The idea is to deny large swathes of the web to Internet Explorer 6. If enough people do it, IE6 will become unusable literally overnight. Upgrading to another browser will become a pressing need.
This is a terrible idea, a naive and uninformed approach as it will disadvantage users and most importantly harm accessibility.
As entertaining a thought as it would be to do something like this, it’s realistically only fun for the tech-oriented people behind the scenes. Many areas of business are still mired in IE6-based web/intranet tools and we still have to realistically support these customers. Even when we hate it.
As a designer developer, I’m in hate with the idea of catering to IE6 even once more. Yes it is true that slow to move corporate types are still on the IE6 train and large swaths of internet users don’t understand browsers and will never upgrade unless forced but why, oh why must we perpetuate the bastard child that is this browser? Footing the bill for hours of extra development time to right the ignorant ways of Microsoft (which have it in their power to release a patch that would augment the css and rules engine) is idiotic. The time is nigh to make a stand and once and for all say “fuck IE6”.
—Bm
The only way we can get rid of IE6 surely is through progressive enhancement. Give IE6 users access to the kind of internet they know and expect, but anything else that is cool new technology won’t be available to them unless they upgrade.
I have been trying to let my clients know that the reason they can’t see the transparency on boxes, or still have jaggedy edges on rounded GIF corners is because they are using an old browser that doesnt support transparant PNGs
As much as I’d love to see the back of it too, people have to realise that there a LOT of users out there who are to a degree stuck with it - corporate networks that cant/wont be upgraded - people using older OS’s like 98’ that cant install newer browsers. If they dont want the traffic, they should go right ahead but seriously…
How can anyone justify such a thing? OK, it’s a little annoying that we have to occasionally develop for IE6 but surely it’s bad enough that it’s usres have to make do with slightly broken layouts etc and lack of styling, but to deny the actual content is going too far.
I used to think the “Down with IE6” and “Quit coding for IE6” was a great idea but now I think this approach is flawed.
I work in a call centre and we use IE6, I helped do IE7 testing for some of our applications about 6 months ago but we still haven’t switched.
I find the linked sites attitude disgusting, what about all the people like myself who browse while at work and CAN’T upgrade or change browser?
I recently saw a survey somewhere similar, I think it was actually the Digg blog, and it asked why people didn’t upgrade if they used IE6, and a fair percentage answered it was du to work place restrictions.
Content that CAN be viewed on IE6 should never be unavailable to such a browser.
Then again, I will stop fixing most of the issues of IE6 whenever possible. Why? If the users want a better user experience, then upgrade your browser.
Same goes for work places. It’s basic business logic: If you’re not up to date with the new trends, ideas and technologies, how do you expect to keep up to your competitors? It might be frustrating by the users of such work places to stick to IE6, but sooner or later the company will have to upgrade or face the consequences of using an 8 year old, flawed piece of software.
The only reason IE6 has lasted this long is because we’ve let it do so. LEt IE6users access their information, but with the flaws that the browser gives: broken layouts (as long as the information is still visible, I won’t care anymore), slow rendering times, lack of PNG transparencies and all those nice features everyone else has.
Then again, I really dislike Paul Battley’s attitude.
It’s been some years now the developers gently try to suggest to end-users to upgrade their browsers, and yet, as we see every single day on our stats, IE6’s users are way more than a small percentage.
Extreme situations call for extreme measures, and Paul’s suggestion - following many major players announcements for IE6 support-drop - even with a hint of emotion, is neither naive nor uninformed.
I fail to see the relation between accessibility and the IE6. Undeveloped regions like Africa, China and South Korea, could actually benefit from using a FREE/open-source browser. Users browsing from work, should stick to their archaic intranet tools.We can’t hold back progress and innovation just for a bunch of idiots.
George Katsanos: Extreme situations call for extreme measures, and Paul’s suggestion - following many major players announcements for IE6 support-drop - even with a hint of emotion, is neither naive nor uninformed. I fail to see the relation between accessibility and the IE6.
— Maybe I shouldn’t reply to comments when I’m in a terrible mood, but you asked for it.
First, dealing with a browser, no matter how annoying its bugs might be, is never an extreme situation. Now, look at what Paul actually wrote.
So here’s the plan. First, we put big, obnoxious, obvious banners on all our sites, telling visitors using IE6 of the forthcoming apocalypse. We name a date—September 1st, say—as the day of reckoning. We threaten catastrophe. Then, when D-Day rolls around, we replace the obnoxious banner with something even more hostile: code to crash IE6.Hiding styles from IE6 is one thing. Using Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS is another. Designing around browser differences or ignoring them altogether is one more. All of these, intelligently applied, are mature solutions.
Denying people, any people, who use IE6 for any reason, any, access to information or services on the web is anti-accessible, worse than that it’s naive, uninformed or both. No, even worse than that, it’s unprofessional in every sense.
Here endeth the comment.
TBH, when I read Paul’s article, I didn’t notice the “code to crash IE6” part. I owe to say this is definitely over the line. (a bit far from the line too). For my defense, I was surfing right after an “update your browser websites tour”, following announcements of Youtube.
Concerning the “content denial”, we will have to agree to disagree. Paul -as you already know- wasn’t the first man on earth to make that decision, he is one of the many, in a long list that there’s no need for me to mention right now. As owner of a website, I retain the right to deny content to a browser that simply doesn’t have the ability to deliver that content as initially intended by it’s designer. Especially in the case the website makes use of new fancy CSS3 properties,png-24 etc, then the Universal Internet Explorer 6 CSS method, could prove more harmful than content-denial, considering the ignorant IE6 visitor might actually think “that’s how the page is - and it’s ugly”. Aside from that, it is a very interesting method, maybe applying more to blogs or other type of websites for which presentation is not an important factor to the user experience.
PS: I am not “asking” for anything, I thought (?) this is a constructive debate. Hope your mood gets better as day goes by.
I agree, it’s very unprofessional.
As an aside, the survey was on the Digg blog:
http://blog.digg.com/?p=878“This goes directly to why most folks use IE6: they don’t have a choice. Three out of four IE6 users on Digg said they can’t upgrade due to some technical or workplace reason.”
I think we need to take this into account. We make/design websites for an, at times, unknown audience, we cannot discriminate against some people just because it’s not their fault they are using a browser which is still supported by it’s manufacturers in an environment which does not allow them to upgrade.
I’m always amazed at how little discussion surrounding the IE6 debate surrounds the idea of e-commerce and customer base.
If 10% of your customers are still accessing you on IE6, are you really willing to risk ~10% of your online sales to “fix the web”?
As a developer, I want to see IE6 kick the bucket as much as everyone else does, but I think my professional career might end up cut short if I told the clients I work for that getting people to upgrade to IE6 is more important than their bottom line.
It also doesn’t help that IE7 and even IE8 still have their own quirks even outside of quirks mode. The end of IE6 may mean a brief sense that development is easier, but in the long run we’ll always be compensating for the gray areas and mistakes of different browser implementations, and you know what? I’m okay with that. That’s my job.
One day, I used my phone to visit someone’s site, to test how it would work. They had tables and inline styling, and images instead of text.
On the phone, the page rendered and styled pretty much exactly like it would on a computer; there was a horizontal scrollbar, because the screen was too thin, but I could find my way around and navigate.
Visiting someplace that uses a CSS stylesheet, meanwhile, brings me to a white page with rows of normal text.It’s kind of maddening that the wrong way of doing it actually gives the better results. Will IE6 end up like this, too? Will it just be a white page, because using standards will slowly mean that IE6 can’t see what we’re doing?
It’s already starting to happen. None of my sites have rounded corners in IE, anymore. Soon, other graphics, like gradients, will disappear.
If 10% of your customers are still accessing you on IE6, are you really willing to risk ~10% of your online sales to “fix the web”?What if this 10% forced to upgrade has a better user experience thus buying more? And what if the time you spent writing CSS hacks, is spent optimizing for standards-compliant browsers thus improving usability for the rest 90% of your visitors?
@George
I suppose it all depends on how long it takes you to write “hacks”, what the difference in experience is, and whether or not there’s a direct correlation between browser version and sales performance.
Most people I know who code for IE6 have developed code snippets that work 99% of the time across all browsers including IE6. There’s no development time lost when using tried and true methods. There’s also not much time spent in the rare occasion that you see the double-margin float bug or others when you know immediately how to fix them.
As for user experience, every company and client will be different. Most people who still code for IE6 work within the framework of what IE6 allows them to do, so user experience usually doesn’t differ between IE6 and, say IE8. Do we sacrifice certain features newer browsers allow us to do easier? Yes, but you could argue using CSS3 or browser-specific selectors right now might give a wider range of both positive and negative experience for customers using a site. Say what you will about working with IE6, but if you care enough about making IE6 work you probably are going to have little to no difference in experience between it and the latest version of Safari.
Finally, while easy to type and comprehend, the “better experience” argument is a hard sell for any established company. For a new company I think you could get away with it. People tend not to mind upgrading to experience something new. People will stop buying from you if you ask them to upgrade to do the very same thing they were able to a day earlier without upgrading, especially if they lack the technical knowledge on how to upgrade or are required to go through a third party like IT.
Trust me, I get it. Coding for IE6 sucks. It wastes our time, it holds back the future of the web, and it’s full of buggy behavior. But while there are existing companies getting a percent of their overall web profits coming in through customers using IE6, you will continue to see (poor saps) like me making a living by getting better at working with IE6 until it gives up the ghost. To all of you who can do a part in making that happen sooner, I salute you.
Thanks for your detailed reply Art. I admit that I am not a professional yet, but from my small freelance experience I see what you’re saying.
Anyway, thank god the majority of the web isn’t e-shops, and with MS really trying to push its IE8, there is still hope… The whole “holding back the future of the web” is really my biggest worry, personally.
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