BBC News reports “Mark your diaries for 4 March because in Denver the funeral arrangements are well underway for the planned passing that day of Internet Explorer 6″. There’s a phobia of being buried alive but I think in this case, it’s the living that are all too quick to be shoveling the dirt over as IE6 doesn’t officially die until 2014 when Microsoft pull the life-support.
Ah, the much loathed IE6. Software tends to naturally rose-tint as it ages, but there’s very few^aEUR”if any^aEUR”fond memories that I have of IE6. When I started out coding HTML, certainly there was much glee that I suddenly had this incredible new platform that I could bend to my will, but being an IE user between 2001 and 2004 was hard; the only thing that was harder was being a user of any other browser!
Google will be phasing out support for IE6 starting 1st of March. I think the hasty funeral arrangements are because ^aEUR~if Google can do it, then it must mean everybody can’. Certainly, developers have been looking for reasons to ditch IE6 given the extra effort that is involved in supporting it. Apple notably excluded IE6 support for MobileMe and many other companies have been following the trend.
In the consumer space, I believe IE6 to be irrelevant. Firefox has opened the gates to competition and users are even having choice forced down their throat in Europe with the browser ballot. Use of IE6 in the consumer space is mostly artificial, coming from users who may simply not know that an upgrade is available, or that alternative browsers exist. The solution to IE6 in the consumer space is that of education, no more. IE6 makes up less than 1% of users on OSAlert (who are obviously ahead of the curve).
The corporate space is something entirely different. The UK government has been criticised for continuing to use IE6 (even in the MOD of all places).
Corporate use of IE6 is mired in a number of problems. Whilst IE6 continues to be patched by Microsoft it is therefore a perfectly ^aEUR~safe’ and valid thing to use, especially if it avoids the cost of upgrading. Enterprises will only be legally forced off of IE6 when Microsoft discontinue support as companies handling customer data must have their software proven to be patched and up to date under requirements of the PCI (Payment Card Industry Standards Council) as well as possible insurance requirements.
That said, what happens in private corporate Intranets shouldn’t reflect what developers do on the public web and I think the Google announcement is what will change a lot of developers’ mindset.
So, let’s raise a toast to IE6; for in its youth it did defeat the awful Netscape and it brought some semblance of W3C standards to developers. Despite IE6 having passed away here, let’s not forget that in some places beyond the horizon, IE6 is alive and well and currently preventing any kind of innovation from happening. It looks like IE6 will continue to haunt us for years to come.
This is happening sooner that I expected by its still not enough. I would love to see funeral of whole IE.
Newer versions have improved, but they are still far far behind other browsers and as a web developer, i hate the fact that due to IE i cannot use so many cool new stuff.
So, dear IE, you currently deserve to die. Get fixed soon so that we have another good browser. However, if you die, i wont mind.
I know what you mean,
i also work as a webdeveloper and we are forced by some companies to support ie6/7. Really time consuming when it comes down to the css part:S
I’ve had to support the latest Netscape 6 (latest came out in 2002).
Anyone out there supporting NCSA Mosaic?
2002, eh? That’s more recent than IE6 (2001).
Ah, you took the bait.
Netscape 6 was released earlier in 2001, IE was first released later that year. The difference being IE was being updated until its last stable release in May 2008, but Netscape 6 stopped in May 2002.
Edited 2010-02-25 13:40 UTC
You think you have it bad! I have to make sites for our company’s clients that support IE 5.5
Edited 2010-02-26 13:01 UTC
I feel exactly the same. But I have to add that it’s a great challange to make your websites work on platforms with different conditions so I think I learnt a lot because of IE6 and I’ll be able to use this knowledge in my whole life in any kind of situations.
Edited 2010-02-25 10:51 UTC
I^aEURTMll agree with that. IE6 is brutal and taught me very rapidly the very depths of CSS manipulation. I^aEURTMve invented a few elegant CSS hacks just because of IE.
I was going to ask if you’re a bit mad and then I saw your nick
Why not use Google Frame for IE?
http://code.google.com/intl/nl-NL/chrome/chromeframe/
I don’t see people having problems with this, they also need to install Silverlight, Flash Updates and other plugins to use all their content on the web.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/02/24/documenting-standards-i…
Edited 2010-02-25 13:08 UTC
Actually, I do see them having problems with it — the sort of people who still use IE6, especially the corporate types, are reluctant to install anything new. Many corporate workstations are locked down completely, so users can’t do it, and the company certainly wouldn’t authorise wasting the IT department’s time rolling out something the business sees as untested and unnecessary.
Your so right, most of the IE6 users are the Enterprise, which still have legacy IE6 applications.
Because the people who are still running IE6 *don’t* install all those plugins. They’re either people who don’t know what a browser or plugin is and just click on the E to access the internet. Or they’re corporate environments stuck with an old version of IE due to some terrible web-app that won’t work on anything newer – and those certainly don’t go installing random plugins either.
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/lifecycle/default.mspx
It effectively does die on March 31, when Windows 2000, the last OS not to have a newer version. gets its support pulled.
So, yeah, I guess it’s more a case of having the funeral early, at a convenient time, so as not to inconvenience yourself when it actually dies.
I’ll toast to IE6’s death! I’m proud to say i never knew you!
Famous quote of the day: “Hmm! Hmm! Hmm! You’re toast! They’ll bury you in a lunch box!” (General Darian, ROTT)
http://www.favbrowser.com/make-and-stab-internet-explorer-voodoo-do…
Edited 2010-02-25 14:26 UTC
If the Mayans are right, the world’s going to end on 12/22/2012 anyway… so no IE6 until 2014!
the world’s going to end on 12/22/2012 anyway
Incorrect. The correct date is 2020, revealed last year when they recalculated the Mayan calendar.
Which is why that was supposed to be a joke…
And here I was worrying about 2038…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Year_2038_problem
It doesn’t really matter, the world isn’t going to end, a new cycle will start. That is all. Things will change, but things are constantly changing.
No, the world will end on December 31, 2010.
That is the date that the calendar on my wall ends.
it’s not the end of the world, just the 13th Baktun. Then we get the 14th. Wheee
Good-bye!
Good luck!
Good riddance!
Nah nah nah nah
Nah nah nah nah
Hey hey hey
GOOD BYE!
Edited 2010-02-25 19:09 UTC
What a sad day that everyone yearns for loss of diversity of web clients, although I’m not suprised at this reaction on OSAlert. I thought the great thing about the web was that we don’t all have to think or be the same.
I’m sure I’ll be shot down in flames, but I like and still use IE6. Its UI is non-pretentious and fits in perfectly on XP, it loads fast and doesn’t get in my way. Admittedly I have a content proxy between me and the web so I don’t have to deal with too much flash. It’s still supported by Microsoft and they are still issue security patches for it. OK maybe they shouldn’t have been there in the first place, but mature software has a lot to be said for it. IE6 is reliable and good enough for 95% of the web.
Yes – I tried IE7/IE8 (visual urgh on XP), Firefox (slow to load), Chrome (why did you reinvent the window?) Opera (kitchen sink UI (TM)) and Safari on windows (cannot stomach Apple policy, and again non-standard UI on XP). I keep going back to IE6 for day to day use, but I keep Firefox for when a website has been badly designed to force me to use something more recent.
Whatever happened to “This site works with any browser“? Would we be happy to celebrate the day the web stops supporting text mode browsers? In my old-fart view, the web is about content and hypertext not flashy shiny bling.
Will anyone else own up to using IE6 or feeling sad that everyone is dancing on its grave?
I await the flames.
IE6^aEURTMs UI is what made it win over Netscape. IE6 was a breath of fresh air compared to Netscape. It wasn^aEURTMt until Firefox was released that anything came along that was closely simple enough for IE6 users to want to adopt.
IE6^aEURTMs toolbar is a good thing. What is wrong with IE6 is everything else. It^aEURTMs slow, insecure and is a nightmare to code for. If IE6 had a decent rendering engine, then I would not find complaint with its UI. That is why ChromeFrame is a good thing.
Engine-wise; there^aEURTMs still IE7/8, and IE8 is not too shabby and I really do hold out hope that IE9 will be a much needed return to a competitive IE.
What about “works with any browser”?
Like the original poster, I can’t help but be bemused – an enthusiast site promoting operating systems diversity has become intolerant of browser diversity (at a time when to many, the browser is becoming the operating system.)
In any diverse ecosystem there will be “better” and “worse” participants (whatever that means.) The real issue here is not IE or IE6, but whether people believe that the web should be a platform that is open to anyone, or whether the web should be reserved for people doing the “right thing” (whatever that means.)
On a more technical note, HTML was designed to intelligently degrade when a feature is not present on the renderer. CSS2 really broke that, because if a style is partially supported the result may no longer be legible or correct. This, IMO, is what makes IE6 hard to support. The problem is not (entirely) with IE; the problem is that current web standards demand 100% conformance to have a useful implementation. This is not very open-web-like, and results in very rapid obsoleteness. It certainly discourages the web from being used in expensive hardware (car, fridge, whatever) because doing so demands unsustainably frequent replacement.
Engine diversity is fine. Inconsistent standards implementation is not. If the GPU world was as messed up as the browser world, gaming would still be back in the 2000^aEURTMs.
Two problems.
First, there are loads of things that make the day to day life of a web developer easier. IE doesn’t support a lot of them, while every other browser does a fine job with it. Supporting IE means you can’t use those things, not supporting IE (but supporting every other browser) and you don’t have that problem, unless you are talking about really bleeding edge stuff.
Second problem is that it is very buggy. Every browser has js and css bugs, but IE6 sort of took it to the next level.
As soon as IE6 goes away, it substantially raises the lowest common denominator (which will be IE7), and dramatically reduces the amount of hackery needed to get everything looking right.
All completely true, but isn’t it equally true in client software?
If a piece of software supports 4 platforms, one of them will be “worst”, and it will simplify things to eliminate it. But even having done so, one will still be “worst”. Taken to an extreme, software only runs on one version of one OS (guess which.)
Open source software typically goes in the other direction. If somebody’s using BSD, a patch to work around a limitation is contributed, and then the software runs on more platforms. The platform matrix for most OSS is enormous, and frankly, a lot of the platforms are terrible for developers.
I’m not unsympathetic to web developer’s plight, since that’s what client software developers deal with all the time. But there is an interesting double standard. On the one hand, there’s an article about WebKit now running on Haiku, which is seen as goodness even though it’s hard to complete and support; then there’s an article about dropping IE6, which is seen as goodness too, even though the user base is larger and support story simpler.
Personally, I’m fine with people choosing to run Haiku, or choosing to run IE6. I’d rather users choose their platforms, and developers support users. That’s my philosophy when I write my own software.
Er, what about the random javascript error dialogs for CSS settings? Or that even when used with javascript properly, you could often get many dialogs in a row on a page load, or with an event on a dynamic page.
What about the crashing? That’s never good, and it seemed to get more common with each hundredth added on to 4’s release version number.
Personally, I preferred the Netscape UI. Even so, IE won that round somewhat fairly.
You’re right – content is important. And good luck watching YouTube videos or looking at photos on Picasa or Flickr in your text-mode browser. Times change, there’s more to the web than text these days.
FLickr works OK – IE6 is fine with JPGs. Point taken about flash video, but Flash is a resource hog and overused anyway.
I’m not visually impaired, but we need to make sure our websites are accessible to those that are. Graceful degradation is the way forward, and it generally works.
Reports of IE6 demise are greatly exagerated
Edit: Picassa is fine too.
Edited 2010-02-25 20:40 UTC
Right, but you were the one who raised the subject of text-mode browsers, something virtually useless on the internet today (if still occasionally useful for reading HTML-formatted log/report files over an SSH connection).
As to IE6, you’re right that it’s adequate for basic content. But only adequate, and that barely. Try to do fancy layouts, to make the content look nicer? That’s a struggle. Try to make a more interactive page, to make things like navigation a bit more usable? Again, a struggle. These days, it’s share is small enough that it’s just not worth the huge extra effort to support it.
Yes I did bring them into it – but the point I was trying to make (not perhaps expressed very well) was about loss of diversity, and whether the only “acceptable” clients on the web are those that support all the latest revisions of the standards.
If by that you mean its not worth implementing some particular features to support IE6 as such, I might probably agree. But I’m not sure I relish a web where you have to support every aspect of CSS version N (for some value of N). Why do we still use HTML heading and link tags, when each site can implement its own styling and interaction? Has javascript now become mandatory to view the web? Not yet, but maybe soon.
It seems the loss of client diversity, and a shift towards layout-focussed approaches could become a reason to add more and more complexity to the browser space. I hearby evoke the spirit of Tim Berners-Lee (my selective reading of his vision anyway!)
Define ‘view the web’? For static content, perhaps not – a page for an open-source project say, with documentation, screenshots, info for developers. Gnome.org or KDE.org, for example. Such sites can, and generally do, get by without scripting.
But the web isn’t just static content, and hasn’t been for a long time now. Can you really picture a Facebook-like site implemented without scripting? Or compare GMail with some of the ghastly non-scripted webmail services of a decade ago.
I agree – by “view the web” I mean can you take your browser onto the web and generally (1) read content on servers (2) navigate between servers (3) optionally view some media along the way. I don’t think I should expect a pixel-perfect rendition of the content as it appears on the graphic designers photo-shop session.
Facebook is not part of the public web anyway – its a private gated community. It might almost as well be implemented in Flash.
Yes for web apps Javascript is a big bonus. But there are web email applications that don’t require javascript, even if they aren’t as flashy as Gmail.
I do acknowledge there is always a judgement call about when support for older clients should be phased out. But it is the fact that the web is a public content space that means we should keep accessibility in mind for longer than we might in other contexts.
You’re missing the point. Yes, Facebook is a membership site, but if it were completely open, the point would still stand – it’s a website used by millions of people, and which could not feasibly be built without scripting.
Yes, I mentioned those. Never mind being as flashy as Gmail – they’re almost universally usability disasters, a consequence of trying to build applications (as opposed to content) while refraining from using the tools to do a good job.
If IE6 were the current version, or even the previous current of Internet Explorer, that’d be fair. But it’s been years since that was the case, it’s been obsoleted in favor of IE7, which in turn has been replaced by IE8. It’s a dinosaur that predates the modern web (Web 2.0, if you like buzzwords), and generally isn’t worth the effort of supporting.
Much the same argument, I would note, applied to Netscape 4 back in it’s day – some people persisting in using it long after development in rivals (like IE6, even) had rendered it obsolete. It’s time has passed.
That is actually the problem — to get a website to display correctly in other browsers, you have to do it right. To get it to display in IE, you need to do it wrong. But it can’t be wrong for everything, so that means you have to write scripts and css that will manipulate the site to become wrong, but isolate those hacks in specific ways that are actually invalid (so that other browsers just ignore them), but in ways that IE interprets fine.
The people celebrating are us web developers, for the reasons I outlined above. Being able to say “This site works in any browser” gets WAY easier and cleaner when that phrase does not include IE6.
Edited 2010-02-25 21:34 UTC
It depends where you consider web development to reside – in the client, on the server or in the integration of your server onto a heterogeneous network containing a wide diversity of systems. Actually I consider myself a web developer too.
That is truly ironic.
Why?
We are talking about a buggy platform implementation. If you are integrating services over a network, you probably deal with boatloads of xml. Imagine you are serializing some sort of message, and can pass it fine to any of a half dozen services without any problem, except for one. It has a buggy xml parser, and not only requires a different serialization process, but figuring out kludges to get it to accept the data you need it to accept is largely a matter of trial and error, and tends to take most of the time required when making even simple changes to your model.
Wouldn’t you be very, very happy if you came into work one day, and found out your company was upgrading that system to a newer version that didn’t have those problems anymore?
Because claims of working with any browser flies against the desire to exclude the ones that you don’t like. (Of course “this site works with any browser” is aspirational, as there must be early beta versions of browsers that were just so badly broken.)
My point is that IMO IE6 is good enough for most of the web, so shouldn’t be excluded. Its a similar argument for why we make sites accessible even though it is a small portion of the population.
For me the argument about XML support in browsers is not a very strong argument. The web is still mainly content markup for the purposes of inter-human communication. Most of the web doesn’t generate XML or even XHTML – so browsers have to degrade gracefully when they build their DOM.
No, actually, if it was part of a general trend to not support older versions of web clients, I’d still be sad. Although I might enjoy using the upgraded client myself, I’d still wonder whether any visitors were being excluded from our site if it only worked with the new version.
Edited 2010-02-25 23:12 UTC
Dude, dont you get it? That 95% of the web supports IE because it has to. If IE goes away, that 95% of web will be able to use much better technologies and the whole web experience will be improved.
Edited 2010-02-25 22:18 UTC
This is my philosophy when it comes to browser support
If it is a personal project I am doing for fun, I have no problems using things that only webkit supports.
If it is a personal project I intend for greater consumption, I’ll add in anything firefox supports.
If it is for a client, I will add in IE7 and Opera, and will make sure the site is usable in IE6, but will not fix rendering errors.
If the client requires IE6 support, I usually explain why that is a pain. If it is still required, I tend to double any estimate to give myself breathing room, and will point out again that they will probably be paying more.
Things that 99% of internet users don’t know enough about and don’t care enough about to give a rats ass about.
Since the only web experience that will be better is that of lazy developers who can’t seem to spend the extra time to learn to use any of their technologies properly.
Hell, ever notice half the ‘tards bitching about IE still use tables for layout, spacer GIF’s, clearing div’s or even worse that stupid ‘clearfix’ nonsense, don’t use valid markup making their HTML complete gibberish, don’t use headings in a proper order if at all, have never heard of TH, CAPTION, LEGEND, FIELDSET – hell most of the time you are lucky if they use LABEL… Code to content ratios in excess of 10:1, don’t practice semantic markup or separation of presentation from content, and have never even HEARD of things like graceful degradation?
Oh wait, that’s probably all stuff that non-developers could give a rats ass about too! It’s just sad when most developers cannot even bother to understand those, yet have the unmitigated gall to badmouth one browser version.
Admittedly, IE6 is a pain in the ass – but supporting it isn’t THAT hard.
I dont give a damn about these little issues. Im talking about supporting svg, text shadows, rounded borders, all new css3 stuff which i CANNOT use.
… most of which shouldn’t be using on production code given the CSS3 specification is not even out of DRAFT. That’s what DRAFT MEANS!!!
Lemme weave you a tale of a browser called IE 5.x; IE 5 in all it’s iterations were the most standards compliant browsers of their time because by the time of IE 5.5 they had implemented as ‘usable’ most of CSS2 and all of HTML 4 – when both specifications were still in DRAFT.
When the specification came out of draft things like the broken box model, improper float behaviors and a whole host of other things became apparent – but fixing it would have broken three years+ worth of people coding to the broken model based on the draft specification… This is why IE6 added the doctype ‘standards mode’ trigger in the first place. Even with that trigger there are still errors and problems we code around…
ALL BECAUSE PEOPLE STARTED DEPLOYING CODE OFF A DRAFT SPECIFICATION!!!
Draft means not for production code – end of story. GET USED TO IT. It’s like the retards who bitch about beta’s being buggy. SAME THING.
It’s also what -moz and -webkit means; If it was ready for real use on websites, it would be called by it’s real name and not prefixed.
Draft is for playing around with to see what might be possible someday, and for testing to make suggestions before it goes final – NOT for making production code!!!
Besides apart from SVG and text-shadow (which in most cases the latter just makes **** harder to read) there isn’t a damned thing you mentioned that cannot be done in HTML4/CSS2 via techniques like sliding doors – hell, MOST of the time you’ll still want sliding doors instead of the auto-rounding of corners if you want gradients, control over the aliasing, or anything fancier than ‘ooh look, I cut one corner off’.
Though it’s funny you mention SVG since IE had SVG support BEFORE any other browser thanks to an Adobe plugin – **** like that is what plugins are FOR!
It’s just Adobe dropped it like a hot potato when nobody gave a flying fig about SVG for six years so they bought out the owner of it’s competitor – Macromedia. Moment they owned Flash… SVG became a discontinued second class citizen.
http://www.adobe.com/svg/viewer/install/mainframed.html
ONLY reason we got a new version in Jan ’09 was because of a security hole. Even the 2005 release was a bugfix and it hasn’t seen a real update since 2001.
IE is able to support SVG, you just need to write a activeX plugin to handle it.
Edited 2010-02-26 21:07 UTC
I am developing a corporate website at the moment, and I just want to cry when I read posts like this.
I like all other web devs hate IE6 (and all other IE versions for that matter) so much that I’m waiting for a game where I can inflict some kind of torture towards it.
I personally hope it dies a slow, painful death.
If you want to use it, go ahead. So long as I don’t have to support it. Ever.
Any web developer who cannot design a site to be well-formed and clean, and then use conditional comments to get IE6 to deal with it, is incompetent.
Most of the IE6 glitches are either due to the fact that it implemented the W3C box model too early (and some details of it changed after IE6 was released), or with margins and positioning that can be fixed by triggering hasLayout using “zoom:1;” on the effected element.
Another problem that causing rendering issues in IE6 is simply having a bad DTD or xml declaration (XML declarations should ALWAYS be omitted) at the top of a document, putting it in Quirks mode instead of Standards mode.
I design sites every week using all sorts of CSS and HTML features, and IE6 is rarely a problem.
It’s only a problem if the developer doesn’t know what they are doing
[q]and then use conditional comments to get IE6 to deal with it, is incompetent.[q]
and even then you don’t NEED that conditional comment bull bloating out your markup since if you just avoid declaring width or height same time as padding/border, know what a haslayout trigger is, know about setting display:inline on floats when margins are messed up, avoid using margin when possible, occasionally use * html with a behavior file or expression for missing functionality…
As I said in my other post it’s maybe 10 lines of extra CSS with nothing extra in the markup.
Conditional comments in the markup? Completely unnecessary!
But yeah, the only real explanation for this type of nonsense is called being lazy – nothing more, nothing less.
Well, except perhaps trying to deploy specifications NOT EVEN OUT OF DRAFT on production websites – specifications that should not be real world deployable for at least four years AFTER it leaves draft. (given how well CSS2’s rollout went)
Besides, if you’re gonna bury IE6, you should bury firefox as well given it’s gaping holes in the HTML4/CSS2 specification, many of which (like the infamous bugzilla 915) are over a decade old.
Even the media darling is no prize pig.
Edited 2010-02-26 01:49 UTC
The problem is less the standard CSS stuff, thats where IE6 can be layouted with conditional includes, hell starts with all dynamic web applications which have become modern… Also modern layouts do not scale well with all their transparencies and rounded corners, but you still can hack them in. Sheesh IE6 now is 9 years old and has had 2 revisions afterwards, get rid of it finally.
I am glad that Google is doing this.
Btw. the more dynamic content you get in the higher the effort becomes, my last count was 30% of additional implementation time to support IE6 in dynamic rich client interfaces on the ajax side of things. Given its marketshare hard to justify this anymore.
This data stems from a corporation I was involved in a project with which had lots of dynamic stuff in, and believe me, the CSS layout was our least concern regarding IE6 support. There were bigger issues in bugs, in IE6 having two separate rendering engines for different types of controls which are not properly synchronized against each other, performance issues on the dom tree, dom bugs which show at the fifth nesting layer of a dynamically replaced element etc…
A simply page supporting IE6 with a semi modern layout still is easy, but pulling off more complicated stuff is simply not justifyable anymore, hence Google is phasing out all its sites regarding IE6 I assume they have less than 5% of IE 6 users on their non search engine sites… It is not worthwhile anymore.
Ah yes and good luck getting bugfixes for all this stuff from Microsoft, the only bugfix to all this is IE7 which fixed about 5 bugs (like PNG transparency and the famous div bleedthrough bug (aka elements of the second native Windows based control rendering engine bleed through divs no matter which Z-Order they have)) closed a few loopholes for layout hacks and opened a can of worms of other bugs. The final bugfix for IE6 is ie8 the first bearable browser enginewise, Microsoft has delivered.
Edited 2010-02-26 16:48 UTC
Which if resorted to usually means the developer doesn’t know enough HTML and CSS to be doing the work they are doing. It can be done without that conditional bullcookies too.
Many of which are such coding disasters out of the gate they are a miserable /FAIL/ – NOT because of the web technologies, but because the coders don’t have a **** clue what they are doing which is why the resort to crap bloated frameworks like jquery and mootools – usually either for **** CSS can do without help, or for **** that turns the website into a total accessibility /FAIL/.
1) If you are talking alpha transparancy, those fat bloated slow .png resulting in two megabyte websites are usually sufficient cause to bitch slap the developer. Pre-compositing can get rid of 90% of alpha transparency use – and the rest can often be pulled off with ‘close enough’ aliasing with palettized transparency; Both of which usually result in smaller files.
This is teh intartubes, smaller files are a good thing.
Last I checked, google has nothing to do with the funeral.
Then I would suspect you are using AJAX for **** you shouldn’t be using AJAX for, though if it IS something you should use AJAX for, are you tacking on some bloated framework along with that? You know, the only thing you can learn from jquery is how NOT to write javascript?
That or you’re blowing bandwidth on *** that could be handled faster server side… especially with AJAX still requiring server side programming to function.
Not certain what you mean by that, but it sounds like you are overcomplicating whatever it is that was trying to be done.
Ok, you have me on that. IE’s DOM is slow – which is why you are better off not dicking with the DOM in the first place… The whole ‘official’ way of creating new elements in js torques my nuts since it ends up like 20 lines of complex dom chicanery for what could be done in one line with InnerHTML.
Which is why I think innerHTML should be made official and no longer considered proprietary; but since every browser with a .js engine actually supports it, I don’t give a **** if it’s ‘offically in the specification’ or not.
Though creating elements via javascript, aka DHTML, is a miserable **** accessibility /FAIL/ you shouldn’t be doing in the first damned place. Javascript should enhance functionality, NOT supplant it. (just like CSS and every other optional technology you can put atop HTML)
So many websites out there right now are unusable garbage becuase of things like DHTML… See Google basically giving Opera users the finger and telling them to *** off when it comes to Google Apps.
Developers who don’t want to spend 20% of their time coding for a legacy browser aren’t slothful. They want to direct their efforts towards productive work.
IE6 is a black hole when it comes to productivity.
Some jackasses who can’t be bothered to put that extra 5% of effort into coding their pages in a deployable manner up and decide they’re going to hold a funeral for IE – despite the fact it’s still around 20% of web users many of whom have it forced upon them by their work – or who aren’t the total technogeeks who constantly run updates.
Naturally this is newsworthy – NOT.
I swear, it’s like people want to return us to 1998 with the “Best viewed in Netscape” vs. “Best viewed in IE” crap… Times best forgotten.
Yes, it sucks to still support it, but when it still provides more traffic than Safari, Opera, and Chrome provided, get off your lazy ass and support it!
There’s a reason it’s called work, and not happy happy fun-time.
Haslayout triggers, Zoomfix, inline-fix for margin-doubling, expressions for missing CSS 2.1 elements – END OF STORY. Maybe six to ten lines of CSS and you’re DONE. No conditional comments needed, no agonizing over layout oddities, and MOST of it is still needed to work right in IE7 and even IE8…
All it can be explained as is laziness and ineptitude on the part of developers who have this attitude.
I’ve run into people running IE5/Windows 2000. Am I expected to develop for them too because they’re not upgrade-happy technogeeks?
And it’s not just CSS. If you think it’s just CSS hacks that need to be applied you’re a laughably inexperienced web developer.
IE6 was released in August of 2001. That’s nine years ago, an eternity by any measure. It’s time to move on.
Edited 2010-02-26 02:05 UTC
Most of the hacks ARE CSS-related. All the JavaScript related “hacks” are either to supplement IE’s CSS support (example: Dean Edward’s ie7-js) or simply for making AJAX (a useless technology) easier (like jQuery).
Edited 2010-02-26 03:03 UTC
Or PeterNeds HoverAnywhere (aka csshover.htc) – exactly my point.
Dean’s IE7-JS is an excellent examples of developers who don’t know enough HTML, CSS or just being lazy diving for javascript to solve issues that either aren’t really issues – or stem entirely from their own ineptitude as developers.
Jquery – now there’s a steaming pile of crap that does NOTHING but make pages needlessly larger. I’ve been getting really annoyed at how lately people seem to be throwing it at EVERY problem – right down to minor stuff that could be handled by a single class.
AJAX on the other hand is a useful technology in a number of cases – posting on a forum or inline-edit is a really nice use of using AJAX to enhance functionality without replacing it. The only time it becomes a problem is when it’s thrown at EVERYTHING.
As a recently departed friend of mine used to say AJAX is being used as the new framesets – and that’s not a compliment given what a complete accessibility /FAIL/ frames are.
Even funnier when it’s sold to people who know nothing of HTML as a way to save bandwidth, since adding 200k of CSS to 50 to 100k of markup is a way to save bandwidth when there’s less than 5k of content on the page… NOT.
Edited 2010-02-26 03:46 UTC
Oops, past edit limit. Typo – should say 200k of javascript, not CSS.
See Hotmail, which now uses AJAX for nothing JUST to make it work like crap cross browser, crap in any browser, be slow, quirky, and break normal forward/back navigation…
Yea that must be it. They must be slothful. It can’t be that they don’t like wasting their time with a legacy browser.
A web developer who works 40 hours a week can be far more productive if he doesn’t have to target IE6. But according to you he must be lazy if he hates spending his time on IE6, even if he works 40 hours regardless.
I was working on an ASP AJAX web app last year and at some point it became apparent that getting the interface to look right in IE6 would take more tweaking than all the other browsers combined. It isn’t just about CSS and PNG hacks. IE6 pukes all kinds of weird problems with AJAX.
Here’s an example from the asp.net forums:
We have implemented an <asp:menu> control for site navigation, the menu has four main categories, and is at most 2 levels deep in some parts, there are in total around 40 menu items; we add/remove menu items dynamically depending on user permissions. Now the problem with IE6 is that if a user spends some time hovering over the menu items, the browser eventually crashes.
Response:
Sometimes a combination of valid JavaScript, Style Sheet, and DOM manipulation will crash IE6.
As for a fix, I’d recommend upgrading your web browser to IE7.
http://forums.asp.net/p/1149733/1872013.aspx
But you think not supporting IE6 makes you lazy? Maybe a website that doesn’t support 200 languages has lazy developers as well. Or maybe they have limited resources and want to use them effectively, just like web developers who would like to make effective use of their time. IE6 wastes time by requiring extensive tweaking that is not required for other browsers. Some websites keep a separate IE6 site so they don^aEURTMt have to bother with endless hacks. IE6 is not only the bane of web development productivity but a giant security risk as well. .
Great example of what I meant by outdated, outmoded or just plain broken methodology used by people who can’t take the time to understand what they are doing.
An ASP:menu instance, and you wonder why it breaks… Again, cutesy crap for what should be a simple non-scripted CSS menu for modern browsers with a .htc for IE6 – you don’t even need to rewrite it anymore.
Unless of course you are using trident as your UI engine for a local crapplet – which is EXACTLY the type of crap that made many businesses unable to leave IE6 in the first place.
I’ll admit – that’s not lazy, that’s outright ignorant. I’d have to see the actual page with problems, but I suspect the problem is the use of scripting and ASP bull for something that needs NEITHER.
Though it is amusing how obscure and ridiculous the ‘problems’ get as people try to defend their anti-IE6 viewpoint; since most always it’s from trying to do something the hard way – and usually making MORE work for themselves in the name of making it ‘easier’…
RIGHT.
Edited 2010-02-28 02:37 UTC
So your response is….YouDon’tNeedThat(tm)
What about all the problems IE6 has had with updatepanel? What would you tell companies in that case? You don’t need partial page updates? You don’t need ASP AJAX?
Oh and I could list dozens of IE6 / ASP AJAX conflicts if you would like. All kinds of random crap that happens from pushing IE6 farther then it was ever intended to.
If you had spent a significant amount of dealing with IE6 issues you wouldn’t be so defensive of supporting it. Yes some jobs require supporting it. That doesn’t change the fact that it significantly reduces web development productivity and encourages legacy design as a way of avoiding conflicts.
You seem to be a very vocal supporter of wasted productivity. Perhaps a position with the government might suit you better than web development.