SaveIE6.com was put together as an April Fool’s joke by the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. Due to the tremendous interest it has received we have decided to keep this site up and running. Thanks everyone for the great feedback and for enjoying the irony!
I guess they just didn't remove the conflicting text in their footer.
"SaveIE6.com was put together as an April Fool’s joke by the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. Due to the tremendous interest it has received we have decided to keep this site up and running. Thanks everyone for the great feedback and for enjoying the irony!"
Perhaps it's because I'm British (we Brits can be a little particular about humour, especially irony), but I don't think a joke like that should explicitly identify itself as such.
> "Get the W3C standard changed to fit IE6" (listed as a goal of the site)
Please correct me if I got it wrong, but it seems HTML 5 is a bit similar -- ``let's make a list of features our sponsors support''. Only the sponsor base is wider.
I laughed out loud... "You have been mislead by a vocal minority and are using opera, which is clearly an inferior web browser to IE6. Please switch to IE6 and sign our petition."
You have been mislead by a vocal minority and are using chrome, which is clearly an inferior web browser to IE6. Please switch to IE6 and sign our petition.
"You have been mislead by a vocal minority and are using msie, which is clearly an inferior web browser to IE6. Please switch to IE6 and sign our petition."
You have been mislead by a vocal minority and are using unknown, which is clearly an inferior web browser to IE6. Please switch to IE6 and sign our petition.
Has anyone tried browsing with IE6 lately? At the time, everything was probably compatible with it.. but my school still uses IE6 and I am finding more and more common web pages are broken by it. At this point, it probably serves more as a content filter than anything.
So IE6 still accounts for about 1 million monthly page views on our site...about 1.5% of the traffic.
Yesterday we took the plunge and decided to display an eyesore of a box on every page on our site if you surf to it with ie6.
Imagine if many sites did this to spur the upgrade process. I'm really curious to see the results of this...will traffic plunge by 1.5% or will the usage of ie6 switch to other browsers. Note: no ie9 upgrade choice.
I'm not sure it really will change anything. The assumption is that people with IE6 chose it and can change it which is often not the case (corporate users with a strict IE6 policy notably).
It's reasonable to expect that your users will stay, and the browser repartition will follow the same curves it did before.
That is a possibility for sure. Since pb is a younger audience my gut feel is that there are a lot of users who are simply clueless about what browser they are using and just don't know better. Whether they do anything about is another story.
Well, this is 2011. That sort of policy just isn't in application anymore. Because companies with policies are companies with upgrade policies as well.
Make a website (IE6 Compatible, of course) that explains in tedious detail all the reasons a corporation should upgrade. There are real security issues that they should care about. Put this in the form of a white paper, but you get to put a few ads for corporate IT stuff in the corner.
Have a prominent "mail this to my IT administrator" link, that people can click, which mails a link to the page to an email address provided by the user. Use a mailto: link, so the email comes from inside the network, as they're going to get a lot of these, and we don't want them blocking them.
In the footer, have a link to your "developer page" with the text, "Help us educate corporate IT to IE6 security risks". On that developer page, have some javascript that people can cut and paste into their websites that senses when a browser is IE6, and if so, puts up a warning box with a link to the white paper page.
Now you have a potentially viral spread. You have an easy way for developers to alert their users to their browsers vulnerabilities, and do it in a way that leads those users on a path that might actually actuate change, which is, alerting their IT people. When it gets to the IT people, you have made a strong technical case that they can use to go to their bosses and get things done.
Plus, you might get a few clicks from IT guys on your ads to pay for your server space.
As far as I can tell there's no reason to get rid of IE6 unless you're going to also eliminate IE 7 and 8. Aside from CSS differences they are largely equivalent. Even IE9 doesn't support websockets or even half the HTML5 features of any other modern browser so for a modern web app you still need to drop IE support anyways.
While IE7 (or IE8 for that matter) is clearly very far from being perfect, it's massively superior to IE6. Not just "CSS differences". I mean IE7 fixed bugs like select elements being always on top or the URL fragment (the #hash part) being submitted to the HTTP server as part of the URL. These issues are major pains in the back. Supporting IE7 is an awful lot easier than supporting IE6.
The things you have mentioned are rather trivial in the overall picture and really not a good enough reason to support IE7 but not IE6. The JavaScript engines are nearly identical and the broad set of technologies are the same.
For example, I consider not supporting SVG 10 years after standarization a major probleam. And only IE9 addressed that issue.
One less browser to tweak and test. If you look at the numbers, IE7 is going away fast. That leaves IE8 and IE9.
I think writing for a cross section of IE9, and the more modern browsers (FF,Chrome, Opera), and some specialized code for IE8 where necessary, is a big improvement.
Also, JavaScript performance has improved in the newer versions of IE. I just ran into a situation where some DOM manipulation using jQuery was taking 35 seconds to complete in IE6, but took less than a second in IE8.
I ended up spending about four hours coming up with a bunch of optimizations that made it perform acceptably in IE6. I suppose you could argue that optimized code is a good thing, but personally I would have rather have spend that time working on something else.
