IE6 has long been a thorn in the sides of many web developers, offering limited support for many established web standards that often force devs to implement ugly, ugly hacks. It might not be so bad if there weren’t so many people still using the damn thing over eight years after its release (and two full browser upgrades from Microsoft), but it still has an alarmingly large following. Its poor performance, combined with its persistance, has made it one of the worst tech products of all time. And Digg has had enough.
In a new blog post User Experience Architect Mark Trammell writes that the site is strongly considering removing some of the site’s core features, like digging and commenting, for IE6 users. This isn’t necessarily to punish those users, but rather to cut back on largely wasted development time. Trammell explains that while IE6 users make up around 5% of site traffic, it only accounts for 1% of diggs, buries, and comments. Digg developers are being forced to spend a very disproportionate amount of time to keep those features working in the ancient browser, and they’re thinking of simply abandoning those efforts. The site would still work for pure browsing, but IE6 users wouldn’t be able to interact with the site.
Trammell’s blog post also includes some good insight as to why Digg users are still browsing with IE6. Digg is no longer as tech-heavy as it was in its early days, but it’s safe to say that most of the site’s viewers are at least aware of IE7 and IE8 (not to mention alternatives like Firefox and Chrome). So rather than simply put out banners prompting users to upgrade to a new browser (something that Twitter just started doing), it decided to run a poll.
The results? 77% of the Digg users on IE6 simply don’t have a choice, citing reasons like “I can’t upgrade because I don’t have admin access” or “I can’t upgrade because someone at work says I can’t”. In other words, they’re probably just as unhappy about it as Digg is. Granted, this poll is probably prone to substantial bias (people who are frustrated about their browsers probably feel more compelled to take a survey and tell people about it), but it’s still worth noting. Given the results, Digg isn’t going to be running a “Upgrade Now!” banner any time soon, but it’s still considering the feature cuts described above.
It just shows how unfortunate it is that people are still running IE6. It doesn’t make sense from a tech perspective at all. Microsoft can’t even upgrade it’s own product. That makes it a definite fail. When people don’t have the option to upgrade, which is obviously the case.
IE6 is really a pain, and Microsoft doesn’t want to alienate the enterprise, and they just tolerate them to use IE6. It also costs a lot of companies with over 300k employees for a mass IE7 implementation especially when all their automated build/images/workstations are running the archaic IE6.
It would be stupid for them to spend money to upgrade browsers and Microsoft again, tolerates them.
Doesn’t cost the companies anything (except for the time) to roll-out FireFox to the employees. Since all reviews I’ve seen say FF has better speed, security and standards, WTF. I hope digg trashes IE6 support.
Um, isn’t employee time for people to make the build, test it, then troubleshoot it once it goes out pretty significant? I’m assuming you’re suggesting they keep IE6 on the machines and add Firefox; otherwise you have to also add in the cost of making whatever applications they use that might depend on IE6 work in Firefox.
SIMPLE MATH FAIL
90+19+2+3+7+3 = 100?
56+46+5+15+15+4 = 100?
may be they were offered multiple choices…
To think I spent 2 hours on my dial-up to upgrade to IE6 back in 2003….sigh
IE6 is a scourge and the sooner the development community stops supporting it the web will be a better place.
WHOA, careful with that. Any BUSINESS should be able to drop it immediately at their own risk, but libraries such as jQuery are doing a lot of us a real favor by continuing to support it.
Some business simply can’t upgrade anytime soon; which in some cases is pretty funny since many of those are flush with corporate cash…
I agree, Microsoft got a lot of bad publicity from companies spending on Vista.
Put IE6 on the list of expenses and Microsoft is on a bad day.
IE6 would be anyway gone ina years time!
If something is stable why change it right… a lot of huge industry still run machines with dos on it because it is far more stable..
I don’t know why you would disable the functionality vs just stop giving IE6 special treatment.
Personally I think all the upgrade banners will help force pressure on IT administrators who obviously don’t read digg or techcrunch.
I can’t freaking stand IE6. I still find myself having to go edit css for countless extra hours just to accommodate IE6 users.
IE6: Please die. Not slow and painfully, but quickly and painlessly.
just quickly would be fine
Good. They should. This might help make some changes at Microsoft.
How so, Microsoft is no longer releasing patches for IE6 nor are they supporting it any longer?
If Digg stopped supporting all versions of IE, by making using HTML5 specific DOM elements for core functions THAT, that would show Microsoft a lesson they would not soon forget.
Adobe should put HTML5 DOM creation into dreamweaver too, so people who don’t know what they’re doing inadvertently use it all over the web.
That would break them.
should read:
“If Digg stopped supporting all versions of IE, by creating page code using HTML5 specific DOM elements for core functions THAT, that would show Microsoft a lesson they would not soon forget.”
http://support....ecycle%20Policy
Good old discrimination from Microsoft.
Support should be the same for businesses and consumers period; that way when the time is up they can stop having anything to do with the old operating systems and if people choose not to update its on them.
Aww…you’re so cute.
ie6 (which does stink) is basically only used in corporate settings. Digg-ers wouldn’t know of such things.
I just stopped coding for IE6. I think I mention it on my websites. It’s not like this stuff is productive to work ethic anyway ^^
Some people use IE6 because there is no other option. The company I work for employs some 300,000 odd people globally and all our Laptops & PCs still have IE6. Im guessing alot of other companies are like that. Only PC’s and laptops replaced since Dec 09 have the latest browser.
“Only PC’s and laptops replaced since Dec 09 have the latest browser.”
I remember Dec 09, that was a good month. Best xmas I ever had.
Haha, that’s good.
That’s because those IT people are either lazy or the executives think they have to retain people, or the programs that were built that only work in IE6 cost to much to upgrade. All of those reasons are total BS!
Not browser related, but one place I worked had an application that was only licensed for Windows 2000 and the upgrade would cost $1 Million. Not really a BS reason if you’re the one footing the bill. The application was critical to life safety, so no, just abandoning it wasn’t an option either.
Yes it is BS, the companies that made the poor decision to code only for a s*it browser like IE6 should get f*cked by now having to pay more for code changes.
Does Digg still have that Microsoft advertising deal?
Even if it does Steve Balmer stated somewhere that they want it to go away too!
I don’t even care as I always use firefox for most stuff and chrome for googling, only fools who use IE at all.
Still using IE6? Fire your IT staff.
Considering that there are still large amount of users don’t even know what a browser is, don’t expect IE6 to be gone any time soon. We are stuck!
Not “We” are stuck, “You” maybe, but I wouldn’t work for an inept company that still uses IE6.
Every Windows computer at my university (UCSD) only has IE6.
No tabbed browsing = FAIL
Survival of the fittest. If you haven’t downloaded a new browser for 2 years, then you don’t deserve to see new websites.
Nice, that’s something I agree with right there!
While that sounds nice as someone who’s business depends our websites I can not afford not to support any browser. If IE6 users are buying, I’m supporting. If I every get venture capital and never have to worry about making any money I’ll focus on being a purist developer. I’m not criticizing your comment, but most businesses have not choice but to support IE 6. It’s not a matter of moving technology forward, it’s how we pay our bills.
Yes, but you’re not taking in to account the extra cost of supporting IE6, dropping IE6 support would be more cost effective.
If users were still using Netscape 4, would you support that too? How about Lynx? NS4 usage died off quicker when sites stopped catering to it. There were better options (mozilla) to upgrade to, but having a better experience because site owners stopped catering designs/layout/js to NS4 helped move the migration along. Site owners and software developers continuing to cater to IE6 helps continue to give the excuse to keep it around (along with many corp apps that ‘only’ work in IE6). My hunch is that if companies quit renewing the software licenses of the apps that only worked in IE6, vendors would upgrade their support of IE7/IE8.
The company I work for, a very, very large company, still uses IE6. Worse, Lotus Notes! FML.
Law Firm or Public Utility?
I also work for a large company that still uses IE6 and God-awful Lotus Notes. I once asked the tech guys who gave me my work computer why we were still using IE with all the security issues it has. They really didn’t have an answer. Big surprise…
Whenever someone uses IE6, a rainbow vanishes, a flower wilts, a child dies – wars have been waged against it.
This is a rather good article, but when you mention alternative browsers, what was the reason behind leaving out Safari??
Anyone thinking that the IT staff who haven’t upgraded to IE6 by this point have the power to do so is fooling themselves.
There are three reasons that companies are still using IE6:
1) Old, bearded IT staff that think IE6 is the safest browser and think upgrading will violate their security
2) Companies with intranet software requires IE6
3) Companies with management who won’t allocate the resources for the upgrade
You’re not going to change their mind. 90% of a company’s employees who can’t surf the web in a usable fashion, however, might. We don’t design our pages with 33.6k modems in mind – imagine what YouTube would be like if they did!
I liken all of this to wheelchair ramps. Only after the Americans With Disabilities Act was passed was enough pressure put on companies to make their workplaces handicap accessible – the act recognized that companies wouldn’t improve their environments out of the goodness of their hearts. Clearly we won’t/shouldn’t have legislation to mandate browser upgrades. But paying any attention to IE6, 8 years after its release, is enabling lazy companies to stay lazy, rather than empowering a better internet for everyone.
The problem is that 90% of those employees visit websites owned by very large companies with similar IT policies.
digg = DEAD
At my old company (a few years ago), a 200 million revenue business, all of the online client tools only worked with IE6. Sad but true.
I thought this was a pretty obvious study, anyone who works in large corporations -knows- why people are using IE6, it’s because they have to. Unfortunately, a lot of large companies under MS influence over the years have developed Intranet intensive applications with IE6. Bad Call? Of course. However, I think the impact of Digg not supporting IE6 wouldn’t be a call to anyone. Corporate IT administrators don’t care that users can’t use Digg, why would they? In fact, many of them block social sites such as Twitter, Flickr, Facebook, Digg, etc. If you’re working for the city, state, utilities, etc. you’re not supposed to be sitting there surfing the net, you’re supposed to be working. Even if you’re on your on time, thats not what those pc’s are provided for.
Digg might as well stop supporting IE6. It’s an oudated OS that shouldn’t be used. Companies that are using it have it for a specific purpose and that purpose isn’t to have their employees sitting around Digging
I do agree with the person above about supporting IE6 if you’re a business. There are a lot of old folks sitting around on their company pc’s purchasing tons of crap from amazon instead of working – in that case it’s worth it.
However, in a similar vein, i’m sure corporations wouldn’t care if their employees couldn’t shop online though. Until sites that truly affect them (banking, etc) stop supporting IE6, they won’t care.
Unfortunately, All of my banks seem to be made on IE6 with Frontpage.
Since everyone is talking about workplaces that use IE6.
What about people in developing countries that use it because there hardware is not capable of running IE7 or 8 or they don’t have the money to buy a better computer please think about that also before you make a comment about using the ancient browser.
Then they should use FF, Konqueror, Opera, or Chrome – you friggin numnuts.
FF & Opera take out a lot of resources and therefore would slow the computer down.
How long you think it would be before any version of FF or Opera an old computer could run would last before its in the same situation of being phased out.
Chrome probably wont even run not sure about Konqueror.
As stated above, most IE6 users are in corporate America where they have no choice. It would be nice if more and more mainstream site would stop going out of their way to support IE6. This would put pressure on the “IE6 shops” to upgrade.
I remember browsing the web with Netscape 4.7 after it went out of style. It didn’t take long before the web was almost useless. One day, the same will be true for IE6 users. I hope this day is soon.
I work for one of the biggest companies in the world and installing a different browser is prohibited and IE 6 is the only choice. NO .png support, no HTML 5 and others. IE 6 sucks.
I think this is an excellent idea, more sites need to take this kind of approach. Lets pound all IE6 folks into submission so that they finally update their prehistoric browser.
Here is an idea.
Next time there is a security hole, you my dear hacker who is reading this, write a Virus/Worm that will update every infected computer IE to a newer version!
On your twitter feed a lot of porn images and feeds are appearing. Pl check out. It may be a good idea not to allow the thumbnails. Don’t turn Tech Crunch to a ‘Sex Crunch’
I think, websites should put some warning message saying …you are using old version of IE and will not be supported anymore.
At least for a startup company, they can afford to not to support IE6. But for a big companies, whose clients are still using IE6, needs to take step thoughtfully.
I too am sick of developing for IE. Microsoft’s disregard for standards sickens me and I cant wait for their browser to be wiped out.
I do have to admit that FF crashed on me as I was typing this….
I’m building a new theme for my site, and if you are using IE6, you will be redirected to the mobile version and prompted with a link to download IE8 or Safari.
We too dropped the support for IE6 three days ago, for the same reasons as Digg.
@Brian: We had a client who had to use IE6 in a corporate environment. So I recommended him to
use http://portable...irefox_portable
Now he’s happier than ever, because not only can he run our app, but also use Firefox for all his online activities.
Educating your users is not a bad thing. When you tell them to use Firefox or IE8 because the browsing is three times faster (and safer), your users should be grateful for this productivity advise.
i dont remeber the last time when i used IE
I can’t remember the last time I used a s*it bloated crashing blue-screen M$ product.
I used IE this morning to use Windows Update. That’s all I use it for. I actually tried to see if Windows Update would work in Chrome with ActiveX turned on and the UA spoofed but sadly it did not.
“I prefer this browser” ??? you sick bastards!
I work for a government contractor (The Federal Transit Authority specifically), and they are all still on the IE6 standard. In fact, one of our apps was specifically built to run in IE6 and NO OTHER browser. That’s how much they are committed to IE6.
Nevertheless, it sucks.
Its really annoying to see the graph which shown ie6 still dominating the market.
Im you side, Digg. Sooner or later other giant would not tolerate with ie6 too. What about techcrunch?
hint : disable commenting for ie6 users?
Its really annoying to see the graph which shown ie6 still dominating the market.
Im on your side, Digg. Sooner or later another giant would not tolerate with ie6 too. What about techcrunch?
hint : disable commenting for ie6 users?
I hope the metrics they are looking at to decide the “stop supporting IE6″ issue aren’t Dev time vs. % of visitors/views from IE6 but cost of Dev time vs. ad revenue generated from visitors/views via IE6.
>77% of the Digg users on IE6 simply don’t have a choice, citing reasons like “I can’t upgrade because I don’t have admin access” or “I can’t upgrade because someone at work says I can’t”.
Hmm…. so really, what you’re saying is that 77% of Digg users on IE6 are on Digg at work.. when they should be working.
I’m willing to bet NONE of those people are going to turn to their bosses or their IT departments and ask for an upgrade so they can be on Digg.
As much as I’d love for enterprise to catch up, I don’t think Digg is in a place to make it happen. Google, maybe. “I can’t search b/c we’re on IE6″. That might pull some weight.
I used to spend the extra time doing the compatibility testing for IE6, but unless I really need to for whatever reason, I won’t bother with making it place nicely with IE6.
I reckon that if web devs stop doing the compatibility for the browser, then it’ll gradually stop being coded for and people will have to upgrade or switch.
Maybe the local library will finally be motivated to update their computers and browsers. Probably not, but I can only hope for the country bumpkin library here in Centralia. They still use IE and I have tried to explain to them why they should upgrade their browser.
I hate IE. Less surfing and more crashing.
I think that this is a great idea, those people need to get on top of the game. I have actually considered doing something like this on my own website where anyone on IE6 or < Firefox 2 would be prompted a nice message and a hyperlink to upgrade.
I think IE6 is out of date, It should be kick off. but I think the digg to make such descine is according a lot of data analysis. I think most of the users came from Firefox, Chrome, Safari, just like http://www.orz-today.com. I think It is time to say goodbye to IE6. I welome digg to make such an decision.
it makes a perfect sense to cut down on IE6. however, it should educate the users about the better solution.
I don’t feel the least bit of compassion for IE6 users. The users of IE6 are obviously fools. And if most of those people don’t have administration access, why don’t they get it?
No workplace makes it mandatory to use IE6 nor depends on it for day-to-day tasks, unless it’s a web development firm. But even then, web development firms require you to use a plethora of browsers (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, etc)
IE6 officially don’t support IE6 and neither should anyone else.
actually, despite recently running browser upgrade notices, we (Twitter) have still been putting in some effort to make our site better in IE6
http://twitter....atus/2559171272
Nevertheless, thanks Mark for running this research.
cheers,
Dustin
…Digg should forward the poll results to M$
Will much worse browsers: links/lynx/konqueror be blocked too?
I will not install IE7/8 because I do not trust microsoft updates. I had to help once someone when sp3 (automatically downloaded) disabled computer (activation text).
Blocking is so wrong. I don’t care if a one image is rendered in wrong position, but forcefully disabling site features?
They said not creating hacks for the IE6 so that certain features work in IE6. That just makes business sense and is completely different from blocking a feature of a browser.
The thing that is even more of a concern – from a security, features, overall advancement for all of computing, perspective, is that IE is tied to Windows. So all those machines with IE6 that can’t upgrade probably are tied to an OS that also is not going to be upgraded. I suspect that choice is because of other inferior Microsoft products that have come into the market space – Vista for example.
I know the IT staff at my previous employer will NOT upgrade to Vista because of how many problems it has. That means a lot of IE browsers out there not getting upgraded as well. However, our IT guys support downloading and installing FF, not officially of course.