I dunno, Google seems to have beaten them to the punch and no matter their culture, I'd still call them a traditionally hierarchically structured organization
What does beating anyone to the punch have anything to do with this? This isn't some race to hit a specific market first, and I doubt they're trying to go down in internet history as The Organization that Led the Revolution Against IE6. Regardless of who came out against IE6 first, this can only strengthen the effort, and lengthens the list of popular services against the browser, which will hopefully change things.
Who beat who to the punch is completely and utterly irrelevant here. It's all about sending out the right signal and taking a bold stand in bringing the web forward.
The fact that people sit down and make time to come up with initiatives like this is something I truly admire, no matter how big their audience or the volume of their network.
Unfortunately, there are a huge number of corporate environments that have virtually no reason to upgrade their browsing platforms. Many of these environments don't even really have a technical reason to not do the upgrade, they are just administered by overworked staff and upgrading IE6 to something newer and safer is just at the bottom of the list.
The bottom line is that until the end users who have to use IE6 every day become inconvenienced enough (in the form of sites blocking them out, not warning them) or the people who pay these IT admins actually think it's a priority, we're not going to make much headway on this issue.
With that said, I think that initiatives like this are a great start. What I would like to see is a distributed technical effort to encourage upgrades, which is what they are doing, followed up a technical effort to block access to IE6 starting on a specific date. Let the note of encouragement that participants place on their sites let users know that unless their browser is upgraded, they will be unable to access the site as of June 1, 2010.
Eventually these IT admins will be placed in the position of having to choose between keeping IE6 to support their legacy intranet applications and upgrading IE6 because third party sites have started to implement functionality that IE6 doesn't support.
One of my clients ships software to such an organization - several of our users had IE6 installed when Training day rolled around. Interestingly, rather than going through Tech Support to request an upgrade to IE7 (which takes a while), the users opted to just download Firefox.
You are luckier than us - some of our customers machines are so locked down that they can't even change the date let alone install firefox. We even tried using portable apps on a usb stick, no luck there either! Arrgh.
Someone installed Firefox on a computer at a non-profit radio station I was involved with not so long ago.
The owner of the station sent an email to all saying that if he found out who had installed the "firefox trojan" on the office PC, he would "sue them and call in the police". A few days later, all computers in the building had been downgraded from IE8 to IE6 and locked down so users couldn't even reboot.
It's now official policy in that company that if anyone puts their own USB drive into an office computer, they'll be asked to leave the station. There is electrical tape stuck over the USB ports. That's the sort of mindless, dribbling paranoia you're up against.
This is the situation I see in many corporate environments. Thin clients set up and users who aren't allowed to download or install any new applications, Firefox included!
Why would they need to change the date? It syncs with a domain controller and if you knock it more than 15 minutes or so out you'll break kerberos and your username and password will stop working, and then you'll tell me "you didn't do anything" and "it was working fine". :-/
More unfortunate still is the huge number of schools trapped in an IE 6 world. Primary and secondary school IT in the US must be worse off than corporate IT -- far too little money, time, and staff to worry about browser versions. Our audience is largely educators and our IE 6 percentage (12% or so) seem stuck now after a steady decline this past year.
There's only so much space to design a widget that works for 640x480 resolution. We're already recommending 4 browsers, many others didn't make the cut (Opera, Konqueror, Flock, etc)
You do realize that a large portion of people that are using IE6 are at work where they have NO control over the browser...
i hear this every time the ie6 argument comes up, and yet, i've never heard from someone that actually works in one of these IT departments that can vouch for this.
who are these unsympathetic robots who, while ironically working in an IT department, are so out of touch with technology that they fail to understand their users are stuck using insecure, out-of-date software that is now increasingly being blocked? are these users still using 500mhz machines with windows 98, too?
The problem is internal legacy applications that only work in IE6. If they upgrade browsers the apps break, so in order to support these apps they keep IE 6. The question for them is 'do we spend time and money to update all of our applications to upgrade a browser, or just leave things the way they are for now?'
Sometimes the question isn't even "do we spend time and money to update our applications", because sometimes the code for the applications is long gone, along with the company that wrote it, and all they have left is the compiled code running on some server in a back closet.
This was the reasoning that led to Java's ascendancy in the enterprise and the 1996-2000 tech boom. Companies were stuck with Y2K-incompliant COBOL software that they no longer had the expertise (or sometimes even the source code) for, and they had a hard constraint of Jan 1, 2000 that they had to hit. So many of them threw away their existing software entirely and rewrote it all in Java. The resulting IT spending fueled the tech boom of the late 1990s, led to the rise of the Indian outsourcing industry, and resulted in widespread adoption of Java EE.
We're in a recession now. There're a bunch of unemployed web developers. Let's simply ban the use of IE6 and kill two birds with one stone! Break some windows and burn those diskpacks, baby!
hell, back when I used to work for more restrictive companies I was still able to download the zip version of firefox, unzip it into ~mydocuments, and run it from there.
That's exactly the situation we had at the place I used to work. Management believed it was better to deal with the limitations of legacy software than with the expense of modernizing it. As of 2006, when I left, they were even still using Windows 98 on a handful of PCs because there was no reliable way to get all the data out of one of the applications and the software vendor had gone out of business.
Same reply here as below:
"Sorry, that's not an excuse. IE 8 comes with a "compatibility mode" feature where any site can choose to use the IE 6 rendering engine by setting headers or meta tags appropriately."
Hmm, you're right. Somehow that didn't make it into the final release. What a shame.
Either way, our perspective is still that the more people that complain about IE 6, the more pressure IT departments will have to upgrade their systems.
Starting with Firefox for a modern browsing experience wouldn't be a bad idea :)
And an antediluvian management experience. Official MSIs with transforms and group policy templates for configuration please.
(e.g. group policy configure location and size of cache, proxy settings, location of profile folder, restrictions on plugin installation, items to add to favourites, home page configuration, default plugins to install, disable update checking if they wont have rights to install them, etc).
Some compatibility problems don't regard HTML, so this compatibility mode is irrelevant - for instance in COM apps using the IE browser control, upgrades to IE7/8 are known to cause problems.
I agree and I face this problem. Generally I circumvent this by firebugs capabilities to edit the HTML dynamically, but it has to be done too frequently end up uninstalling IE8. and installing it again at a later point. IT department thinks that IE7 does not make the security cut .. I dont know the specifics of security cut.
Digg surveyed IE6 users. 76% of those surveyed DO NOT HAVE THE POWER/AUTHORITY/ABILITY to upgrade.
"Giving them a message saying, “Hey! Upgrade!” in this case is not only pointless; it’s sadistic.
We’re committed to developing to Web standards and building new ways to help you discover the best of the Web. Keeping an eye on what technologies folks use and why they’re being used is a big part of it."
The Digg survey shows that 70% of IE6 users are corporate, but there's no indication how representative that is of the web as a whole.
Either way, this initiative is targeted straight at those users. We've heard from several sources that many corporate IT departments don't feel any need or urgency to upgrade, and receive very few complaints. We see this as a start -- the more complaints the IT department gets (especially from on top), the more pressure they'll feel to upgrade. Even if they can't upgrade IE 6 due to legacy applications, they could always install a version of Firefox side-by-side and only use IE 6 for the legacy apps.
For the other subset of IE6 users (moms, grandmothers, etc), this will be a great notice to let them know that their web experience is seriously degraded, and that they should strongly consider upgrading their web browser.
Unfortunately, IT departments receiving complaints isn't going to do it, unless those complaints are "I can't do my job with IE6 any more"... So you need to hit core web apps for those businesses. If the choice is "we could fix our 78 different custom web apps to work on Firefox" or "we could upgrade to IE8 or FF", the choice is pretty clear for a cash-crunched business with an understaffed IT department. It's a cost-benefit thing.
For what it's worth, we don't support IE6 (or if we do, it's accidental!) and we're pretty squarely aimed at businesses and "prosumers". So count us in!
Having consulted to big companies in a former life, I just don't think it'll do much good. :-(
It's as good a place to start as any. Once we can get the percentage of users using IE 6 down a little bit more, we'll be able to ditch support completely.
Also, there's no reason the browser decision has to be binary: custom legacy apps could use IE 6, with Firefox as the main web browser.
BTW: Shoot me an email when you've implemented some kind of notice and I'll throw your logo up!
There's a slight problem with this (and I'm only half tongue in cheek here): corporate IT admins probably see it as an actual positive if their staff can't access their favorite social networking web sites or anything else not explicitly required for work. The only thing that will convince them to move is if critical business infrastructure they depend on starts breaking and that isn't very likely to happen soon.
I think one of key things that will make businesses move will be when Microsoft itself phases out mainstream support. Sadly, their policy is that IE lifecycles follow that of the OS they were released with, so if I read it right, we are looking at IE6 being supported right through to 2014 before security updates disappear. That means we'll probably be stuck with some reasonable percentage of IE6 users for a few years yet. With luck Win7 will be good enough to entice a lot of companies that held back through vista to upgrade and that will kill off a goodly number over the next year or two.
I'm currently an intern at a large biotech company which employs over 25,000 people world-wide and all the machines come with IE6.
I'm an intern at their headquarters in a section of the IT department that doesn't deal with maintaining the software on the computers. However, there was one larger meeting where I remember someone asking about upgrading IE, and the response was something like, "Uhh, I've been pretty busy, I'll get around to it eventually." Everyone just laughed and I could tell it was a kind of ongoing joke. I think the general attitude is that no one here really cares enough to go through the work of upgrading everyone. I don't think they get many complaints, and their job isn't in jeopardy, so they just sit on it until something or someone really big makes them act.
IE6 is still very prevalent in the American school system (don't know about elsewhere). We used to sell a web product to schools and you wouldn't believe the number of districts using IE6 for "compatibility" with their network software or because they don't consider upgrading a priority.
One of my co-founders has been a public school teacher for the last 20 years or so. She says that the school system's primary function is to give America's least competent individuals a way to stay in the middle class.
While that's true, it's beside the point. All the public schools I've been to do not have an `IT Department', the computers there were just installed in a fire-and-forget manner. Often the school district has some people who are supposed to be in charge of it, but they don't come around very often, and honestly don't have the time, money, or manpower to set up something sane.
These unsympathetic robots are all the people that are using Windows 2000. I've seen people in firms that refuse to update their version of windows. They all seem to hate this and don't expect much of a browsing experience from these machines anyway...
The majority of the users of my company's web application use IE6 on Windows 2000. Additionally, many of these computers have Vista stickers on them, and are quite powerful. Their IT groups already have established practices to support the machines, and they are used almost exclusively to surf the web and run software that was purchased 5 years ago. Our users aren't even unhappy, as their work does not center around a computer; thus, the corporate IT infrastructure has no motivation to upgrade them.
That said, we still pressure them to upgrade, and I'll be extremely happy when they eventually do.
so is the refusal coming from the IT person or the end-user?
perhaps instead of all these silly campaigns to try to force users to upgrade, they should make a simple questionnaire that asks the user why they are still using ie6, and then publish the results. i have a feeling the leading reason will not be "because some jerk in IT won't let me".
Our perspective is that the more people that are prompted about their outdated browsing experience, the more pressure the IT department will be getting to get their ass in gear and upgrade their decade old computer systems. You can bet that if the volume of complaints triples, it will start to become a major priority -- especially if the complaints are coming from the top.
Being as my desktop at home still runs Windows 2000, I used to assume this was the case as well. But the OS/browser stats on w3schools, at least, show only 1% usage of W2K as compared to 14% IE6 usage, which, if my math is right, seems to mean that a large number of IE6 users are on XP.
I know from extremely unpleasant experience that many large Canadian government organizations are still using IE6+XP. Further, I know of at least one large health region still on IE6+XP.
Change takes a while in these monolithic bureaucracies; especially when they have to ensure that any upgrades to software have no negative effects to any other software installed on the system (a lot of which can be equal parts shoddy and proprietary).
As an aside, I've been working with a large government client for 2.5 years now, and I still haven't been able to get their IT dept. to add Flash to their image to support the streaming video site they paid my company to build (hooray for Windows Media Player).
In a lot of cases (including mine), IT operators are working with zero budget. While there's the obvious argument that upgrading from a free browser to another free browser doesn't cost any money, it does cost time; I work at a federal agency in which their web applications HAVE to work, and unfortunately, many of them were written for IE6. Rewriting those applications to support a new browser isn't free either.
In addition that that, there is time spent securing the installation. In the case of IE it's a little easier as I can manage it with policies, but it is absolutely critical that we're following DOD stigs regarding security, and setting up a central policy isn't free.
Regarding the PC comment, the laptop I replaced a month ago was a 1.0Ghz Pentium with 512M RAM. This was the upgraded laptop at the time, that I needed for java development. Compiling code with 512M on XP was adventurous. For the last 8 months I had it, the internal LCD had died, most of the keys didn't work, the WiFi radio was completely dead, and the power button would only work if I wiggled the frame and monitor. I made sure to use it on a plugged-in (ethernet network) to bypass the WiFi, plugged into an external monitor to get around the LCD, grabbed an external keyboard to type on, and wiggled it every day to power it on.
Before deeming it dead, they replaced the motherboard 3 times and the hard drive twice. I kept using the decrepit old machine because frankly, it was the nicest laptop anyone had on the team. They're refreshing the machines now, but we've only had IE7 in the environment for about a month. I am lucky in that I can use Firefox, but only within the firewall, and not at all to browse any external sites.
Sorry, I kind of got off on a tangent here, but it's perfectly reasonable to understand that there ARE in fact reasons why it takes a long time to get off of IE6.
i've never heard from someone that actually works in one of these IT departments
Hi!
who are these unsympathetic robots who, while ironically working in an IT department, are so out of touch with technology
The same people who get emails from vendors warning us off upgrading to IE7 or certain programs will break. The same people who have had such pain from flakey apps for all sorts of reasons that we just don't dare upgrade. The same people who use anti-virus, non-administrator accounts and gateway HTTP, FTP and SMTP proxies with scanners to reduce the risks.
The same people who've learned to beat their inner geek into submission to the principle of 'if it's not broken, and you don't want it broken, leave it alone. Companies want sameness, predictability and uptime, not features, novelty, CSS compliance or security'.
By choosing the easy path for yourself you’re choosing the hard path for web developers. Sooner rather than later this tension will become too much and you’ll find that websites simply stop supporting your browser of choice.
But, like someone already mentioned in this thread it’s not a binary choice. Install Firefox (or an equivalent up-to-date browser) for normal browsing and leave IE6 on the machines for legacy apps.
I am currently working at one of the largest beverage corporations of the world, and not only they continue to use IE6 but also they methodically inspect every Windows OS update, even if its a security patch, it can be months until they decide to update the network with such patches and updates.
At my day job we have some (unpatched?) Windows 2000 machine (no service packs) running IE 5.5 (I think?). I carry around a flash drive with a Portable Firefox (among other apps) install on it for browsing at work.
They're 2.0 gHz P4 Dell machines if you're really interested in the specs. :p
GM requires the use of IE6, or it at least did when my father last worked there (about a year and a half, two years ago). It could have changed by now but considering they were just moving from 95 to 98 when he left I doubt it.
The official browser at my office is IE6. Of course I have chrome, firefox and safari installed, but most employees here don't have local admin access.
As far as I know all government machines are running FDCC(Federal Desktop Core Configuration) and the machines I've seen run IE7 with many IT departments recommending Firefox.
As does Britain's Ministry of Defence as well as many other departments in the British government. Moreover, they don't even have upgrade plans in place either.
I have worked at a place like this. You clearly have never worked for a large bank, or financial institution. Or a company that has a lot of internal processes designed for ie6/active-x. It is great, like stepping back into the past, but not the good past of dinosaurs or gladiators, but the shit past of 6 years ago, when we didn't know any better. You no longer want to use a computer at home, since you are constantly reminded of the shit you are using at work.
They're people who work in firms that have intranet applications that were written specifically for IE6. Its cheaper to keep the browser than update some very badly written software.
Sorry, that's not an excuse. IE 8 comes with a "compatibility mode" feature where any site can choose to use the IE 6 rendering engine by setting headers or meta tags appropriately.
From my comment on VB:
"That's exactly the idea. Even if a bunch of the remaining IE 6 users are corporate, hopefully a few of them will become aware of the fact that their browser is almost 9 years old and start putting pressure on IT to upgrade."
The more prompts that are posted across the web, the more pressure the IT department will be getting to get their ass in gear and upgrade their decade old computer systems.
For 'drop in code', it would be nice if they cleaned it up a bit... Removed redundant whitespace in css, redundant white space between divs and used better quoting e.g. the following
I applaud everyone who participates in this for having the gumption to add some inertia to the situation. It's ok to give the plebs some incentive to user better, safer technologies. And furthermore, three cheers for the realization that small, progressive companies can use consumer impact to positively change the greater technological environment and accelerate the pace of widespread adoption. Booya!
The vast majority of machines running IE6 have requirements that see no advantage to an upgrade. Example: corporate machine where the internet is not used - in that case an IE upgrade is pointless, but the employee might still surf the web.
How many home users are still using IE6? I doubt all that many TBH.
I wonder how many organizations use separate test environments; because parallelism is really useful for this kind of migration.
In the case of IE6, it would mean setting up some machines with $NEXT_GEN_BROWSER and some side servers with copies of the antiquated "web" apps. Gradually, everything that's broken without IE6 is fixed by tinkering with the side copy that no one is really using. Sometimes, the company's been really stupid and doesn't even have source code, etc. so "tinkering" might really mean "try something new entirely", but at least they'd be showing interest in modernizing (however long it takes).
The simple fact is that all companies should have this kind of "beta flow", in which they can basically try whatever they want (time permitting). Today it's IE6, tomorrow it could be something entirely different; there will always something new that "might" vastly improve efficiency, and a company that can give these things an honest trial is way ahead. I cringe when I see change-averse IT groups, because deep down I know they're shooting themselves in the foot.
Wow, I hadn't checked my site stats for a while, I thought IE6 browser share was a lot higher. For me it's ~18% of total visits, ~30% IE7, ~12% IE8, 30% Firefox, 7% Chrome, 2% Safari.
Isn't just about everyone left using IE6 a corporate user whose employer won't let them upgrade? While I'd love to see the death of IE6 & 7 as much as anyone, I think most people using IE6 probably have firewalls that block Reddit and Justin.tv.
While I heartily support your attempt at feeling significant by coming across as an arrogant prick, my original question was moreso along the lines of "are you guys restricting the featured sites to those using the code you've provided?".
I haven't seen that explained yet, hence why I asked. ;P
I'm guessing most of the remaining IE6 installs are inside corporations and government departments and are necessary to run legacy internal web applications.
Again, same reply:
"That's not an excuse. IE 8 comes with a "compatibility mode" feature where any site can choose to use the IE 6 rendering engine by setting headers or meta tags appropriately."
True... but not by choice since some government agencies are still using Windows 2000 (which doesn't support IE7+). Some might say a move to FF would be beneficial, but the overhead of having to manage and secure FF is far greater when they can just stay on IE6.
Still using IE6 means avoiding forced updates from MS, so, they probably were disabled security updates. It means they are the source of bootnets and hosting for trojans and viruses.
It's not a boycott, just a dismissible nag message. Did you read the article?
Also, the number of people from these startups is approximately (data from quantcast):
4.1 million (jtv us) + 1.3 million (weebly us) + 1.7 million (reddit us) + 1.3 million (posterous) + 0.5 million (disqus us) = 8.9 million US people. Global reach is probably 2-3x that much, but quantcast doesn't offer global numbers for all of them (JTV has 26 million globally).
Perhaps I'm misreading your analysis but it seems to me you're suggesting that the US visitor count for each of those sites is 8.9 million people total? I would suggest it's actually much lower - the chances are that the people who use reddit are the same sorts of people that use posterous and disqus (and so on). You're potentially counting 1 person who uses all 5 sites as 5 separate people.
The problem I see is that - particularly for reddit, posterous and disqus - the audience is mostly technical (or at least fairly Internet literate). These are not the types of people who need to warned about IE6.
I've been looking forward to seeing what this type of network can do that a traditionally hierarchically structured organization can't.