YouTube Puts Another Nail in the Coffin of IE6Many developers are familiar with problems of making a perfectly standard website display properly in Internet Explorer 6 browser. Usually a development process would consist of testing the site in Firefox or another standard compliant browser. Then, after opening it up in IE6, one would need to figure out why in the world it’s not displaying properly; trying to adjust the HTML/CSS code or applying some IE6-specific hacks to the code that have been known to work.
In years past, the most difficult part was to try to explain to a client why one should not use IE6. You would be lucky to find a client who is somewhat technically sound and would listen to you. But most of the time, they don’t really know or care what “W3C standard compliance” means for them, or what a browser is, in the first place. Microsoft made a genius marketing decision by putting the word “Internet” in their browser name, and to most non-technical people “Internet Explorer” is Internet.
Most importantly, the clients cared that IE has been the most popular web browser, and thus could not be ignored. At the end of the day this just meant extra time and headache for web developers (some horror stories have people spending up to 30% of their development time on IE6 fixes and adjustments).
Google has recently announced that it is dropping support for the Internet Explorer 6 browser on March 13. If you visit youtube.com in the IE6 browser you will now see a big exclamation message in red: “Your browser will be unsupported soon. Please upgrade to a modern browser.”, along with links to a few browsers to upgrade to. This is following a previous announcement of Google Docs and other Apps dropping support for IE6 on March 1st.
In the recent years, since the release of IE7 and IE8 there has been a push from the internet community to at least make the public upgrade their Internet Explorer browsers (if not switch from IE altogether), which included even tricking the visitors to upgrade their browsers.
Over the last two years the usage of IE6 has been dwindling down. But it still consists of 10-20% of the web usage depending on which resource you trust. So recently the problem has been getting better, but once in a while you still run into a client who is using IE6 and it is usually not a pleasant discussion.
Since now the developers have upgraded, and test the site in IE8, most don’t even care about IE6 anymore, until they run into a client who is using one; at which point the discussion begins of why the client is seeing weird things, and then eventually leads to developers trying to convince the client to drop the IE6 requirement. Some, after having learned their lesson, are even putting ‘No IE6 support’ in the initial proposal, to insure that no extra time will be spent on it after the development is over.
One of the biggest users of IE6 (besides old people) are many company employees who do not have permissions to upgrade their browsers at their work. This is a job for their IT department, and often times an IT upgrade of any kind for a company means spending money. In this case one really needs to push the ‘non-security’ aspect of IE6 to an employee hoping that it will get to the top. After all, no company wants to deal with viruses or potential data leaks. There is a speculation that the most recent hacking of Google by Chinese Government came from the security vulnerability of IE6. Thus Google’s recent announcements to drop support for IE6, does not seem like a mere coincidence.
So how does YouTube’s dropping support for IE6 help you and your developers? Well for one, it should be easier for you to convince the clients (or your bosses) to forget about IE6 and upgrade, if they still use it. Google and many other huge websites dropping IE6 really makes it legitimate. Before, it was just your word against theirs. Now you can cite examples of other companies dropping IE6 with Google being the biggest of them all. Another good stat to share is to show them how the usage of IE6 has been decreasing over the recent years.
During these discussions it is also a good idea to mention that they should always try to upgrade their browsers (especially Internet Explorer) to newest versions to avoid being outdated. People usually upgrade the things in their daily lives often, such as cell phones, gadgets, and even cars. Why should a browser be any different. Educating them to stay away from Internet Explorer in general may also be a good idea. IE7 has some problems with CSS rendering, especially with CSS dropdown menus (although not as many problems as IE6). Also, the fact that none of the IE browsers support HTML5 or CSS3 functionalities, really makes out IE to be the big anchor holding back the innovation on the web. After all, developers cannot fully build websites with new HTML5 or CSS3, if IE doesn’t support them and people are still using IE.
By choice, I haven't done a full-on design project in 9 months (wow), but I am SUPER-excited about this. Next design proposal that I do will only include support for IE7, IE8, FF, Safari, and Chrome? What a breeze that will be!
It may or may not be intentional, but that graphic looks spookily like an abstract version of the Firefox logo :)
I don't think that was a coincidence. The creator must be a Firefox fan :)
IE6 must end! I was recently at a meeting and was going to show the client some of our projects but saw the little non-yellow bolt through it IE logo and immediately had to basically hush up. Then I started talking about how much of a piece of crap IE 6 is and how it is more than 8 years old. He then told me how his dopey IT department has control of it. I am sure this all too common and leads to generally highly negative meetings and it's really frustrating.
IE6 really needs to just go away. Let Google Chrome take over.
I concur with Youtube and the other commentors if you are not using Firefox, then my goodness at least use the latest IE browser. If you are two versions back on anything on your computer then shame on you.
yup, youtube force me to upgrade my IE6
Akismet is blocking from 10e20.com any of our grad students who use toyperiod.com as a home page.
Let me explain.
With few exceptions, our business graduate students have been rejected by sites using Akismet.
All it takes is one request from a blogger anywhere for Akismet to ban any home site, whether the blogger is delivering spam or not. (None of our graduate students deliver spam. They are very intelligent commenters who like and enjoy your site, but have stopped visiting here, because Akismet is blocking them on your behalf.)
I am taking the time to write this because I believe your blog to be of high quality, and one from which both you and our graduate students would profit.
If you wish to have our grad students resume visiting your blog, please e-mail me at the College at avoisin@lindachristas.org, and I will place you on our faculty chart as a welcoming blog.
However, Akismet will have to lift the ban on ToysPeriod for you, or you will have to unplug your blog from Akismet.
The person to write to is Alex Shiel at Akismet at support@akismet.com
If you have not blocked ToyPeriod personally, that is even worse. Akismet has been known to universalize blocking.
That is, if one blogger anywhere reports a home page as spam, from then on, ANY person using that website as home page is blocked.
I do hope to hear from you.
If you ever wish to monetize your blog, Akismet will at some time or another have to be disconnected. Otherwise, as with our grad students, visitors will continue to be blocked, even if it is the first time they have ever visited your good site.
Dr. Ann Voisin
Linda Christas College
Actually, I am not really disappointed. I never was a fan of IE. I use IE only in the university, where Firefox or Opera are not installed.
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Dear Victor,
This was my response to two so-called SEO consultants who just don’t get it. All LC students are on the same IP. Leone
Response to charge that Dr. Ann is a spammer:
Go ahead and laugh away guys. You are attacking the wrong bad guy and laughing in your foolishness in public.
Next time, before going public with your support for something of which you know little, perhaps you will understand two things:
1) Akismet is under investigation by the American Civil Liberties Union
2) Akismet is terrible for business in that they trash prospective clients sight unseen.
Dr. Voisin’s (Our provost) interest was strictly stoked because ToysPeriod does provide several of our students with scholarship money.
They never spammed anyone in their lives. You would know this simply by doing appropriate research.
However, Akismet has banned them, again anonymously, and for no stated public reason other than they can.
Didn’t you ever feel sorry for a wounded puppy, a small helpless beast being kicked just because it is helpless.
Well, that’s what Dr. Ann was reacting to.
Here we have a vendor minding its own business, generously supporting students, and Akismet comes along and bans them anonymously, no stated reason except someone somewhere, evidently decided that their messages (which they never sent) are spam.
Jeez guys, when you get something wrong, you REALLY go out of your way to bring attention toy your errors in public.
Leone Class of ’12 Linda Christas College
I tried to get an RSS Feed to the website and I am not sure why, but it is not displaying in Google Chrome. Does anyone have any ideas?