Save the Developers! Stop Using Internet Explorer 6

Or alternatively, Stop using FireFox.

I can understand the frustration with the non-compliance of IE. But why are other browsers almost always shut out in recommendations? Try Firefox? Why not Opera?

Great point. I can’t believe there are still more people on IE6 than IE7… I thought that MS monopoly allowed them to push their new software to people!
How to make your 2.0 website work on IE6: 1) Put your head next to the wall 2) Hit the wall with your head 3) Repeat ad lib.

Opera? Supporting Opera buys you 2% of the market. I don’t know of any dev’s that test on Opera.

Firefox does more harm to the developers than all IE’s combined, in terms of time wasted over all these years, and continue to waste developers time.

I am amazed to see that firefox has that large a percentage of the market. I would love to geta sampling from say weather.com or something showing browser statistics, I am sure firefox is not that high.

Firefox is not that high on a non-technical site….15-20% tops….

But, in any case, IE7 sucks beyond sucking. Just like Vista sucks beyond sucking. People don’t want to “upgrade”….

I’m not sure what’s up with w3school’s numbers, but for my high-traffic consumer-oriented sites IE7 beats IE6 2-to-1. It’s about time a movement like Save The Developers reached critical mass. I’ve placed the popup code (note, it’s not a real popup and won’t be affected by popup blockers) on my web design firm directory.

This is good,

but..
For a more effective campaign, we all should ban IE6 users with a lovely message + link to Microsoft Downloads site ..

Anyone ? JK ..

It’s easy to understand. ie7 (which is a great browser by the way) comes as an optional download on windows update and you need to have a valid Windows XP license to get it.

Most of the people who do not upgrade from ie6 either are not web savvy enough to feel the need and/or haven’t paid their XP licenses and do not care about firefox or opera.

hell, I still have a small percentage(around 1% of IE users) using versions 4 and 5. About 30% are using version 6

I know that some users insist on using IE6 over IE7 due to what they feel is an “unwelcomed improvement” with security notices. Sites with self-signed or otherwise invalid certificates, as well as sites that simply encrypt only some content (ahem, Google) turn IE7 into an incessant nagging machine.

Realistically 99% of the type of companies/startups that Techcrunch targets are being used by people who are more tech savy than to have an older browser.

Why not just code for IE 7 and if you get a user with IE6 put up a big ass warning telling them to upgrade. Make it really obnoxious too, like a huge red box that say upgrade to IE7 or Firefox

As a developer who spent the Ester weekend trying to solve IE6 related issues I’d love to see everyone make the switch. But alas we can’t upgrade at work becuase a significant amount of enterprise software only works on IE6. Until that changes I will be stuck with IE6 at work. Unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as just encouraging people to upgrade. I’d love to but I can’t.

At home it is a different story.

How did IE5 usage go UP 0.2%??

What a stupid idea… I’m sure these “developers” are going to go out and install updates on grandmas’ computers all over the place. Developers do not dictate the needs of the market, they respond to them.

This is nothing more than wishful thinking.

Good news, now if we can get rid of small but very vocal 5% who use Opera & Safari, all will be well….

Reset css like yahoo ui make it trivial to make your site look roughly the same in all browsers.

I’m still using ie6 for the ietab firefox plugin.

My company’s site, aimed at US corporate users:

52.6% IE6
33.4% IE7
8.4% Firefox 2.0
2.2% Netscape 4.0 (!!!)
1.6% Safari
0.4% IE5
0.5% Firefox 1.5
0.2% Opera 9
0.2% IE4

I was in a VCs office last week and their stock computers had IE6 on them.

1) haha
2) I wonder how much of the IE6 marketshare is from IT departments that haven’t upgraded their company’s software yet vs. home users who haven’t upgraded

I’ll second that and I’ll add resolution to the mix. Anyone that accesses a site from a computer with 800×600 should be taken directly to a display vendor’s website.

And 1024X768ers, you’re next!

Sounds like typical developers whining to me…the market drives what people want to use. as long as the market doesn’t see a need to upgrade, they’re not going to just to satisfy the inconveniences of developers. the world works on a “what’s in it for me” mentality and until there is some perceived value, in the consumer’s eyes, to switch, there is no incentive for them to switch…”save the developers”? don’t waste your time. figure out a way to solve your problem and don’t expect others to solve it for you.

“Redirect Loop

“Firefox has detected that the server is redirecting the request for this address in a way that will never complete.”

So much for linking to that site, then.

It could be because Microsoft never pushed it out to everyone. I have two systems with automatic updates turned on. Every second tues. of the month i make sure they get updated. I have NEVER received IE7 from Microsoft. I don’t really care since I’m a Firefox user anyway, but still there is no exuse for Microsoft not pushing it out to everyone. Also, I’d bet you a majority of IE6 users are corporations and not the general public.

@DaveS: Leaving out the fact that W3 Schools only publishes “market share” stats for their domain, ignoring the 2% of Opera *desktop* users also means your site may or may not work on a host of other devices from Sony Ericsson, Nokia and Motorola phones to the Nintendo Wii.

But I hope you’re at least coding according to standards. If that’s true, testing in Opera should be relatively painless and give you some added peace of mind.

it doesn’t matter if they are corporate users or the general public. they are the consumers in the market. until they feel a need to switch and a perceived value, they won’t switch.

It is the consumer best interest to upgrade. Why? Because it helps new entrants on the market. And, as a consumer, you want more choice.

So, it is not just “Save the Developers” — It is also “Help the Consumers”.

Dwight - The problem is that most people think a browser is a browser. As long as they can see one site on it, they assume that if another site doesn’t work, it’s the fault of the developer.

How many times do you think the general computer user says, “wow, i really need to update my browser b/c it will add X value”

I’m not sure I trust that Firefox is 30%, I think most of the numbers I’m used to seeing are closer to 15% ….. IE6 DOES suck…..creates a lot of work to make sure everything appears correctly in sites using it, but it can’t be ignored with a third of the population using it. Ultimately end users don’t care and shouldn’t care about the effect this has on developers, so when these people upgrade their computers or their tech guy or kids upgrade for them, THEN the problem is solved, not when developers tell them to upgrade. Microsoft is already telling them to upgrade in most cases and they don’t, so they are comfortable and clearly don’t see using IE6 as an issue.

How many of those are corporate users? I am willing to bet a big percentage of those are large enterprise desktops where the user has no control over what software is installed.

Virtually I am already part of it…My blog doesnt work on IE6… I refuse to support this browser …lets call it to sack IE6!

Jean HR - i do agree with your comment at the highest level but…

1. users aren’t savvy enough to understand what is always in their best interests.

2. one could argue that consumers don’t always want more choice. if their needs are being met at a price/cost that gives them the perceived value they need, they make the purchase. eventually, this builds loyalty to that brand/product and the introduction of choice provides no perceived value. there are many examples in the business world where an intruder into the market (more choice) created chaos and destroyed the market. too many choices leads to consumer paralysis which is very poor for the market. FYI…this has happened in the world of insurance, brokerage houses, financial institutions, fashion. what consumers really want is a product that has been turned into a commodity or they want inovation that will improve “something” in their lives. i’m not sold that upgrading to ie7 provides for either of those needs.

also, a pop-up, as being suggested by the save-developers organization would not persuade any one of the value of changing. most people don’t even read them.

lastly…bad acronym for save the developers…STD…

The thing that really irks me is that even before IE7, Microsoft had ample opportunity to fix long-standing IE6 bugs (e.g. alpha transparency pngs) with their update process but did not.

The stats above represent browser usage among people that visit the w3schools site (web developers), not the general public. In reality, one should expect that the IE6 percentage is even higher and FF to be lower.

To get a more accurate view, one would need to get stats from a broad-based consumer site, like Amazon or Yahoo. Anyone aware of such stats?

One problem is that ie7 is not available on windows 2000. Before you force everyone to upgrade to vista, remember your (grand)parents who are likely running windows 98 or mac os9.

It’s kind of a Chicken and the Egg situation though. A lot of developers, like myself, keep IE6 installed so that we can use it for testing purposes. My main browser is Firefox and I keep IE6 going so I can test things to see if they work.

There is no real point for me to move to IE 7 because 1) It doesn’t have as much market share and 2) It’s a lot easier to fix any incompatibility issues with design. I simply just wait till the end, and do my IE 7 testing…

matt - you are exactly right…there is no perceived value in one versus the other so why upgrade? i use ie6 and it satisfies probably 99% of all my needs. i don’t really care about the additional cost and/or burden being placed on developers because i don’t bear that cost and/or burden as an end user.

now…you may argue that my cost is driven higer to transact due to the higher costs that developers must charge…but i can assure you that if a organization required ie7 they would charge no less to a consumer (corporate or otherwise) simply because of that fact. they may have improved their cost structure by a few 100’s of a percent but that’s probably it. nothing would happen to the actual cost to the end user meaning…no perceived benefit by the end user.

Admittedly we underestimated the strong community behind the Opera browser. Our intentions thus far have been to provide the common user with a path of least resistance (hence such a large Internet Explorer 7 button). Since we want SaveTheDevelopers.org to speak to the interests of developers and the community in general, we’re adding an Opera link to the page as I write this. Please feel free to send additional suggestions and requests to info [at] savethedevelopers.org.

Matt #22, you should think that people outside the US and Europe not always have a 19″ flat screen…

There’s a lot of irony in how backwards-compatible web apps have to be …

As a Firefox devotee, I’m happy to see that usage among TC visitors is so high. In less technical circles, though, our experience is that IE is still dominant, including the dreaded IE6.

Here’s the latest breakdown for Bplans.com, our free content site for creating business plans:

43% IE7
34% IE6
18% Firefox
5% other

this is down to Microsoft and the validation of windows before you could download it. I thought they had fixed this and were going to roll it out to all users that had auto update on no matter the status of their windows.

Its not that bad, once you know its limitation you just build in a ie 6 stylesheet switch.

I’ve got to second the info that corporate users are probably the highest percentage of users that have not upgraded their end users to IE7. I know quite a few places that haven’t due to IE7’s incompatability with some of thier web framework (and all of these places us SAP framework in question). So they are waiting for the framework to meet the browser demands.

My personal opinion is that all websites should block old browsers from seeing their site so that you are required to upgrade. What would buisnesses do when the site’s their employees are needing to do their job are blocked because the IT department or framework developers don’t anticipate these publicly milestoned upgrades.

This is nothing more then a marketing opportunity for them to sell t-shirts.

wake up, people

all - thanks for an intersting thread/conversation…

parting shot - Trae…that wouldn’t work because the market doesn’t like to be held ransom. consumers want suppliers that are easy to do business with. if 100 suppliers make that change and 2 of their competitors don’t…those suppliers requiring that the market do business with them a specific way using tools driven by the supplier…typically lose market share. no one wants to do that.

Maybe the stupid noob Dreamweaver using “developers” could actually learn how to code.

This is a great thing. However, IE7 is only marginally better than IE6 and IE8 only slightly better than IE7 (yeah yeah, it *almost* gets the CSS right now but the rendering and javascript performance is still TERRIBLE because its just a re-hash of the same dodgy old code!).

SaveTheDevelopers.org: Do us a favour - Remove IE7 from the recommended browsers list. Please!

IE6 is great for developers! It gives us hours and hours of extra work.

Supporting Opera buys more than 2% of the market — it ensures that your website does not rely on Firefox’s bugs (I’m looking at you Google!).

And with new CSS3 features and new JS engine in Opera 9.5 supporting it is just plain pleasure.

At work 4 PCs still use IE6. Why? Because IE7 doesn’t exist for Win 2k.

IE6 is still the newest browser, of the IE tree, available for Win2k users (which accounts for 8% of my traffic). Since these people have almost certainly been exposed to Firefox, yet not made the switch (typically they don’t like change, after all they’re using Windows 2000), what is the solution for them? Switch to a non-MS browser or be forgotten?

Everyone I know uses firefox, and if they don’t, I go to their computer and download it at no charge. I tell them not to use IE6 anymore, because it doesn’t work on many websites….especially true for my Japanese and Korean friends. With firefox they can type in their own language right into the browser bar…. Wow, what a new concept.

my 2 cents. When IE8 is out of beta drop most support for IE6. IE7 has suffered I think because of Vista’s shortcomings. Pity because IE7 is an amazing browser compared to IE6. Ignore IE6 users at your peril, but ignoring layout and just supporting readability might be the push these users need to bring them screaming into the this part of the 21st century.

@ Mike #20, our company’s site, aimed at not-so-tech-savvy consumer users is not that different on top compared to yours, but the bottom is more difficult for development, esp since the 7.5% of our safari and opera users are both some of our best customers and some of the most vocal…

50.5% IE6
31.3% IE7
7.9% Firefox 2.0
4.4% Opera 9
2.9% Safari
1.5% Netscape 4.0 (!!!)
0.8% Firefox 1.5
0.3% IE5
0.3% other
0.1% IE4

I don’t have to worry, I got the best browser FIREFOX!

-Check out my site for ways to make money online. http://mikesmoneyclub.blogspot.com

I test in IE6, IE7, Safari, Opera, and Firefox 2 before shipping any design. And through my heavy cross-browser testing that this process requires, I’ve found that the vast majority of the bugs I see in IE6 are replicated in IE7, meaning I’m far more likely to have to use the hack:

html:not([dummy]) element { }

to selectively target Safari, Opera, and Firefox together than

* html element { }

to target IE6. And that 36% Firefox total is obscenely inflated.

Erick,

You should update the article to show that those are W3’s own stats and not general stats. The general stats should show IE6 and 7 about even, the last time I checked, and Firefox about half that.

Also, web developers need to stop being snobs and trying to push everyone to use Firefox, etc. This concern is so far from the minds of the vast majority of internet users that it’s not even funny, and arrogance just makes us professionals look pushy and demanding.

Also, my job would be far easier and thus pay less if these cross-browser bugs were less prevalent :^)

Okay, this is a great idea. However, your button needs to be dummed down a bit. Make it bigger and have it say something like this. “An update is required for you to view this site. Please visit the following link.” Then make a big button that says “update now!” My guess is that most of the people still out on IE6 have no idea what an internet explorer is or that it needs to be updated. All they know is they click on it to type in the web address. They’re also probably still on a Tandy and think that “Googling” is something you do to your wife.

So it’s going to make your life easier if I upgrade? What if I can’t afford to upgrade? Are you going to buy me a new monitor and computer?

Or perhaps you should just improve your coding skills - if thousands of other websites are capable of cross-browser compatibility, perhaps you just need to study more?

1. Not everybody can upgrade hardware, software, etc. If you face an IE6 the user wants to tell you this .. so DOWNGRADE GRACEFULLY and focus on plain content. IE is full of well documented hacks to keep him apart from other browsers. Just deliver one version for your tech-savy geeks and one for those, that just need PLAIN CONTENT. This way you’re ready for the mobile web as well.

2.It’s a bad move from Microsoft to not push the IE7 once it was published, by introducing barriers like no auto-update or Windows validation. Now they have to support two major browsers, too. But the upside is: Real competition of 3 major browser: IE7, IE6, FF. (At least here in Germany) I guess if Microsoft had pushed their new browser in a better way, Firefox wont be that strong today. .. but maybe IE8 “takes back the web”.

Users dont care about what browser they are using. They are used to opening up new windows and moving back and forth through their mouse. I’m still suprised how many people Ive seen still not use the Tab feature in IE7.

I run a site mostly visited by “regular” users.

Stats:

IE (all of them): 57.45%
Firefox: 35.39%
Safari: 4.50%
Opera: 0.44%

Not too different.

I think more and more “non-technical” users are running Firefox. A few weeks ago I had my mother ask me about Firefox out of the blue and it made me go “?!?!?!” quite a bit.

Funny timing.
I just posted the IE6 vs. IE7 vs. IE8 stats over at:
http://blog.simpy.com/blojsom/.....s-IE8.html

I also *just* published the stats on Firefox 3.0 and Safari (links in the post)

Technicle, please elaborate on your statement:
“Firefox does more harm to the developers than all IE’s combined, in terms of time wasted over all these years, and continue to waste developers time.”
I beg to ask the question, how so?

Maybe if IE7 wasn’t a terribly annoying and slow piece of software when run on XP, more people would switch. IE7 is actually the reason I switched to Firefox!

Of course that’s assuming that 30% of internet users have any idea that browsers even HAVE versions that could/should be updated…

I will be supporting SaveTheDevelopers.org fully through my web service directed towards MMO Gamers. Here’s a small snap shot of our users:
Firefox — 45%
IE 7 — 18%
IE 6 — 17%
Opera– 18%
————————-
Windows XP 92%
Windows Vista 7%
Linux 1%

So as you can see, depending upon the niche this makes sense : >

As always when this debate rises its had people forget enterprise users that don’t have any control as to what can and can’t be installed. Its pretty easy to support IE 6 and make it perform along with the rest, you just have to know what you’re doing, what to do and what to avoid. The problem is we’re still suffereing the abundance of dire developers - who think that by using firefox they are going to get layed - who simply don’t have a clue, perhaps it should be renamed savetheretardedhoplessdevelopers.org. Surf the web with errors enabled and you’ll see just how bad most of the developers out there are.

We just don’t have any control,, my company with over 100k employees do not allow access to our intranet with any other browser only E6, can you please email them… clue: orange.

I dislike IE6 but hate IE5, IE5.5 and IE5 for mac . Before we can get rid of 6, everyone stop using IE5. Please?

IE7 is working out ok.

IE6 isn’t actually going to go away any time soon.

And you’re only entrenching IE7 as yet another fragment you’ll have to take care of in the future.

Probably would have happened anyway.

In the five years that MS let IE6 languish because they didn’t care to fix it up the web community figured out how to cope with it. A broad toolchest of IE6 hacks have been discovered, published, and are now known and used by experienced developers. Building for IE6 is something we can do.

You’re probably going to have to support IE6 for two more years.

Now you want to speed up the _addition_ of more browsers to our requirements?

I say code to standards and to IE6 and be done. Well, now IE7 looks like it has to be taken care of too. I suppose you’ll be pushing for people to switch to IE8 next.

MS is going to have to update their browsers to work with the standards before long. Coding for IE5 has come and gone, coding for IE6 will eventually go away, coding for IE7 will go away. But somehow coding to standards supports past versions and each new version of Firefox and Safari and Opera. Which of these do you want to learn: IE5, IE6, IE7, IE8, or Standards?

Please don’t encourage IE8 or IE9 unless they start working well with the standards.

Firstly I believe the STD website is a viral for the web design shop conveyorgroup.

Second, I’m stunned that we’re *reverting* to the days of “best viewed with Internet Explorer [X]“. As developers we must cater to the user and not the other way around.

Third, suggesting that a user upgrade to IE7 in order to make a developer’s life easier is laughable. Want to make our life easier? Upgrade to Firefox and ditch IE altogether.

Lastly I’ll note the notifications reads “Click here for the benefits of upgrading your outdated Internet Explorer browser”. Clicking the link leads to the campaign itself and no further information about these supposed benefits.

IE6 sucks….its a nightmare to develop apps.

I would be the first person to shoot a pop-up

I think most of the IE6 usage comes from surfers at work who can’t install/update anything. Corporations are the slowest to update their workstation browsers and you know how much we like to surf while on the clock.

IE7 is not available for anyone using a lesser version of Windows than XP or Server.

So… IE6 is the best you are going to get from those that can’t or won’t upgrade to XP or better…

Yes it sucks… but thats just the way its gonna be..

I’m never going to “upgrade” to IE7. It’s got requirements that I object to, such as the drm crap built in.

If you want to save the developers, teach them not to write craptastic code that takes more time to support that to write. Yes, I too am a developer. Follow the KISS principle (Keep It Simple, Stupid) and limit the front end aspect of the web page. Don’t throw complicated code on the front end, especially for the first page visitors see. Here’s a hint, most users to sites don’t want fancy, especially flash. Every time some company decides to set up a new web site, they always want to throw everything, including the kitchen sink, into the first freaking page. I still remember trying to visit my cable provider’s site after a merge and discovering the idiotic home page (with flash) would take forever to even load, much less run.

But regardless, at least we’ve only got 2 major versions of IE to deal with today. 2 versions isn’t so bad. Back in the day, we were lucky if the manager said to just code for version 3 and up.

Solution, code for version 6 and just verify that version 7 will work ok. Don’t be an ass and code for the latest version, especially if you have customers trying to access your pages.

And kill ALL devs that want to throw activex controls on the front end. They are obviously incapable of ever learning anyhow.

To all those who think this is a stupid idea. Please try to write a web2.0 app with lots of javascript/heavy design, and get it to work across 5 browsers before you tell us as developers that it’s a bad idea to ask people to ditch their 8 year old browser.

Seriously these are the same users, who want to see all the wonderful flashy interactive websites, and their the same guys who either can’t be bother or don’t know how to install IE7.

I suppose they want their 1983 4 cylinder leaded petrol car to be more fuel economic too huh!

Soooo… I’m all for ending Explorer 6, but this is a complete and utter ripoff of a project I started about six months ago called, End 6!. I’m more than slightly annoyed by this and if you don’t believe me, look at the domain registration for this new venture, which is 2008-02-05, while End6! is 2007-10-13.

Goes to show that innovation is pretty much dead on the web and that Erick Schonfeld did little research in writing up this article.

Again, thanks…

-michael

Thanks for supporting Opera! It is a very high quality, fast alternative that I use.

Isn’t IE7 supposed to be in Windows automatic updates? I could have sworn that when I restarted my XP computer I was automatically upgraded to IE7. Though from the Microsoft site, they say it’ll take several months to complete.

Also, here’s a nasty trick that I use on my not-so-techy friends and relatives who are still using IE6. I simply tell them “Stop using IE6 or spyware will EAT out your computer. Install Firefox.”

Vista has a lot to do with IE6 still having a big share.
Enterprises are sticking to WindowsXP, and therefore keeping IE6.
While IE7 is available for WindowsXP, the first versions were unstable and definitively consumes much more memory. I would not expect IE6 to be killed until Vista grabs a bigger market share in business customers.

Why bother upgrading to IE7? Use Firefox 3 instead!

Ever think, maybe, that some people don’t have any choice? One of my company websites has some back end features that won’t work at all in IE7 and don’t look right in Firefox, and whether it is fixed or not is not my call.

If you’re going to tell them to use IE7, you’re just going to be kicking yourself in 5 years. Tell them to download Firefox. Firefox itself encourages users to upgrade, so you’d be perpetuating a solution.

Wow….campaign against their own product..:) cool…USE FF instead…It rocks

I think one the issues with IE7 adoption is that it required you to have a genuine windows copy. And I am sure there are enough people without one - which means they have to stick to IE6

The last time I dowloaded IE 7, I wasn’t able to organize my favorites. Extremely annoying. Has that changed? It was probably just some setting I needed to research and change, but didn’t have the time for. Trying out Firefox on my other computer; seems like I’m downloading some upgrade or plugin for every site I go to or am streaming from.

Why is IE7 at the top? This sounds like a stupid microsoft driven way of taking the impetus of the upgrade drive away from Firefox.

Damn you have to question the logic of the idiots who put this site up.

To Technicle : Stop saying bullshits. I am a webdeveloper and my time is wasted by IE. Firefox is the tool that helps create pages while IE is the tool to make Your work nightmare. Only recently I was fighting IE6 cache problems. All other browsers work fine (even links) but not IE. Well probably standards are good for others not for M$

Save the developers ! Stop using M$ software at all

As a Enterprise/CMS developer for the Federal Government, i test and develop for all browsers. Quiet simply IE7 is a travesty, equally to IE6.

The IE team at Microsoft have basically admitted to IE7 been a complete failure and this is the reason for the quick push out of IE8, which by the way after much testing is the best thing out of the IE team in 8 years…..

Please dont upgrade to IE7……go firefox, opera or IE8….

What simple users do not understand is that new browsers bring new features that could deliver better user experience! Newest Safari, Opera, Firefox and even IE8, have some interesting things that can’t be supported extensively while IE6 is still around.

It’s totally wrong that IE6 suits all your needs and you have no reason to change. If you all switched to a better browser, we developers would make sites that are impossibile or extremely tricky to do in IE6. So it’ll be better for you!

Developers have their fault, too. They’re stuck on the idea that a site has to deliver the same user experience on every browser. I think that this is a wrong attitude. You have to assure that all your visitors can use the site, of course! But if they have a better browser why not gratifiy them with better things? There’s a lot of interesting things you can do with SVG, for example. If your browser supports it, why not use it? SVG could had some cool things to the interface, while retaining old-school usability with the other browsers.

When you see that your friend with FF/Opera/Safari can do some cool things that you can’t with IE6/7, they’ll soon drop IE when they’re back home.

The bottom line is: do not just tell IE visitors to upgrade, give them a reason to do so!

I can see the point. But I feel sorry for the people who can’t afford to upgrade their once-awesome-but-now-painfully-slow computers to match the system requirements and capabilities of the today’s browsers. I was in that situation for quite some time, and it sucked.

#55 antje: “since the 7.5% of our safari and opera users are both some of our best customers and some of the most vocal…”

Being a regular user of one of these browsers I also get vocal from time to time - I’m simply fed up with some arrogant and sloppy developers who think that there are only two browsers out there when fixing it for Safari and Opera wouldn’t cost them much - surely less than 7.5% of their web designing time.

Here’s a fact; lack of support from MS of IE6 has helped to hold back the internet by about half a decade. We could have been, and could still be doing some wondrous things had MS actually bothered to support IE.

IE7 is a load of pish, sure it’s fine for the joe bloggs user, but any real web developer (or designer) will tell you it’s nothing more than a bad joke (along side IE6).

However, having said that IE8 and MS’s new interest in supporting developers looks like a light at the end of a VERY dark tunnel. Getting people off IE6 to IE7 is a start, but IE8 is when things will really change for the better… we hope.

IE7 Sucks, it crashes all the time on me and is a total memory hog.
A lot of computers out there aren’t strong enough to switch to IE7, hence the reason, IE6 remains strong.

Although I’m switching to firefox, it never crashes on me.

First off, They are Web Developers, not Programmers. There is a difference between coding a web page in CSS and programming advanced scripting via PHP, ASP.Net or some other technology. Second of all, I would LOVE to get rid of IE6, I already have at home, but our current client Specs require someone to test our development on IE6. Until the target moves up to IE7, I’m going to have to suffer through it. So chill, you make it sound like most Web Dev’s are either too lazy, or unable to do their own jobs.

The reason people aren’t using IE 7 has nothing to do with standards compliance, CSS/Javascript bugs, and the other IE6-specific problems that plague every developer on the web.

People aren’t upgrading because:

1. They’ve seen the travesty that is IE 7’s interface (seriously, wtf)
2. Thanks to Microsoft’s years of inactivity, they’ve been using IE 6 for over 5 years and aren’t even aware there’s anything different.
3. They’re deliberately out to sabotage the elegant and compliant code that I right for my web applications. “Hahaha!” they think as they fire up the old workhorse, “my insistence on using this piece of crap is causing pain and suffering all over the world. Fixed positioning, you say? Four-side positioned absolute positioning, you say? PNG support, you say? Percentage margins, you say? Pseudo-class and advanced CSS selectors, you say?

Microsoft can create super advanced web technologies, .NET, silverlight, etc., but they can’t support basic CSS? Inexcusable.

@Evan

Microsoft HAVE got css right, obviously they failed with IE6 and 7 but IE 8 will be one of the most advanced browsers available regarding CSS. This is a good thing and we should support the IE team as much as possible for making changes within MS and pushing for a better browser. Heck this may even force Mozilla and others to improve their own CSS and technology support.

Easiest way to make people update is to steal a trick from the OS lot - block older browser versions from your site.

On the one hand, people will update if you give the message “IE 6 not compatible, please update to version 7/8″.

On the other hand, a big chunk of daytime web surfers are business users, and business’ upgrade slowly, but any company still using IE6 with all it’s flaws and security headaches deserves to have angry employees!!

Developers - stop whining, and start bullying people into upgrading!! It works for Apple and Microsoft with their auto-updates - why not the big browsers too??

Microsoft just don’t get it!

Just like using email with Gmail has better performance than hotmail, and other IMs have better performance than MS Messenger, the same way is with the Web Browsers. Microsoft IE7 performance does not compare with that of Firefox. Ever since I discovered Firefox i have not turned back! Only non-conesours users are still using it (which is the wast majority).

The days of MS are counted! So, let us start developing for Firefox …

Guys, you’re a bit morons. Probably the most important reason why MS pushing its IE7 is pirate versions of Windows. You can’t imagine how many pirate versions of Windows are installed all over the world. IE7 is nice, but is requires Genuine Windows check. And this campain - “save the developers” - seems to be all the same. OK, probably by pushing IE7 MS also is pushing its own technologies - Silverlight, some non-standard extensions, etc. They want to kill FireFox, but first of all they need to kill IE6 which also dont support many of that new things. Anyway, that is not a fair play.

IE 7 instala dll que no son para xp, sino para vista, por lo que varios programas dejan de trabajar. Si estas programando, como es mi caso y distribuyes los programas compilados, estos no funcionan en windows xp que no tengan IE 7 instalado.

Por mi parte uso firefox desde hace años y me va mucho mejor.

Automatically translated text:

IE 7 installed Dll for non-XP, but to Vista, so several programs stop working. If such programming, like myself and distribute the compiled programs, these do not work on windows xp not having installed IE 7.

For my part firefox use for many years and I am going much better.

I can appreciate the call to develop consistent browser standards but what really gets old are those people who have their browser preference as a religion. The constant whining of the Firefox fanbois is about enough to make me want to uninstall the thing and block Firefox from my sites.

For all the “firefox does more hard than good” comments I’ve seen here, I’ve yet to see one valid argument explaining how such a conclusion was reached.

As much as I’d love to say w00t for FF’s higher numbers, I know that one of the reasons it is getting up there is there’s a good deal of companies that mandate its use over IE because the boss (who knows little about technology) hears that it’s much more secure than IE so that must be what we should use, right?

And as far as trying to get people to stop using IE6, keep dreaming. I work for a company that customizes a data reporting framework that is only now starting to work towards IE7 compatibility. IE6 made such a dent in the way people developed proprietary business tools that IE7 won’t be the “standard” overall until those tools all get upgraded. With how often most companies avoid upgrading a proprietary software until they absolutely have to, this will be a long time coming.

Granted, if you know your audience well enough, you could support this movement as long as you’re not alienating your readers/clients/etc. (e.g. pretty soon, if not now, most gaming sites could already be designing without much in the way of IE6 compliance)

@Law: You need to be REALLY careful with that idea. I’ve heard it a million times already, but if those users are your revenue, you just put yourself out of a job. Doing that for your personal blag is one thing, but any other site is quite another matter.

For my site, I have 65% IE (33% IE7, 31% IE6), 21% Firefox, and 2% Safari. Those are the three I test for. The one thing that I don’t like IE6 not supporting is transparent PNG files, other than that I’ve been able to use CSS and cross-browser fine. On the other hand, I looked briefly at the IE8 beta 1, and it handles some stuff way different than IE7/Firefox/Safari does…I’m hoping that’s just because it’s in beta!

Granted my sites are fairly basic (non Web 2.0) but I don’t need to support 5 browsers, just standards compliant ones and IE6. Unfortunately I don’t have a PC to test IE6 with, so that makes my life a bit of a hassle. (Please don’t tell me to buy a cheap Dell for my testing. I’d rather go to the public library to test pages than have a piece of vomit like that cluttering up my office.)