Microsoft is Officially Killing IE 6 - NOW

It may be the entire OS that is being spoken of.

I personally feel M$ should kill off IE anyway. Or at least make an effort to keep it on par with FF or Chrome. (Which I will vow by Chrome till the day I die lol)

They are doing that, aren’t they? :shifty:

IE9+ are only supported on win7+ whereas AFAIK Chrome and FF also still run on XP (and *nix and mac for that matter), so no, not really.
It looks like it, but it’s not really so. Got windows XP? Sorry, IE8 is the end station for you. Too bad.

And that while XP hasn’t even come end of life yet. Just stop supporting it why don’t you, it’s not like people have to pay for your OS. Oh wait, they do!

You know the song “Every day I love you less and less” by the Kaiserchiefs? That.

</rant>

Yes, fair point. IE8 isn’t too bad CSS-wise, but the lack of support for IE9 in XP is amazing, really. I don’t get MS at all. Why does their OS cost around $300? Crikey, the Mac OS (which is better) costs about a tenth of that.

Uhhh…Its only $120 to upgrade Windows. Don’t forget to get Mac OS you have to buy the computer along with it. Apple makes their money from the hardware not the software. Microsoft doesn’t sell any hardware. So while Apple can offset the cost, Microsoft does not have that luxury.

  • Please do not use “which is better” again. Better is relative to the person, what is better to you is not better for me or someone else. That is how flame wars start.

I use linux most of the time :D, everything just works (In ubuntu / Mint <Less your graphics in nvidia then you might have a problem>) I take the hard way and build my own with arch -Hardcore Hacker Style!!- xD

That’s still nearly four times the price. If it were a reasonable price, maybe more people would upgrade and we could move on from old versions of IE.

Please do not use “which is better” again.

Yes, fair enough. I use them side by side and that’s my experience, but as you say, to each his/her/its own.

As people have said a lot of the holding on to previous releases of IE / Windows etc. has been because of big corporations refusing to upgrade their systems, since that would mean hiring another IT company (who are often ridicously overpriced) to revamp the systems. And let’s face it, these corporations are massive customers because of their Enterprise level licenses, products etc. So if Microsoft ignored them, they would just be making a bad choice from a business perspective…

I’ve used FireFox for a few years now, but I generally use Microsoft products and am a bit of a MS fanboi (oh dear) - There’s more to it than just “not wanting to upgrade” - if MicroSoft had their way I’m guessing they would, like any company, want to bring frequent updates (like Mozilla’s 6 week update plan) - but Mozilla doesn’t have 2512412621421412 massive corporation customers yelling in their ear when they do.

Sure they do: http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9217896/Enterprise_IT_unhappy_with_Firefox_4_s_quick_demise

Microsoft probably did that intentionally to drive sales of their new operating system. If Opera, Firefox, Chrome, and Safari can make their browsers work with XP, certainly the creator of the operating system can.

XP is a good OS. Upgrading to put money in Microsoft’s coffers is not a good enough reason. XP does everything I need it to do. No point in upgrading until I get a new computer.

Anybody who knows anything about computers always says that it is not a good idea to upgrade, that you should install a complete OS fresh. I agree with that. The full retail price of Windows 7 Professional retail is $299.99. Maybe Home Premium is sufficient (as it probably is), but that still costs $199.99. Why spend the money? For IE9? :lol:

Unless I’m missing something this is misleading since for the Mac OSes you have to pay for each subversion whereas with Windows you’re only paying the once and getting the subversions free. The actual price of a new install for mac OSX pack is $169 for a one user install, the equivalent windows 7 package is actually $119 for Home Premium and $99 for Home Basic not $300 which is the price for Windows 7 Ultimate Retail, roughly equivalent of me going “OH, Well since there’s a version of Snow Leopard for $499 obviously the whole OS is overpriced, who would ever pay $499 for an OS? Stupid Apple”.

As for the rest of this, if you’re still using XP and want to go past IE 9 you’re a little screwy to begin with. If upgrading is so important to you but you can’t take the time to upgrade your OS once every 5 years I think IE 9 not being compatible is probably the least of your concerns. You certainly shouldn’t be complaining that support is lagging on an essentially decade old discontinued OS.

I consider the upgrade from OS X.6 to OS X.7 similar to upgrading from Vista to Win 7, but perhaps that’s an unfair comparison. Anyhow, Last year I wanted to get a copy of Windows to run on the Mac, so I had to buy from scratch, and I couldn’t find it for less than around $300 here in Aus … but maybe I was looking for the wrong thing … not sure.

You have to ask WHY that is though – and for many corporations it’s the cost; Non-profits who can’t afford to upgrade past windows 98 for example. Lady-friend of mine is sitting at a Athlon 600 running win98 at work; FF, Chrome and Opera dropped support for Win98, it’s work so it’s not like she can install KernelEx, there is no IE7/newer on that platform – and do you really think that a non-profit/charity is going to understand the need to drop even a couple hundred on a nettop to replace it when what’s in there right now gets the job done?

IE6 isn’t just about IE6, it’s about the Trident engine below it and how easy it is to use it as the renderer for an application – just like using XULRunner for using XML or HTML to build the UI for applications; or the move towards HTML5/CSS3 for Metro. A good number of corporations rely daily on silly little applications built in Visual Basic that RELY on IE6’s specific version of Trident.

But as I just said, some people don’t have the choice TO upgrade; money doesn’t grow on trees and it costs money to upgrade software – while it sounds all fine and dandy to simplify our lives as web developers and ‘move the web forward’, it is extremely difficult to convince a suit who knows little of this that the software their business has run just fine for over a decade needs to be replaced… Especially if doing so breaks other software, requires massive rollout and time for an already overburdened (and underfunded) IT staff, retraining of employees, etc, etc…

I’m sorry to say, but in a lot of ways this “moving forward” is a colossal step backwards to before the browser wars; If you sit back and think on it we had more useful faster websites and LESS headaches as developers when the only browser that mattered was IE6. Literally, things were EASIER when the only question developers cared about was “Does it work in IE”. With the massive bloat of todays pages doped to the gills of hundreds of K of javascript, HTML5 idiocy with extra DOM elements for no good reason apart from placating the people who never pulled their heads out of HTML 3.2’s backside, and a general “accessibility what’s that?” attitude with the px fonts and fixed widths on everything – literally this “moving forward” feels like two steps back. It’s why as a whole I find the Internet less useful than I did a decade ago.

As to not supporting “Ancient” browsers, that’s the actual job of a web developer; You don’t want to do that you are in the wrong business. …and again it’s kind of the point of HTML and why progressive enhancement/graceful degradation exists – 99% of the stuff that doesn’t work back to legacy IE in terms of actual functionality is either goof assed scripted animations, AJAX for nothing (a laugh since AJAX originated with IE, meaning just **** coding), fancy visuals that it doesn’t matter if they aren’t there (rounded corners and gradients – ooh, not that) or just plain flat out broken site methodology.

The “oh it’s only x%” routine, IE is only x%, Opera is only x%, people on netbooks are only x%, people on tablets are only x% – eventually you’ve got no % left and it’s just another lame excuse to try and sleaze by on as little effort as possible.

… and spending money on new technology when the old stuff works just fine is a significant part of why economies worldwide are in the toilet; as Kissenger once said we’ve gone from a nation of savers to a nation of debters; I’d extend that to the world as a whole… we’re so obsessed with “new” and “the best” that we’re spending money that doesn’t even exist yet on things we don’t need; all while a third of the worlds population is starving to death. Go progress!

It isn’t necessarily even the cost of upgrading the software. There are lots of computers out ehre that would not be able to run Windows 7 and so you’d need to replace the entire computer and not just the software. A much larger expense.

I also agree that if the pages are coded properly then those using antiquated browsers should still be able to read the pages - just not see all the fancy rounded corners etc. You can’t rely on everyone using the latest browsers having JavaScript enabled so the page needs to work without scripts and so if the scripts don’t work with antiquated browsers such as IE7 then it doesn’t really matter as those people get the same way of using the page as those running IE10 with JavaScript disabled.

I don’t think there is any reason that a website shouldn’t at least be functional on any browser.

However, I also think it’s time we stopped bending over backwards to make sure every little feature works in IE6 (and even IE7 for that matter). Web apps in particular, which rely on lots of new technology to work well. Sure, we can make them work all the way to IE3 if we really wanted to… but it’s not worth the time.

Yes, there are still some people using really old stuff, but they can’t expect every site to work for them. Those on Win98, for example, aren’t just locked out of certain websites. There is very little new software that still supports Win98. I’m sure if you looked hard enough, you’d find someone still running Win 3. That doesn’t mean we should still support it.

It is an ongoing dilemma for site builders, business owners and the e-commerce clan. We are working in a global economy and many nations and areas of the world are lacking the proper and most recently updated versions of many programs. It is difficult to include all users when you design a site but over all most will still produce work that can be displayed to all even if all of the features can’t work.

I still use win xp and my website can only run with IE, it is not supported by firefox or chrome

A website should run in all browsers.

Yes, even it can run in all browsers but some function of the website is not supported by firefox or chrome.