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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Microsoft make a desperate push for IE7

With uptake of the latest Internet Explorer browser being slow compared to that of main rival Firefox, Microsoft have started a big push to encourage more users to make the change.

The first big advantage Microsoft had was having it pre-installed on it’s latest OS - Vista and not allowing the obsolete Internet Explorer 6 to be installed (which would undermine vista security anyway). However, with Vista uptake being slow and with the tech savvy already using firefox, opera or other browsers IE7 is struggling to make much ground.

Latest figures I have from various sites I run/developed show that on sites for web developers or tech savvy users Firefox now has the majority over both all other browsers combined.

On consumer sites it is about 30% IE7, 28% IE6, 40% Firefox and the remaining 2% using other browsers. So although overall Internet explorer has the majority users still, IE7 alone has not caught up with firefox.

On business sites the weighting is slightly more in favour for Internet explorer but then the figure is increased for IE6 rather than IE7.

In a bid to convert more users to IE7 this week we’ve seen them <a href=”http://news.zdnet.co.uk/security/0,1000000189,39289859,00.htm”>remove the validation requirement</a> to download it.

Now they have sent out a newsletter promoting Internet Explorer 7. It seems to be targetted at IE6 users as it focuses on the improved security in IE7 and the fact that it doesn’t render correctly in Firefox:

<em>”The Internet is a vast place–and not every site is friendly. How do you help protect yourself online? With Windows Internet Explorer 7. Already, the Internet Explorer 7 Phishing Filter prevents nearly one million visits per week to known dangerous websites. In just a few clicks, see how the latest version of the world’s most popular web browser can help you be safer online.”</em>

The latest version of <strong>the world’s most popular web browser</strong> may not be a statement the internet explorer team can use for much longer…

As a developer I am happy with this push to IE7 - the sooner we get rid of IE6 the sooner I will stop having to support it. It is currently holding designers/developers back in what can be done as we have to ensure whatever we do is supported it. Binning IE6 will mean - less hacks, more advancement, less development time - resulting in savings for everyone.

Hacked to Death ii (Safari)

Apologises for the lack of posts the last few days. I’ve not been on holiday, far from it, I’ve started a new contract. I will be producing for a leading media company.

This actually brings me nicely onto this blog entry’s topic - Hacking Safari. I am used to testing on the major PC based browsers (FireFox, IE, Opera and to a lesser extent Mozilla, Netscape, linx) but have never been required or had the hardware to test with Macintosh’s Safari.

For the most part if a design works in FF and IE, Safari will quite happily play along. However, on one page where I have used relative positioning to move an image up by a few pixels I encountered a problem. FF and IE6 didn’t line up. I was forced to use an IE6 hack (see previous hacked to death entry) to set a different pixel adjust for the two browsers. While this solved the problem in IE6, Opera, FF and IE7 - Safari was not happy.

While Safari had rendered the page as FF it treated the positioning of this image as IE6. As IE6 hack only affects IE6 and older Safari’s positioning of he image is not corrected. Quiet a problem.

Thus began my quest to find a CSS hack that only affected Safari. Preferably an elegant hack (if there is such a thing) still allowed my style sheet to validate and would not affect future versions of The browser.

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Hacked to Death

Everyone working on the front lines (building for the front-end) will have likely encountered a page that despite being a coding piece of art looks great in one browser but falls apart in another.

If you don’t work for Microsoft you’ll know the problem is usually with the Internet Explorer browser. A lot of the time tweaking a style sheet a little can solve things but sometimes there is no other option but to add a hack.

No one likes hacks, in fact I go to insane lengths trying to find an alternative before I will use one. However, if it is necessary to ad a hack is there a good way, or is a hack always going to be ugly and we just have to face it?
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