Why the fuck are people still using IE6?

[Spaff]

It was released in 2001, surely they have found time in the seven fucking years since then to upgrade or something....

I know marek had issues with Adventuregamers, something like 10% of the readers were using it.

On littlebigplanetoid we put a semi rude message that displays over the top of the site telling you to upgrade or the site won't work.

we recieved this lovely message hehehe.

From assholes@littlebigplanetoid

Fuck you with your browser banner. You idiots.

Nice... dude, you're that guy who throws spears at planes flying over head. Edited December 6, 2008 by Spaff

[Marek]

Funny. Had EXACTLY the same happen today:

http://www.adventuregamers.com/forums/showthread.php?t=23696

[Nachimir]

dude, your'e that guy who throws spears at planes flying over head.

The banner on the site should so include this

[ysbreker]

Thank the big corporations for that. They're the lazy fucks that don't want to update their intranet software that runs on IE6. I'll bet when IE8 comes out next year it will replace IE7 faster than it will IE6. Sad but true

[Erkki]

I still use IE6 for sites that don't work in Firefox (few of those, mostly some intranet shit of corporations as ysbreker said )

[David]

To provide an example for ys's point: At my last job (a travel company I did web stuff for), they spent millions of dollars and years of development to build a booking system for reservations agents...that only worked in IE6. People in that department who upgraded themselves to IE7 had to have a visit from the IT dude to downgrade back to 6

Thankfully the web team at least didn't have to worry about that shit.

[DanJW]

When I worked in QA, we had an initiative from IT to replace IE6 with Firefox (obviously IE was still there somewhere, if you knew where to look, but most testers didn't... computer literacy was not a requirement for foreign language testers....)

Anyway, it turns out that almost all the online bug reporting databases used by our clients would only work with IE6. So It had to convinced to roll back the changes. Just one of example of the wonderful joined-up thinking enjoyed by that company.

[elmuerte]

IE dependencies was one of the worst computer science mistakes ever, it's even worse than adding semantics to whitespace for a non esoteric programming language.

However... there are still a shit load of people these days happily entering a serious vendor lock.

[Thrik]

Heh, god — don't even get me started on IE6. For two years I've had to build dozens of sites at work that work flawlessly in that trash, even the ones that need PNGs and other such fanciness.

I keep egging it on to fall down a cliff and die forever, but that usage statistic does nothing but climb down carefully.

One saving grace is that companies with ridiculous software dependencies can use IETester now, allowing them to use IE6 (or even 5.5) alongside any other version of IE; ideally IT departments should encourage this so general browsing is done in a secure, up-to-date browser. This is naturally how I test sites in IE6, too.

[Wrestlevania]

I could likely quantify the amount of professional time IE6 has cost me to date in mother-fucking years.

[ysbreker]

One saving grace is that companies with ridiculous software dependencies can use IETester now, allowing them to use IE6 (or even 5.5) alongside any other version of IE; ideally IT departments should encourage this so general browsing is done in a secure, up-to-date browser. This is naturally how I test sites in IE6, too.

I don't trust that kind of software. Ive heard from people at microsoft that you usually end up with horrid hybrids. IE7 with the javascript engine from IE6 or IE6 with the javascript engine from 7. The best and most sureway to test in IE6 is using the virtual machines MS provides for free. Get it here

[Wrestlevania]

It's absolutely true; I created a "ring-fenced" version of IE6 once, for evolt.org, and it suffered from exactly this problem.

+1,000,000 for actually using properly virtualised browsers, running on the OS they were designed for.

[ysbreker]

OH and if you're lazy/don't have the space/don't have the CPU power/Don't have the RAM there is allways http://browsershots.org

[elmuerte]

not really useful for anything that isn't 100% static

[Thrik]

I don't trust that kind of software. Ive heard from people at microsoft that you usually end up with horrid hybrids. IE7 with the javascript engine from IE6 or IE6 with the javascript engine from 7. The best and most sureway to test in IE6 is using the virtual machines MS provides for free. Get it here

I'm not a big fan of virtual machines because there's a relatively high overhead for what's not a particularly big job, plus it can be complicated if you're trying to test sites on a local version of IIS through the virtual machine (Let me know if there's actually a way round this!).

Testing in a virtual machine at some stage is good, and indeed we have native installations of all supported browsers so they can be tested properly — including a Mac. However in my experience thus far IETester produces identical results to the native versions, making it little more than a formality.

To clarify, IETester doesn't suffer from the JavaScript engine mix-ups that you describe; it ships with the appropriate engine for each version. It's a much better solution than the hack-job that was MultipleIE (no longer works acceptably in Vista anyway).

[n0wak]

I don't trust that kind of software. Ive heard from people at microsoft that you usually end up with horrid hybrids. IE7 with the javascript engine from IE6 or IE6 with the javascript engine from 7. The best and most sureway to test in IE6 is using the virtual machines MS provides for free. Get it here

This is true, but it's no less asinine. Microsoft got in a lot of shit for being anti-competitive by integrating the browser into the OS and, years later, it's the same old shit. That's the problem with IE6. Most web developers are waaay ahead of the curve when it comes to web technologies than the average user and by integrating the browser into the OS and not making it possible to run multiple stand-alone versions, they've made it a complete bitch to test for.

I had to clear out some IE6 errors this week myself

Still, all the annoyances the inconsistencies in IE6 are nothing compared to the shit we had to deal with when Netscape 4 was still a valid option and people on Macs used Internet Explorer 5:fart: (which rendered things in vastly different ways than IE5 or 5.5 on PC)

Also, there's this:

http://24ways.org/2008/the-ie6-equation

Which can be useful, I guess, but I generally prefer to avoid browser-specific code or conditionals. There are CSS workarounds to most everything as long as you aren't anal about things looking 100% the same across every browser. Unfortunately, I work with a lot of designers with a print background