframe. This usually makes the customer take a closer look at their actually IE8/XP install base and I've had several customers decide they would speed up migration from IE8/XP and remove the support requirement for that browser. Just doing my small part to help kill IE8 - one small government agency at a time.
- dclowd9901 13y agoI would think the myriad security holes ie8 presents would be compelling enough a reason.
- iamthepieman 13y agoEspecially now that there are no more security patches. But if you've never worked for a government agency then you might be surprised at: 1. How little management cares about technology as long as it's working. 2. How competent/paranoid some of the sysadmins are and how severely locked down some of these networks are because of it.
- angersock 13y agoYou're fighting the good fight, sir or madam.
- cozuya 13y agoWhile I commend you for finding a way to communicate to your clients in a way that allows you to not develop for IE8, you're not really being truthful. You can use "HTML5" with IE8 as part of html5shiv.js of course and IE8 doesn't need to be responsive - its a desktop browser. In most cases you can almost certainly deliver an IE8 solution without a lot of extra work.
- crisnoble 13y agoAs a dev I have been trying to convince the project managers of the following theory of people who use IE6/7/8. They must fall into one the following categories 1. Windows XP, which does not allow them to upgrade to IE9 AND do not know that other non-sucky browsers exist 2. They work for a company that requires IE8 3. They are masochists who love pain) 4. They are sadists who enjoy dealing out pain to Web developers. Proposed solutions were: 1. Tell them that other browsers have better experiences. 2. Point out that they can usually get around this by using a Chrome frame. Also point out that IE8 is riddled with insecurities and give them a form letter for their IT department asking for an update. 3. They love pain, there is nothing we can do about this. They probably enjoy having incomprehensible boxes instead of icon fonts on half of the sites they visit. Grids be dammed, they love misaligned columns. 4. They probably don’t even use IE8, they (or their botnet) just use a User Agent String that mimics it. These people are asshats, should be ignored at all costs. I felt this was a quite pragmatic approach, needless to say we still support these users and their shoddy experience.
- toxican 13y agoIn regards to your first solution, I keep going back and forth on whether or not it's professional to add a conditional warning that detects an old browser and explains the upgrade process. I know there are some scripts you can throw on your sites that automatically do this, but I'm not sure if that's a good idea.
- crisnoble 13y agogoogleapps, facebook, youtube, nike, among many other gigantic brands seem to think it is just fine to encourage their users to have a better experience.
- jrochkind1 13y agoI didn't realize there was actually an end-of-support date for IE6. Is there one for IE7?
- syncsynchalt 13y agoToday is the end of paid support for IE6. Today is also the end of unpaid support for XP (which I assume includes IE7 - IE8).
- MCarusi 13y agoI really can't say I'll be in mourning over this. I've lost count of how many times I've had to convince clients to upgrade even to IE7 because IE6 isn't compatible with some aspects of WordPress.
- deleted 13y ago[deleted]
- andy_ppp 13y agoHaving to support IE8 Compatibility mode for a bank is worse than IE6 - at least IE6 issues and fixes are documented. IE8 Compatibility mode is a world of pain, add in some proxy servers and latency sensitive JS and you have a fun fronted time.
- giarc 13y agoIt's not dead. I work for a large health organization (100,000+ employees) and IE6 is still the default browser. Users can manually update. Needless to say, but I'm still using XP.
- taude 13y agoI'm currently working in a very heavy enterprise space, most fortune 100 banking/insurance, etc. companies use our software. Our requirements are only IE9+. I'd be scared of the legacy companies that need older support
- BenefitOfDoubt 13y agoI never understood why IE updating lags so far behind. It is free. I understand why updating the OS is a bigger deal. It costs money and is a huge change that involves a lot of work for some. I suppose Microsoft is partially to blame. You can install any version of Chrome and Firefox on XP, but only up to IE8.
- alashley 13y agoIs it though?
- jongalloway2 13y agoIf you're maintaining sites that are difficult to upgrade, I'd recommend looking at IE11 Enterprise Mode. It lets you run with pretty good IE8 compatibility (e.g. ActiveX) in IE11, taking advantage of improved speed, security, and base OS improvements. 20 slide deck: http://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=http%3a%2f%2fvideo.ch9.ms%2fsessions%2fbuild%2f2014%2f2-559.pptx http://view.officeapps.live.com/op/view.aspx?src=http%3a%2f%... docs: http://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn640687.aspx http://technet.microsoft.com/library/dn640687.aspx good blog post: http://love2dev.com/#!article/The-New-Internet-Explorer-Enterprise-Mode-or-Why-You-Should-Never-Use-IE-8-Anymore http://love2dev.com/#!article/The-New-Internet-Explorer-Ente...
- talles 13y agoThe browser we love to hate. The version we love to hate. Interesting (see footer) how many of those site were out there.