The war on IE6

It seems that the decline of IE6 has plateued at around 15-20% which has brought frustration to many web developers around the world. For nearly a year now I stopped supporting IE6 on my personal sites but 99% of my work is for clients who do not want to exclude what is a significant portion of their audience. This has lead to a signifucant portiin of development time taken up by finding hacks for IE6 or worse still dropping features that IE6 won’t support. Most clients wont accept that IE6 users should have a degraded experience and would rather lose a feature than have it only available to other browsers!

CNET Video page was a beast to get working in IE6 as even when it looked perfect scrollong down would cause divs to partially collapse and colours to flicker. IE6 also had issues with Ajax loading in content after the page had been rendered and wouldn’t expand boxes to accomodate the content. The hacks were ugly and made me hate IE6 more than ever. Note the page has been redesigned since these issues but I imagine many haslayout and delayed loading issues still remain.

Until IE6 is gone this is just a daily problem for developers and with the failure of Vista and the apathy/ignorance of users and corp IT departments something more drastic was needed. .net magazines started a campaign a couple of months ago to unite developers in putting IE6 to the sword. Check out bring down ie6 for the details. It has caused some controvecy as many developers feel that if your weblogs and clients say that IE6 is still important we should support it. And to be fair some users have no choice. However, rather than just allowing a page to appear broken in IE6 by boldly stating the reasons why you will recieve a degraded experience if isong IE6 as mobile me and google mail have done you both educate the ignorant users as to the existance of alternatives and irritate corporate IT departments into action. When the company MD cant access certain sites or keeps getting alerted to reduce performance, features and security because of his old browser it wont be easy for the IT department to make excuses for having firefox or IE7 on the users systems.

I think it could be taken 2 steps further. Educate users that you dont need admin rights to install firefox. In fact the first time I used firefox at work I installed it on a memory stick. Scandisk have memory sticks with U3 feature that runs several apps directly from the usb dongle. It’s self contained and so can be taken with you and run on any pc. However, i found memory stick run apps a little sluggish especially on scandisk dongles (I only use corsair now) so installing in the My Documenta folder is my usual recommendation. Where I work I am surrounded by IE6 users, all of them hate it but felt they had no option. A quick demo of a My Documents install and everyone’s converted. If this was added to the advise on upgradeing I am sure uptake would be higher. Note, installation of flash and java support for these browsers does require admin rights.

The next step would be to treat IE6 like a mobile browser. A mobile browser has reduced features and performance so has a cut down version of the site with just the essentials (i know there is more to it than that, screen res, bandwidth etc). So my IE6 site would have the content but not the look and feel of the full site. Again this will probably just be on my personal sites and for pro-bono clients, for the clients that pay the bills the best I can hope for is to include a message advising to upgrade their browser and link to the campaign page.

The more sites/developers that get on board the more effective this will be. Hopefully boosted by a succesful Windows 7 launch and MS dropping support for IE6 will see the browser retired for good.

IE7 critical update, more users moving browser

Microsoft released a critical out-of-band patch for IE7 causing panic updating in IT departments around the globe. Some took advantage of this update to encourage users to make the switch to a more secure browser like Firefox or Google Chrome.

This prompted me to take another look at the figures for browser usage on some of the sites I maintain to see if there is a shift from IE after this update. I was expecting to see the usual 60-70% IE dominance split almost evenly betwen IE7 and IE6. However, it seems IE6 usage has significantly dropped off in the last few monts across a range of sites. The users don’t seem to have all shifted to IE7 either as overal IE usage has dropped to around 50%. The increase has been seen in Firefox 3, Safari and Google Crome. Safari seems to have gone up from an average of 2-3% to 3-5% depending on the site. Google a new entry is around 2-3% and Firefox is enjoying 30-35%. Dare I hope that soon I will no longer have to support IE6!?

Well I expect I’ll have to wait until Windows XP is no longer supported by Microsoft before it finally dies or an unpatchable security hole is found and users are forced to upgrade.

In any case if you haven’t done a windows update today do it now and get IE7 patched even if you don’t browse with it.

Will check browsers stats in a couple of weeks to see if there is a dip/change after everyone has update panic.

Testing IE6 on Vista (multiple IE take 2)

Despite numerous free and better browsers being available for a number of years IE6 (Internet Explorer 6) is still used by about 30-35% of web users. This means despite it’s bugs, lack of support for many css techniques or image types as a developer I still have to support it.

I previously wrote about how multiple versions of IE could be installed on one system but this only worked on Windows XP and was extremely buggy, throwing up errors everytime it encountered flash or javascript on a page.

When using Vista even this buggy version of IE6 would not work. Obviously some developers asked Microsoft for a way of running IE6 on Vista. Microsoft said that it would compromise the security if Vista and so the only way was to install a virtual machine running windows XP and IE6. microsoft even provided the virtual machine software and temp XP license for free. I was pleased with this solution as it meant it would be very unlikely Joe Public would get a new Vista PC, decide they want IE6 and be able to install it. The end of IE6 looked near!

Unfortunately, Vista didn’t take off and replace XP, thanks in no small part to Apple’s smear campaign and users with old/obscure hardware being very vocal about performance… But that’s another topic. This meant continued IE6 was needed. While running the Virtual PC worked it was a waste of system resources and slow to open and close so I soon got sick of it. Then came along IETester.

This standalone app enables you to render pages as IE5.5, IE6, IE7 and the latest IE8 beta as seperate tabs. Pages load without the annoying error popups of MultipleIEs and ironically faster than Vista’s built-in IE7 browser.

It unfortunately doesn’t yet support flash in some of the IE versions but this should be in an update. The IETester toolbar replaces the IE toolbars so unfortunately you can’t run IE developer toolbar to help debug. Despite this I highly recommend grabbing this free download (donate if you can) even if you are running XP.

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