ScratchMonkey

First, the obligatory spoof site:



But on a more serious note, a lot of corporations wrote applications tied to IE6, and simply can't upgrade IE because it will break their internal business. IE7 and IE8 were designed to replace IE6, and can't be installed alongside the older version in a stable way.

Competitors should view this as an opportunity. We all want to move forward towards standards-based browsing, and don't want to be trapped by our legacy apps. But we don't have to upgrade IE to do that. Instead, install a competing browser (Chrome, Safari, Opera, Firefox) alongside IE6. The competitors don't mind IE sitting there continuing to run the legacy apps. They'll happily act as your web browser for outside content, while IE6 continues to keep your internal business operating.

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snooggums' density principal: "The more dense a population, the more dense a population."

Iliana: "You're a great friend but if we're ever chased by zombies I'm tripping you."

Steamers

Hehe. compared to the new IEs, IE6 is a tab-less piece of great work sometimes i prefer this over the newer browsers.

ScratchMonkey

If you're a fan of minimalism, consider using Lynx:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lynx_%28web_browser%29

__________________
snooggums' density principal: "The more dense a population, the more dense a population."

Iliana: "You're a great friend but if we're ever chased by zombies I'm tripping you."

Twisted_Firestarter

@Scratchmonkey Having to support IE6 for web development is an enormous drain on time and resources. I've been on many very large web development projects and jumping through hoops to get IE6 compatibility sucks up a good 30-40% of the development time and makes the code much less robust and maintainable. That is time that could be spent adding new features, improving code design, tweaking the user experience, or increasing performance.

Why not just code for IE7+? Because something like 40% of the users are _still_ running IE6, so we are forced to include the legacy support. The vast majority of people aren't running IE6 because they love it and don't want to upgrade; they are running IE6 because they never bother to upgrade any software unless there is no choice.

If in-house intranet applications want to continue to develop for IE6, more power to them, but it should be no longer supported or provided by MS.

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Twisted Firestarter
a.k.a |TG| Harkonian

ScratchMonkey

Twisted, are your projects for internal corporate use or for the Internet? I think MS is making a big mistake by not working to allow IE6 to coexist with its newer offerings. It prevents corporations from deploying the two together to ease the transition, and effectively forces them to stay with IE6.

A similar thing would happen with Visual Studio, the MS C++ development system: MS provides no solution to allow a C++ project to operate with both tools at the same time. MS only provides a mechanism to upgrade your project in place, overwriting the configuration for the older system. Fortunately the project description files are XML so with some clever text editing, one can have project files for both versions of the development system. And fortunately the development system is not so entwined with the OS that you can't have both installed at the same time. In fact, I've been working on a large system that was being simultaneously compiled under VC6, 8, and 9, while I weaned a customer off of VC6.

__________________
snooggums' density principal: "The more dense a population, the more dense a population."

Iliana: "You're a great friend but if we're ever chased by zombies I'm tripping you."

ZaBoo

IE6 should have been fixed ages ago. If the rendering system was on par with the outlines defined by the W3C, instead of going off on their own tangent and developing their own [now obsolete] features, nobody would be in this situation.

The differences between IE6[PC] and other browsers is quite minimal, unless the web applications are using some ActiveX plugins of some sort. It shouldn't take that long to port the site to work on modern browsers. This will help the internet, users, and developers alike to move on to bigger and better things, and help the internet bury the software once and for all.

There are solutions to get IE6 and IE7/8 running at the same time. They are by no means elegant solutions.

IETester, and IE6 Standalone would be good places to start.

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ScratchMonkey

But those solutions would be tough for an understaffed IT department to maintain when they're also trying to get the app upgraded.

It's much more maintainable to install a competitor's browser, and rewrite the app in parallel to run on it, than to try to hack up getting IE8 to run alongside IE6.

__________________
snooggums' density principal: "The more dense a population, the more dense a population."

Iliana: "You're a great friend but if we're ever chased by zombies I'm tripping you."

ZaBoo

Agreed; Installing a modern browser along side of IE6 would be the ideal case for a XP user who hasn't updated to IE7/8. The idea of keeping IE6 around just aches me, so I cannot personally recommend any solution which keeps IE6 installed. Such a solution will also become unrealistic as Vista/Windows 7 is packed with IE7/8 (horray!) - And to my understanding, there is no way to go back.

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Twisted_Firestarter

Both. The last project I was working on was Nokia's social media sharing site: share.ovi.com. Coaxing pixel perfect rendering in IE6 is just stupidly hard. Everyone on my team was trying to get support for it dropped--and it would have been, too, if not for the fact that Nokia's internal browser is IE6 and execs wanted to be able to demo the site internally.

Lately I've been heads-down on iPhone development. Objective-C is quirky if you are coming at it from a C# background. You get used to it, but all the [] brackets still drive me slightly crazy.

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Twisted Firestarter
a.k.a |TG| Harkonian

ScratchMonkey

Is that common knowledge? How many other large "bleeding edge" technology corporations are stuck on IE6? Perhaps it's time to create a Wall of Shame on the Internet to show off these dinosaurs. At least to encourage them to stop using IE6 for anything but their internal legacy apps, and install a competing standards-compliant browser for Internet work.

__________________
snooggums' density principal: "The more dense a population, the more dense a population."

Iliana: "You're a great friend but if we're ever chased by zombies I'm tripping you."

Kerostasis

Hey, I recognize that dilemma!

I've actually still got IE6 installed on my home computer, mostly because I didn't like the way IE7 and 8 function. But I've also got Firefox installed in parallel to run anything that doesn't support legacy IE6 -- and the list of sites I want to visit that DONT support IE6 keeps growing, so I guess one day I'll have to switch over completely.

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ScratchMonkey

Sorry, no. Win7 comes with a VM and a free minimal copy of XP and IE6, allowing one to run older applications in a VM. This allows corporations to upgrade their XP boxes and still use their aging internal apps. You'll have to hope that that's enough of a hassle that hardcore IE6 users won't go through that much trouble to keep using their old friend for Internet web sites.

__________________
snooggums' density principal: "The more dense a population, the more dense a population."

Iliana: "You're a great friend but if we're ever chased by zombies I'm tripping you."

rolypoly

firefox 3.5 ftw! LOL!!

ScratchMonkey

Part of the trick here is not to focus on Firefox. Instead, offer a choice of 3rd party browsers, including Opera, Chrome, and Safari. That way you don't come across to the IT department as a brand zealot. You're offering a practical solution to their upgrade dilemma. Maybe the pinheads in your company can't handle Firefox and need something more dumbed-down. Let the IT department and the CIO make that call. It's enough to get them to consider any alternative to IE.

__________________
snooggums' density principal: "The more dense a population, the more dense a population."

Iliana: "You're a great friend but if we're ever chased by zombies I'm tripping you."

ScratchMonkey

http://hey-it.com/

__________________
snooggums' density principal: "The more dense a population, the more dense a population."

Iliana: "You're a great friend but if we're ever chased by zombies I'm tripping you."