IE6 Funeral

February 22, 2010 2:19 PM

IE6 Funeral [via mefi projects]
posted by kbrower3 (90 comments total)

pics or it didn't happen.
posted by shmegegge at 2:20 PM on February 22, 2010

It was Firefox, in the Library, with a pipe.
posted by Babblesort at 2:24 PM on February 22, 2010 [16 favorites]

Am I supposed to get the "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem..." pop-up? Cause it'd be funnier if I weren't.
posted by MrMoonPie at 2:28 PM on February 22, 2010

IE6 is still the standard browser at the company where I work.

Which company? A major one.
posted by LordSludge at 2:28 PM on February 22, 2010 [7 favorites]

IE6 killed my pa...
posted by Dick Laurent is Dead at 2:29 PM on February 22, 2010

This goes out to you, IE6.

It's kinda hard with you not around,
Know you in heaven smiling down,
Watching us while we pray for you,
Every day we pray for you.
'Til the day we meet again,
In my heart is where I'll keep you friend.

Syke.
posted by sallybrown at 2:31 PM on February 22, 2010

Oh, and I, too, have no choice about continuing to work with IE6. The "Why don't you use a modern browser?" annoying nag page on your site won't get me any closer to an upgrade, but it will cause me to leave your site, mmm-kay?
posted by MrMoonPie at 2:33 PM on February 22, 2010 [5 favorites]

Are we sure it's dead? I mean really dead? It could come back as a zombie or something.
posted by brundlefly at 2:34 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Syke.

Psych?
posted by Solon and Thanks at 2:38 PM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pFl7f_Q3uKM
posted by jcruelty at 2:39 PM on February 22, 2010

I just don't understand "big companies are stuck with IE6". There is legacy stuff that requires IE6, yes, but why not just run Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera too?
posted by worpet at 2:42 PM on February 22, 2010

.
posted by crazylegs at 2:42 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'll be wearing a red dress and matching size 13 stilettos.

OK, flats with open toes.
posted by longsleeves at 2:42 PM on February 22, 2010

Syke.

Psych?

Syke.
posted by sallybrown at 2:43 PM on February 22, 2010

This provided the company I do a lot of work with an opportunity to drop IE6 support, so yay. We will provide it for a 20% surcharge, which is about right, depending on the site and the tech desired.
posted by maxwelton at 2:44 PM on February 22, 2010

Don't take it as a personal offense, MrMoonPie. If we keep supporting it, your company will NEVER upgrade, and web designers are tired of doing extra thankless work. Complain to your manager and IT if stuff doesn't work in IE6 - even big companies have to respond when the bitching gets loud enough.
posted by chundo at 2:50 PM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

worpet: I just don't understand "big companies are stuck with IE6". There is legacy stuff that requires IE6, yes, but why not just run Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera too?

I've always wondered this. I can't imagine it'd be difficult for the average user to install Chrome.
posted by reductiondesign at 2:51 PM on February 22, 2010

Syke.

Psych?

Syke.

Psych.
posted by reductiondesign at 2:52 PM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

I'm excited to be part of the company doing this.

Am I supposed to get the "Internet Explorer has encountered a problem..." pop-up?

Yeah, we've had a few reports of that. It seems to have something to do with this JavaScript file. We're still working on a fix for it. May take a few weeks. Or years. Hard to say.
posted by scottreynen at 2:56 PM on February 22, 2010 [11 favorites]

IE skids, goes off the road
Hits a patch and then explodes
Death was quick - painless they say
Hope when I die I go that way

You may not be so lucky
You may not be so lucky
You may not be so lucky
You may not be so lucky
posted by Blazecock Pileon at 2:56 PM on February 22, 2010

Sike.
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 2:58 PM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

I just don't understand "big companies are stuck with IE6". There is legacy stuff that requires IE6, yes, but why not just run Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera too?

I've always understood it that there's a pretty constant Big Fight (tm) at your standard company between a tech team that may want to migrate to another platform and people whose only real response is "where's my internet? I don't understand. Why can't I just click the Internet globe anymore? This is stupid. I'm not a tech person, just give me the internet." and at the end of the day, you're fighting people over details they don't understand and don't want to spend time and/or energy understanding. they just want the Internet.
posted by shmegegge at 2:59 PM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

Psych. Urban dictionary is not highly regarded for its accuracy in spelling or history. Kind of like how a lot of people improperly spell hippie as hippy (which they also misspelled back when, in case someone digs out an old misspelling as proof of "hippy").

Short for "psyched out", "psyched you out", and infinite variations on the psych theme, used as a punchline to fooling or pranking someone. If you're old enough, you can remember things like that.
posted by mdevore at 3:02 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

There is legacy stuff that requires IE6, yes, but why not just run Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera too?

If the battle I'm following with interest at one company is any indication, it's resistance from an IT culture that doesn't know what to do with these other browsers. There's a push to get away from IE6 and on to Firefox, and the questions IT is asking asking mostly seem to boil down to "How do we manage deployment, plugins, and updates over hundreds of machines?" and "Who will be responsible for support if we get stuck on something?"

I am not a system administrator, so it's hard for me to gauge how weighty those issues are, but it's hard for me to imagine a problem with Firefox or Chrome that would involve having to call somebody, let alone needing 2am insta-support. The first one... I can kindof understand. Central management makes sense on large networks, and you might with good reason be intimidated with the prospect of 100,000 extensions + greasemonkey scripts for your users to mess around with.

The funny thing is that people have been talking about this issue for years now. But for some reason, the Mozilla foundation doesn't seem to care. I'd bet they could snag another 10% market share if they paid attention.

I know there's at least one open source project that aims to change this. Maybe there's other ways of managing generic installs that I don't know about, too... like I said, I'm not a sysadmin.
posted by weston at 3:03 PM on February 22, 2010

Real IE6 Usage Reasons:

1. I can't computer
2. What is a browser?
3. Computer older than sand
4. Need more Java Googles
5. Over 65
6. What would April 1st be without IE6?
posted by netbros at 3:06 PM on February 22, 2010 [8 favorites]

Oh, and I, too, have no choice about continuing to work with IE6. The "Why don't you use a modern browser?" annoying nag page on your site won't get me any closer to an upgrade, but it will cause me to leave your site, mmm-kay?

This a thousand times. You are not gonna convince one single soul in DoD to use an open-source browser, much as I'd like to. Our IT folks are convinced that everything is crawling with malware and viruses. No thumb drives. No zip files. No jpegs. We have been dicking around so long that we've gone past IE7 and will probably roll out IE8 next summer. Maybe.
posted by fixedgear at 3:09 PM on February 22, 2010

There is legacy stuff that requires IE6, yes, but why not just run Firefox or Chrome or Safari or Opera too?

Several reasons, here's some that come to mind:

The infrastructure for managing every setting of IE is part of Active Directory and so comes 'free' with a standard install of Windows Server (ie. but the DVD in the box, click Next until OK). There are thousands of relatively cheap Windows admins who can then control the settings of every single web browser in the company, providing you don't do crazy things like allowing people to install some other random browser.

Given two applications which offer pretty much equivalent functionality, except one runs all your current intranet apps, do you pick one, or both, given that you'll have to support every single application you install on anyone's computer, and test every intranet application with every browser you have running.

Some organisations only refresh their desktops every 5-7 years. This means that they still have a lot of desktops on Windows 2000 (where IE6 is the newest version that will run) and Windows XP (where IE6 is the version you get by default). I've been in some banks where there are still people on Windows NT 4...
posted by robertc at 3:14 PM on February 22, 2010 [6 favorites]

To those reporting that http://ie6funeral.com/ is crashing IE6: Sorry, we're no longer supporting IE6 on this site.
-scottr

Heh.
posted by boo_radley at 3:16 PM on February 22, 2010

You are not gonna convince one single soul in DoD to use an open-source browser, much as I'd like to

Well, the answer then is IE8, although you then go on to say they're dragging their heels on that. But really, they couldn't have moved to IE7 anytime in the last 3.5 years?

I mostly use Chrome, but IE8 is pretty fast and will run pretty much everything (sans some HTML5 stuff, but not many people are _requiring_ HTML5 support for anything important).
posted by wildcrdj at 3:18 PM on February 22, 2010

I assume that if Vista had caught on with businesses, that would not have supported IE6. But plenty of large corps skipped right over that. No gain vs. XP.
posted by smackfu at 3:18 PM on February 22, 2010

Funny, I just read Why You Can’t Pry IE6 Out Of Their Cold Dead Hands this morning.
posted by adamrice at 3:19 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Also, no company worried about support should be running anything older than XP, since thats the oldest OS Microsoft still supports. While IE6 was indeed shipped with XP originally, IE7 has been available in enterprise-friendly-distribution form for over 3 years...
posted by wildcrdj at 3:19 PM on February 22, 2010

What we really need to do is sanction IE 6. Block it at all major websites with a page that says "Get Firefox, Chrome, ChromeFrame, or Opera!"

Perhaps even offer an ActiveX installer for those browsers, since people who use IE 6 seem fond of clicking Yes to those popups in my experience.
posted by mccarty.tim at 3:21 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

fixedgear: You're suggesting that DoD types have a particular aversion to open-source software? How does that work? Wouldn't the transparency of OSS lend it some confidence? Who knows what sorts of backdoors are hidden in those closed-source apps? Or is their priority something other than security?
posted by The Winsome Parker Lewis at 3:23 PM on February 22, 2010

This site crashes my browser.

IE6, since you ask...
posted by pompomtom at 3:25 PM on February 22, 2010

Ah, I thought Win2k was already EOL, but I guess it has a couple months left!
Win2000 end of support: 7/13/2010
posted by wildcrdj at 3:26 PM on February 22, 2010

IE6's wake:

"This is such a crock of shit ... what kind of example am I setting? Over a browser we all know is terribly dysfunctional, who spread no cheer at all ... we suffered for years under the yoke of that browser, ruined how many god damned Christmas' I don't want to begin to count."
posted by geoff. at 3:29 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

You are not gonna convince one single soul in DoD to use an open-source browser, much as I'd like to. Our IT folks are convinced that everything is crawling with malware and viruses.

And their response is to simply trust a closed product with known serious issues rather than closely examine and even patch an open one?

Man, if there ever is a cyber war of some kind, we're pretty likely to get pwn3d.
posted by weston at 3:31 PM on February 22, 2010

Also, no company worried about support should be running anything older than XP, since thats the oldest OS Microsoft still supports.

If you're a sufficiently large company, it may be cheaper to pay Microsoft to extend support than it is to retest all your internal infrastructure with a newer browser.

Microsoft understands that local laws, market conditions, and support requirements differ around the world and differ by industry sector. Therefore, Microsoft offers custom support relationships that go beyond the Extended Support phase. These custom support relationships may include assisted support and hotfix support, and may extend beyond 10 years from the date a product becomes generally available. Strategic Microsoft partners may also offer support beyond the Extended Support phase. Customers and partners can contact their account team or their local Microsoft representative for more information.

From the Microsoft Support Lifecycle Policy FAQ.
posted by robertc at 3:32 PM on February 22, 2010

I work for a Fortune 100 company and we still use IE6.

Couple things: my company is not (for the time being) going to put any other browser on our computers. Why? Because there is NO LEGITIMATE WORK RELATED REASON we need a different browser.

If I call IT and bitch about IE6, their response is "which internal site isn't working for you?" The answer is "um, well . . . never mind, bye." All our internal stuff works on IE6.

Why don't I download it myself? Because it would be gone the next morning. This happened when I downloaded Google toolbar at work. Nothing was said, but I can't imagine that could happen too many times without getting fired.

As for Firefox portable, etc: If I uploaded any software (or downloaded certain things) from an external or thumb drive to a work computer, I could be fired immediately. I don't work for the DoD, but my industry is subject to scrutiny and IT takes that seriously.

All that said, I guess I'm not defending IE6. I hope Google Reader will still work. I know youtube is not going to support it any longer, but they say videos will still play. My best hope is that other sites will not just block IE6 users, but whatever. This is going to suck.
posted by peep at 3:33 PM on February 22, 2010 [4 favorites]

Psych....If you're old enough, you can remember things like that.

Yeah, but that spelling really ruins my allusion to Big Syke, which tied in neatly with the funeral song I quoted.

If you were young enough, maybe you would have gotten it. (Psych/Syke/Sike!)
posted by sallybrown at 3:34 PM on February 22, 2010

Perhaps even offer an ActiveX installer for those browsers, since people who use IE 6 seem fond of clicking Yes to those popups in my experience.

Google Chrome Frame runs along this premise. The counterpoint is that IE6 isn't an end-user problem, it is a constraint at the organizational level.

I will sympathize with organizations, especially those who's upper and middle management might have some very technology adverse members. No one wants to hear a VP of sales complaining their presentation went to shit because they had everything bookmarked in IE and who the fuck decided to change things when things worked fine before?

Most people don't know what a browser is, a lot of people seem to not understand some of the basic concepts of how you interact with the Web and if it isn't on their MSN web page, how are they suppose to get to it?

This, again, is the idea behind the iPad and ChromiumOS. Most people don't care, they just want to do something. It is much the same way automatic transmission takes preference over manual. On the other hand, as browser get more sophisticated they become sort of the perfect sandboxed VM and such users can be catered too really well.
posted by geoff. at 3:35 PM on February 22, 2010

Because there is NO LEGITIMATE WORK RELATED REASON we need a different browser

Well, unless they're actively blocking users from the Internet, there is: security. But I see your point --- it's not something a user can exactly request, it's just something the IT department should know and do. IE8 is leagues more secure than IE6, if they want to stick with IE. Really, IE6 puts the entire company in danger if they're not just blocking Internet access entirely.
posted by wildcrdj at 3:41 PM on February 22, 2010

If you were young enough, maybe you would have gotten it.

Maybe if you tossed in some Edna St. Vincent Millay?
posted by mdevore at 3:54 PM on February 22, 2010

Why are you holding a funeral for something that's not dead? (Message typed in Firefox, sure, but with an IE6 window right next to it.)

Granted, I was amused when I tested the site in IE6 and the window crashed. (But crashed closed without killing all of the other instances of IE6 running, which is much appreciated.)

But IE6, not dead yet.
posted by Karmakaze at 3:58 PM on February 22, 2010

*pours out HTML 4.0*
posted by kirkaracha at 4:30 PM on February 22, 2010 [7 favorites]

Oh, and I, too, have no choice about continuing to work with IE6. The "Why don't you use a modern browser?" annoying nag page on your site won't get me any closer to an upgrade, but it will cause me to leave your site, mmm-kay?

That's fine. The nag page isn't there just because it would be all nice and dandy if you upgraded, it's there because supporting IE6 costs a great deal of time and money for a modern web application. Supporting IE6 means coming up with workarounds for its bugs and alternate ways to do things that are far easier in any other modern browser.

The closest analogy I can think of is that it's like trying to maintain your site in both Ancient Latin and English; every time you want to add new content, you've got to dive back into the Latin and try to figure out how to force your ideas back into an ancient language. At some point, you decide that this is way too much effort, there's no good reason why people should be demanding to access your app in Ancient Latin, so you tell them to start reading English dangit, especially because it turns out they are able to do so without very much work anyway.

So I'm sorry that your company forces you to use IE6, but businesses have essentially decided that it's too expensive to keep you as a customer, especially when their product is often "free." They want you to leave their site, at least until your company moves past frickin' 2001. To put that in perspective, back in 2001, Google had only been running advertisements for one year, Napster was shut down, and the first iPod was released. We've come a long way since then, and it's time to move on.
posted by zachlipton at 4:31 PM on February 22, 2010 [8 favorites]

Exception error in module win1252.charXlate.UTF-32 on string value "."
posted by BrotherCaine at 4:42 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

THE BEAST WILL NEVER DIE!
posted by Artw at 4:53 PM on February 22, 2010

You are not gonna convince one single soul in DoD to use an open-source browser

I used Firefox for years within the DoD. It was fully supported, and encouraged by some. It was on our approved software list. It wasn't in the FDCC image, but it was allowed.

Chrome, on the other hand, was completely verboten.
posted by bh at 4:56 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

Here's another one stuck working for a ginormous multinational that uses IE6. Not that I actually care that much. I'm only on the internet for MeFi comments anyway.
posted by Nabubrush at 4:57 PM on February 22, 2010

You are not gonna convince one single soul in DoD to use an open-source browser, much as I'd like to

What are you talking about? They are already doing so. Can't link to it though, obvs.
posted by DU at 5:01 PM on February 22, 2010

>You're suggesting that DoD types have a particular aversion to open-source software? How >does that work? Wouldn't the transparency of OSS lend it some confidence?

Technically yes - but the objection is more political. Big companies like to have suppliers who sign frightening looking contracts to get the work. Then if anything goes wrong the senior manager from the big company can call up the supplier and shout at them. They can threaten loss of future business and, perhaps, legal action. The supplier, if they know what they are doing, will employ somebody to be sympathetic and then work up a lucrative new contract to fix the problem . With open source software, by contrast, there is only an online forum of anarchic hippie geniuses who will laugh at you.

This, at least, is a convenient belief for both propriety software suppliers and their large corporate clients.
posted by rongorongo at 5:04 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

I work in a web development environment for a big company you've heard of, and have multiple browsers installed on my work PC out of necessity. Yet our CMS isn't supported internally using anything other than IE6. We've recently been told that the company is ditching IE6 "soon" for IE8, but there's no telling when that will actually happen.
posted by emelenjr at 5:08 PM on February 22, 2010

Wouldn't the transparency of OSS lend it some confidence?

I'm reminded of this thread.
posted by Artw at 5:09 PM on February 22, 2010

Not only can you have Firefox on a "DoD computer" you can have Linux on there. Any policy that prevents it for you is a local one.
posted by DU at 5:11 PM on February 22, 2010

Are there any florists in Denver, CO who want to prepare and deliver a disgusting, dead bouquet of flowers? Serious.
posted by parhamr at 5:17 PM on February 22, 2010

Oh, and I, too, have no choice about continuing to work with IE6. The "Why don't you use a modern browser?" annoying nag page on your site won't get me any closer to an upgrade, but it will cause me to leave your site, mmm-kay?

When your CEO or other sufficiently high-level manager sees the "why don't you use a modern browser?" nag page on his favorite site, then you'll get closer to an upgrade.
posted by ook at 5:18 PM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

So I'm sorry that your company forces you to use IE6, but businesses have essentially decided that it's too expensive to keep you as a customer, especially when their product is often "free." They want you to leave their site, at least until your company moves past frickin' 2001.

Right, so what good does a nag page do? They should just block it.
posted by smackfu at 5:23 PM on February 22, 2010

Babblesort: "It was Firefox, in the Library, with a pipe."

With a series of pipes, actually.
posted by Joakim Ziegler at 5:31 PM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

Metafilter: an online forum of anarchic hippie geniuses who will laugh at you.
posted by weston at 5:42 PM on February 22, 2010

With a series of pipes, actually

I thought it was a series of tubes?
posted by bh at 5:46 PM on February 22, 2010

The DoD has a FAQ on their open source policies. Summary: it's okay, maybe even encouraged, but not required.

Are there any florists in Denver, CO who want to prepare and deliver a disgusting, dead bouquet of flowers? Serious.

Forever Yours Floral Design is one of a few florists within walking distance of the funeral location, and the only of those few with a website that follows web standards enough that I wouldn't feel silly linking in this context.
posted by scottreynen at 6:02 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

pics or it didn't happen.

Yes, but make sure those pics have an index transparency instead of an alpha transparency.

Incidentally, I work for a large company on a web-based management application that includes IE6 in the list of supported browsers, solely to assuage the concerns of some contractual customers who insist they cannot upgrade their internal browers. In my personal experience, these are the most common things we have to say when reviewing potential new capabilities for the platform:

1. IE6 cannot support the visual design you're trying to accomplish;
2. IE6 support for that functional feature is nonexistent/buggy;
3. IE6 JavaScript performance is too slow for us to build in that capability and still hit our performance metrics;
4. IE6 crashes when we try to load that much data/access the DOM in that way.

As a result of these items (esp. 2 and 3), in combination with various powers-that-be who prefer the IE6 experience to match the experience we deliver in other browsers, our application is feature-limited and takes longer to design/implement than it should. Also, QA blockers run high for IE6 and IE7 (and FireFox 2 as well, until we dropped support for it.) Don't get me wrong, it's still a good product, but without the albatross of IE6 and IE7, it would be measurably better and our release cycles would shorten considerably.

So customers don't want to upgrade, providers don't want to lose that business and so support IE6, customers now don't have to upgrade because providers support it, and overall the product is mediocre and slow with extended delays for feature releases and bug fixes -- so the customers move on to another provider, who promises to fix all those problems while still providing IE6 support, and the cycle starts all over again.

FWIW, IE6 has issues, IE7 has issues and IE8 has issues...but so far, supporting all three in this application, IE8 is much better than IE6 and IE7 and I look forward to people skipping IE7 altogether in their upgrade path.
posted by davejay at 6:03 PM on February 22, 2010 [3 favorites]

And their response is to simply trust a closed product with known serious issues rather than closely examine and even patch an open one?

Yes.

Not only can you have Firefox on a "DoD computer" you can have Linux on there. Any policy that prevents it for you is a local one.


DU, it must be local to all of Defense Logistics Agency, some 10,000 of us worldwide.
posted by fixedgear at 6:08 PM on February 22, 2010

Isn't one constant in the military that even if there is a service-wide standard, it can and will still be changed by whoever is in charge of you? Even if that's contrary to the original intent of the standards. Especially if it has to do with uniforms.
posted by smackfu at 6:38 PM on February 22, 2010

Are those of you working at large corporations that require IE6 unable to install another browser on your own computer? I worked at two large defense firms (probably the two you're thinking of), and while both required IE6 (and one required Netscape 4!) for internal applications, I had no difficulties whatsoever installing either Firefox, or portable Firefox (which doesn't require admin priveliges) and using that instead. I even called IT support and told them I was using Firefox a couple of times. I got "Oh, yeah, we don't support that, sorry", not "Oh, you're immediately fired."
posted by !Jim at 7:03 PM on February 22, 2010

> The "Why don't you use a modern browser?" annoying nag page on your site won't get me
> any closer to an upgrade, but it will cause me to leave your site, mmm-kay?

This, and more. I don't use IE6 but I do sometimes set my useragent string to report IE6 just to see who's spying on me in this particularly ham-fisted way. Just serve the page, dorks, don't spy. Who do you think you are, the Lower Merion School District?
posted by jfuller at 7:03 PM on February 22, 2010

Oh, and I, too, have no choice about continuing to work with IE6. The "Why don't you use a modern browser?" annoying nag page on your site won't get me any closer to an upgrade, but it will cause me to leave your site, mmm-kay?

No offense MrMoonPie, but considering the enormous amount of work required to make my site work in your browser, that is an amicable solution.
posted by !Jim at 7:05 PM on February 22, 2010 [2 favorites]

Just serve the page, dorks, don't spy.

Keep in mind it's the response that might be considered ham-fisted, but if you want wacky high-end web 2.0 features to work in your browser, us dorks need to know what browser you're running.
posted by davejay at 7:21 PM on February 22, 2010 [1 favorite]

I don't use IE6 but I do sometimes set my useragent string to report IE6 just to see who's spying on me in this particularly ham-fisted way. Just serve the page, dorks, don't spy.

If someone's doing the nag right, they don't ever test the useragent string. Instead the nag is displayed using CSS that only IE6 recognizes and javascript/dom stuff is tested by looking for the presence/absence of certain specific functions or objects.

Also, though: the nag shouldn't be insulting. It should simply tell people they may not see the intended design and features of the site in an unsupported browser, and maybe link to an explanation and/or other browsers. Information, not preaching.
posted by weston at 7:28 PM on February 22, 2010

Yeah, but that means doing some of the hacky crap that we want ditch IE6 to avoid doing in the first place.

I say if you don;t support IE6 just don't test in IE6, and if it's broken, it's broken. That gets the general idea over without screwing around.
posted by Artw at 7:30 PM on February 22, 2010

IE6 visits are down to about 7% on my personal site that gets any sort of traffic, so there's hope. 5% is usually the point with clients where they say "fuck it, I'm not paying extra to support those people."

Which isn't to say you can't feed IE6 people content, that's easy. It's the requirement to "make sure everyone sees the exact same thing" that costs money.
posted by maxwelton at 7:57 PM on February 22, 2010

MrMoonPie: “Oh, and I, too, have no choice about continuing to work with IE6. The "Why don't you use a modern browser?" annoying nag page on your site won't get me any closer to an upgrade, but it will cause me to leave your site, mmm-kay?”

It'd cause me to leave my job. Or at least threaten to. An IT department daft enough to stick with IE6, despite the huge security risks, bugginess, and lack of compatibility, is a sign that people somewhere don't know what they're doing. I'd be worried.
posted by koeselitz at 12:00 AM on February 23, 2010

I'm still using IE5.
posted by JtJ at 12:15 AM on February 23, 2010

jfuller: “I don't use IE6 but I do sometimes set my useragent string to report IE6 just to see who's spying on me in this particularly ham-fisted way. Just serve the page, dorks, don't spy. Who do you think you are, the Lower Merion School District?”

Said the dude who had no idea how the internet works. Ham-fisted? User agent strings are sent by the browser, so you're the one telling them what browser you're using. Nobody's 'spying' at all. And besides, you've obviously never tried designing a web page, or you'd know that pages look so significantly different on different browsers, even in these post-Microsoft days of web standards, that web designers are pretty much required to plan for the browsers that use their pages. How exactly did you think web pages were viewable on cell phones and iPhones and all that?

Believe me - whether they stick up a nag screen or not, most web pages you visit know what browser you're using. That's not because they're 'spying on you.' That's because you told them.
posted by koeselitz at 12:15 AM on February 23, 2010 [2 favorites]

An IT department daft enough to stick with IE6, despite the huge security risks, bugginess, and lack of compatibility, is a sign that people somewhere don't know what they're doing. I'd be worried.

This is funny.
posted by fixedgear at 2:21 AM on February 23, 2010

fixedgear: “This is funny.”

Funny how? I guess I should hasten to add that nine times out of ten it's really not the IT department that's daft, but somebody somewhere else who's telling them what to do. But the fact is that, for anything but the more intensive internet-using companies, it takes - what - an afternoon or two to switch over to a new browser? Net-install, push it out to all the machines, and be done with it. Yeah, it's a hassle - and you vastly improve the performance and security of the machines on your watch. Why not? The only reason most companies haven't is because IT have been told over and over again that they 'can't spare the man-hours.' Which means they're stuck trying to fix some other foul-up, and can't be spared to do the most routine of maintenance. Which means that IT is (a) understaffed or (b) mismanaged or (c) both.

Which is why I'd be worried. Especially if I worked for that IT department.
posted by koeselitz at 3:40 AM on February 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

I mean, I used to be a DBA for a non-profit branch of Denver Probation. Have you seen a non-profit budget? Held together with masking tape and string, I'm telling you. And our IT guys had had IE7 across the network for years, and pushed out IE8 six months ago, a few months after it came out. It was a bit of a hassle, but management let them do it, and they rolled up their sleeves and did.

An IT department that isn't allowed to do routine maintenance like that is an IT department that is being misused. And a sign of a company that doesn't know how to manage people.
posted by koeselitz at 3:44 AM on February 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

I meant "it's funny" to mean that my expectations are so low after twenty years of Government service that I have almost no expectations of my IT dept. The fact that I have a functioning, obsolete computer on a much slower network connection than I have in my home delights me. We've always been behind, technologically. We've gone from being 5 years behind the state of the art to being 2.5 years behind, a vast improvement.
posted by fixedgear at 4:28 AM on February 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

Yeah, I know the feeling.
posted by koeselitz at 4:30 AM on February 23, 2010

Funny how? I guess I should hasten to add that nine times out of ten it's really not the IT department that's daft, but somebody somewhere else who's telling them what to do. But the fact is that, for anything but the more intensive internet-using companies, it takes - what - an afternoon or two to switch over to a new browser? Net-install, push it out to all the machines, and be done with it. Yeah, it's a hassle - and you vastly improve the performance and security of the machines on your watch. Why not? The only reason most companies haven't is because IT have been told over and over again that they 'can't spare the man-hours.' Which means they're stuck trying to fix some other foul-up, and can't be spared to do the most routine of maintenance. Which means that IT is (a) understaffed or (b) mismanaged or (c) both.

That's not it in the (largeish) international company I work for. In fact, I could get IE7 right now from the self-service corporate upgrade menu (there's a menu of optional but permitted software that users are allowed to select for themselves) and I do have Firefox. It was a lovely ten minutes, until it became clear that some of the software I need no longer worked and there was no way to make it work in IE7. Off to uninstall I went.

I guarantee you, it would be more than an afternoon or two to patch the enterprise level software package causing the issue over the whole company. I know we're not alone, because Why You Can’t Pry IE6 Out Of Their Cold Dead Hands, originally linked above, even mentions the problem software by name.
posted by Karmakaze at 5:27 AM on February 23, 2010 [2 favorites]

Work in a XP SP2 shop, IE6. All locked down. No flash, no java. New (late 2009) intranet rollout is so IE6-centric that nothing else will even render it.

Welcome to your power utility.
posted by scruss at 7:27 AM on February 23, 2010

We were stuck with IE6 for years, then upgraded last year. To IE7.
posted by kirkaracha at 8:55 AM on February 23, 2010

> Said the dude who had no idea how the internet works. Ham-fisted? User agent strings
> are sent by the browser, so you're the one telling them what browser you're using.

Um? Considering the message you're responding to stated that I was setting the useragent string (to something false) from the browser end, ...uh, thanks for the info, k.

I was unclear about exactly what I considered ham-fisted. Popping up an upgrade-your-browser notice, rude or not, on the basis of nothing more reliable than the reported user agent is ham-fisted. Major sites are still doing it right now today. Youtube, for instance. Browser FF 3.5.6, string: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1). Youtube: "Your browser will be unsupported soon. Please upgrade to a modern browser."
posted by jfuller at 9:43 AM on February 23, 2010

jfuller: people who know how to spoof their user-agent know to expect weirdness as a result and to ignore erroneous warnings. Capability detection is a good thing and should be used in many cases, but the UA string gives a positive identification for what the browser announces itself to be, which is important for YouTube because they don't want to confuse casual users who don't know what a browser is nor why they should upgrade one. There's absolutely no spying involved here

Here's an analogy. You go into a store and try to use your credit card. The clerk tells you that your card is 9 years old and they are soon going to stop accepting it, so you should get another one for free from your bank. You get mad and announce that your card isn't really old, it's brand new, but for whatever reason, you decided to write an old expiration date on it with a sharpie so everyone would think that it's old. It upsets you that the clerk would then treat you as if your card really is old. I don't understand the logic.

Basically, you're running around the web announcing that your are IE6, and for some reason, you're getting pissed off when people greet you as Mr. IE6. It's one thing to complain about these warnings if you're actually an IE6 user, but you're not one, you are impersonating one, and while it's just fine to impersonate folks, you don't get to get mad when someone addresses you as if you are your impersonatee.
posted by zachlipton at 10:46 AM on February 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

jfuller: It might be ham-fisted, fine. There are better ways to sniff out the browser being used so that you can arrange a conditional for a javascript / flash / php script. (Lately, the thing I use this for is checking the html5 compatibility so that I can write pages that offer html5 stuff if the browser supports it.)

What bugged me about what you said was the implication that people are "spying" (your word) when they check the user agent string or try to sniff a browser. I agree that nag screens are annoying, and user agent strings unfortunately aren't a great way to sniff for browsers, although maybe you can understand if some of us just trust the user and go with it anyway, but – it's really, really weird to call checking a user agent string "spying."
posted by koeselitz at 10:56 AM on February 23, 2010 [1 favorite]

Please, please, please let it die.

Please.

If you feel forced to use it, forward this message to your higher ups, and I will beg them.

(Pleeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeease.)
posted by rubah at 10:43 AM on March 4, 2010

And yet the beast still lives...
posted by Artw at 10:44 AM on March 4, 2010

The funeral was covered on cnn.com today.
posted by emilyd22222 at 1:22 PM on March 4, 2010