I recently read a blog post saying Facebook is going to be dropping support for Internet Explorer 6 on September 15th 2010. This is a very bad decision because many people still use IE6, especially those people with slow computers who live in poor countries because some people still only have 128MB of RAM so Internet explorer 6 is the only browser that runs fast so if people had to upgrade to ie7 or ie8 their computer will become un-responsive and facebook chat is used for free speech in countries like Iran who have very old computers and a government that wants to stop free speech. I know IE6 has security issues but people can’t upgrade if they have slow computers. So my suggestion is that if a user is using Internet Explorer 6 after September 15th just present them with the?old version of facebook Chat and if users are using IE7 or IE8 then present them with the new version of facebook Chat.
So if anyone would be kind enough to pass this message onto the facebook team by copying and pasting this(you need to be logged into facebook) and sending it to >
I appreciate it. The more people that contact the better.
The only way to get completely rid of IE6 is to stop supporting it! Make it abundantly clear to your users that their web browser is not supported and offer them the choice to download a new one.
Good thing is that we now finally can stop with the ongoing discussions about which browsers we should think about when developing a website. If even Microsoft is starting to let their trouble baby go
Even Microsoft has taken some baby steps in this direction; the new Office Web Apps don’t support the browser either.
then why should we do it any longer
Makes you wonder why those still use IE6. But I bet it’s mostly down to office PC’s which either don’t get used for internet purposes or they are on a server of some sort. And the fact most office workers cannot upgrade IE due to admin restrictions.
Sorry but you’re wrong. The only people who use W3Schools are those whom are interested in web design and thus the statistics (which are ONLY for the W3Schools website and no other) are immediately biased toward a technical audience - which does not match the average Facebook user. W3Schools is not one of the top 1,000 sites on the web (probably not even in the top million) so you don’t have the justification to proclaim that statistics for that one site give you a good average for browser usage. The only authoritative sources in respect to browser market usage apart from those of Facebook and Google (which remain unpublished) are those of independent groups like NetApplications whom get their statistics sourced from many millions of websites who use tracking analytics packages.
I can almost guarantee that the people who are using IE6 are not people “who live in poor countries”. Even if you had a pretty old computer it would be able to run a modern web browser.
The users of IE6 are big corporations that do not want to put in the time and money to upgrade their software.
It would do the world good if more developers would drop support for IE6 (especially enterprise-oriented websites). And Facebook is hardly the first to do this. Google has also dropped support for IE6 in many of their products such as Google Docs and YouTube.
I am not saying that everyone should stop developing for IE6 without considering the consequences. You have to decide for yourself how dropping support for the ancient browser will affect your business. Facebook has obviously decided that they would be better off without it. Personally, I refuse to develop for it - the inconvenience outweighs the benefits by far.
…Um w3schools.com is not an authoritative source for browser usage. A) w3schools is not connected to W3C. B) w3schools.com user statistics is not Facebook’s user statistics.
It’s authoritative enough for me though because it is used by enough people on the planet in order to get a feel for what the average usage is for each browser.
Can you post a link to an authoritative source for which browsers Facebook users use?
Sorry but you really don’t understand the current situation. Those who still use IE6 either do so because they don’t want to upgrade (or move to a different browser) or can’t (because of enterprise or government restrictions and upgrade protocols). Claiming that people on old computers can only use old versions of IE is redundant as Chrome and Opera (and even Firefox) require less memory, use less resources and work to a better extent. Claiming that people in third world nations only have dodgy old infrastructures is also quite discriminatory and uninformed. Many third world nations (India would be a prime example) have put a LOT of money into infrastructure to educate their citizens in order to give them work in the future (which is also why India and China are now major players in the web sector).
I disagree, back in it’s day it was a good product, but times have moved on and unfortunately a lot of governments and corporations haven’t (which is rather amusing to think that our national security and customer details may be in the hands of people using such a redundant and bug ridden browser). As for the worst product, my money goes on Microsoft Bob… the VB5 written monster behind both Clippy and the “smiley” nerd emotion in MSN Messenger.
I agree, in fact, we would probably remove IE6 at a faster rate if people would just stop supporting it (to avoid reinforcing the reason not to upgrade).
Agreed, though conservative estimates are much higher than that. According to independent research provided by the likes of NetApplications (amongst others) it averages out that IE6 may still have 16.18% of the total market share. Note: that these stats aren’t for Facebook but of the web in general. Scary!
The w3schools stats are good enough for me and how I use them.
I see that in August 2010 w3schools says that 76% of users used IE or Firefox while NetApplications, and I don’t know how recent their figures are, say 82% use IE or FF.
I’m not going to argue over a few percentage points differences or the splits making up the 76% and 82% because they are near enough for my purposes.
I would say its a good thing.
IE6 was one of the worst products from microsoft. Developers always have hard time making the site ie 6 compatible. Sooner it disappears, I would be happy:)
