Office Live works in IE6, IE7, IE8, Firefox and Safari on both Windows and Mac.
Well some places are running WindowsXP which will have IE7 pre-installed. One thing is true upgrading multiple computer systems can be very costly.
Personally I know you think you can stretch a piece of hardware to last just another five months only to realize you can’t because the new piece of software you just got needs that extra power, and that is more money out of your pocket and more eating (not ramen) cheap pasta with sauce 
Only if it has been upgraded since Windows XP originally came with IE6 pre-installed. That’s why Microsoft are continuing to support IE6 for security patches until 2014 - because that’s the date that Windows XP (of which IE6 is a part) is supported to.
Even IE5 is supported by Microsoft until they cease support for Windows 2000 in July even though support for IE5.5 ceased some time ago.
I know this is a bit off-topic for this thread, but interesting that IE5.5 is not supported but IE5 is. I never knew that…
From the sites I manage, IE6 accounts for less than 5% of the people visiting my clients sites. I agree it time to put the dirt on that coffin and move on.
I may be wrong but I would imagine some clients would better understand the purpose of changing browsers if they know a large (very large) company such as google is doing so. That’s what I’m suggesting and wondering.
Google isn’t changing web browsers, they aren’t an end-user or customer, they are a provider. They are simply dropping support for IE6 within a few of their products and services out of the need to keep their stuff evolving (without being locked into an elderly system). Besides, there are very few people who use IE6 whom do so out of personal choice, it’s not a case of a lack of education but a lack of cost-effectiveness to upgrade (at this stage).
Absolute rubbish. The majority of people using IE6 do so because (a) they don’t know any better, or (b) they are on a corporate network and have no choice.
There really is no reason not to upgrade except for a few corporate clients using modified IE installations or possibly crappy ActiveX objects, which most don’t.
Corporate networks are often slow to upgrade because (a) they usually have legacy applications that won’t work on the new setup, and (b) the cost of rolling even free software out over a network is high. Many corporate networks still run Win2000 or WinNT, which don’t support newer versions of IE, and sysadmins are reluctant to switch to Firefox/Opera because they know that the change will cause an immense amount of work for the IT department, not only in rolling out the upgrade but also in dealing with problems arising from application conflicts and user inexperience.
You missed this thread http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=657978 started 3 days before this one.
Originally it was a “I’m frustrated designing forms/UIs for IE6” thread, but quickly degenerated into a “IE6 bashing” thread. I would prefer to see useful helpful posts on how to deal with the problem(s). But I guess if the OP was wondering if others shared his frustration, he sure knows now. But as the thread has gotten off-topic to the point where it’s essentially been hijacked, hopefilly it gets back on track soon.
Personally I find all the whining about “it makes my job hard”, all the various justifications for not doing things professionally, etc. etc. ad nauseum extremely old.
You don’t find IE6 a little outdated ?
Ah, i contributed to that thread then dropped out, just a few posts before it became an IE6 bashing. But I still feel this one wins the invisible prize as the first one whose title and opening lines imply drop IE6.
Yes, we wish it would go, but as the thread referenced above points out on its second page, with about 20% of users unfortunately still using it (my sites have a bit less IE6 users) we are stuck with it for a while.
Insulting users and ordering them to upgrade will not work - as the endless threads last year where people said their pages did this has showed, because the IE6 users are still with us. I do suspect that those switched on enough to know about google docs would not be the sort to be using IE6. Stick in the muds don’t grab the new technology whil esticking to old technology.
A number of companies use IE6 for their intranet. It isn’t cost effective for them to rewrite the entire intranet to work with more modern browsers at the moment as they gain no benefit by doing so.
Microsoft still supports IE6 (and will until 2014) because it is considered to be a part of Windows XP and that is when Windows XP is supported until. That support consists mostly of security patches. When that support ends then the companies with intranets relying on IE6 may have a reason to change it.
Neither of those have anything to do with the web directly except that those who need to use IE6 with an intranet are also likely to use it to access the web (as companies are unlikely to implement multiple browsers so that people have one for the intranet and one for the internet). They may change and implement a two browser policy - particularly since Windows 7 actually supports running multiple versions of IE so that a company with a Microsoft software only policy would have a solution that allows them to keep IE6 for their intranet even after all support for it is dropped while using a supported browser for the web.
IE6 must die. This is no different than the problem we had killing off Netscape 4.7x back in the early '00s. NN4.7 held us back from fully adopting CSS back then and IE6 is holding us back from adopting new technologies now.
At some point, as web developers, we just have to start cutting off support for IE6. We don’t have to block it or intentionally make things break under IE6, but we can choose not to fix some things and to not create work a rounds such that IE6 users have an alternative to some modern implementation.
Just allow sites to degrade gracefully for IE6 and stop wasting excess time trying to support IE6. Until IE6 users’ Internet experience starts to degrade to the point of being painful, some users won’t migrate to something new. This includes corporations, who in many cases won’t migrate away from IE6 until the pain of staying on IE6 becomes greater than the pain of fixing their internal processes so that they can move to something newer.
This is true. Companies can afford everything else, yet they can’t upgrade there systems to even IE7, at least which would make most happy.
In a way, corporations who don’t upgrade to up to date browsers are pushing development costs off onto others because it increases development time/costs for websites to continue to support IE6. At some point website owners just have to say enough is enough, it isn’t worth it to continue to support IE6 because it is holding us back.
Changing the language that their intranet is written in could cost companies a huge amount of money. Where a large intranet only works with IE6 there isn’t a great deal of choice in the situation - they just have to change it gradually so that they don’t blow their budget for the intranet.
Changing the language that their intranet is written in could cost companies a huge amount of money. Where a large intranet only works with IE6 there isn’t a great deal of choice in the situation - they just have to change it gradually so that they don’t blow their budget for the intranet.
Rewriting their entire intranet to not use the activex controls only available in IE6 and earlier isn’t as cheap or simple as buying 10,000 new computers.
While yes the cost of undoing past sins is what is keeping some corporations tied to IE6, that isn’t our problem, its theirs. At some point the web development community just has to stand up and say we are no longer supporting IE6. IE6 is holding us back big time and it drives up our development time/costs to continue to support it.
I’m not saying to block IE6, just to not optimize for it nor make extra efforts to fix things for it. If things still work in IE6 without extra effort, great, if not oh well so sad. It is time for us to move on.
I’m not going to remove past optimizations I did on my sites for IE6, but I’m also not going to go out of my way to optimize new stuff on IE6 in the future.
IE6 is gonna be gone soon enough all on its own. Nobody’s choosing to stick with it, and it’s fading out as individuals and companies make upgrades.
Here’s a market share trend graph I prepared yesterday from the past 3 years of data at W3Counter:
Every company that reports on browser market share has slightly different current figures in the 10-20% range, but the slope of the line is approximately the same – it’s going towards zero pretty fast.
Nice graph, I hope the downward trend for both IE6 & IE7 continue no slower than the current pace. Maybe we could be done with IE7 in a few years as well.