Pressure Mounts to axe IE6

[The Scooter Guy]

A Downing Street petition is calling for the UK government to drop Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) and move to a more modern browser.
The petition says that IE6 has security flaws and uses outdated technology, creating a burden for developers.
The petition comes as the Department of Health advised the NHS to move away from the old browser.
Other government departments - and many firms - still use the software, which was first released in 2001.
"Most creative and software development companies are forced by government department clients to build websites for IE6 when most of the industry has moved on," the petition reads.
"Upgrading would be a massive task for government, but if the public is encouraged to lead the way and the government follows, that would create the momentum needed."
The petition was set up by Dan Frydman of web firm Inigo.
A campaign in the US, called ie6nomore, is supported by more than 70 web firms and claims the software is "holding the web back".
Microsoft has released two more versions of its web browser since IE6, but some firms and government departments still use systems that require it.

More Info: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8492862.stm

[Nathan]

Google is dropping support for IE6, in regards to their online apps (such as Google Docs). The end is finally in sight, and it can be banished to hell alongside Netscape 4.7 and IE Mac 5.5. Next on the list - IE7.

[The Scooter Guy]

I wish every YouTuber wouldn't spread online petitions about saving IE6 all over the internet, or even worse, get out their pitchforks and start a riot...

[peas_and_corn]

There are people campaigning to keep that heap of crap that calls itself a web browser??

Firefox and Opera FTW!!

[yousername]

although i use a mac now (chrome) i love IE (8) its by far the easiest browser to use and i have NEVER tried a browser as fast. firefox is still while IE is ridiculously fast. i like chrome but it isnt anywhere near as quick as IE 8 for windows

[monotonehell]

although i use a mac now (chrome) i love IE (8) its by far the easiest browser to use and i have NEVER tried a browser as fast. firefox is still while IE is ridiculously fast. i like chrome but it isnt anywhere near as quick as IE 8 for windows

There's been many tests performed by many people and the results vary so much that the only technical conclusions you can come to is that Firefox, IE8 and Chrome all load pages at around the same rate. The real difference is in memory use, Chrome and IE8 use more than twice the resources than Firefox with multiple tabs open. But the reason for this is that both IE8 and Chrome isolate each tab as a process while Firefox still has one process for all. This means Firefox might be more prone to crashes bringing the whole browser down.

But the only actual conclusion you can come to is it's all down to personal preference as to which browser you think is better. Which way of working suits you better and so on, as the differences in speed are only perceived in people's minds/personal experiences.

[Aidan]

I don't think even that's a valid conclusion. I've found Safari to be much faster than Firefox (mac), but I haven't tried Chrome yet. And while Exploder feels fast on the Uni computers, that's because of their faster internet connections - otherwise it's slower than Firefox (PC) though I admit I've not thought to compare the PC and Mac versions of Firefox.

Mono, I don't normally bother with tabs - instead I have multiple windows open. Do the browsers work differently under this circumstance?

Anyway, all this browser comparison is missing the point. A web page should work whatever browser it's being viewed on.

[Prince George]

Mono, I don't normally bother with tabs - instead I have multiple windows open. Do the browsers work differently under this circumstance?

Anyway, all this browser comparison is missing the point. A web page should work whatever browser it's being viewed on.

The tabs-vs-windows question depends on the browser. In Firefox's case, by having multiple windows you have multiple processes, which will change the performance when compared to having multiple tabs hosted by a single process. And "change" could mean better or could mean worse, there are many other variables affecting performance

Compatability, otoh, is a tricky subject. Few people write a page and expect it to render in Lynx or W3 anymore, so I think we can say that there are some minimal expectations that we have for which browsers we consider. Now suppose there is a page that renders in some browsers and not others, who's to blame? Is it the page authors for not taking into account all the browsers that visitors may use, or the browser authors for releasing a buggy browser? The answer is probably "a bit of both" - it's never good for the browsers to have bugs or even just significant differences, and when pages start expecting or even depending on a browser's quirks it becomes hard for the browser authors to make changes or fixes. That was an early problem for IE8 - going standards compliant broke all the pages that expected IE6 specific stuff.

This would all be much easier, of course, if the users all just went straight to the latest version as soon as it became available. But they can hardly be expected to do that if all the pages that they go to are then broken. So the bulk of users spend several years on older versions (of practically everything), waiting until all the rough patches are smoothed out. You can expect that a government would be particularly conservative about this - imagine the uproar if they move to something new and some critical piece of their infrastructure stops working for them. And then the page authors are stuck still having to support some archaic browser.

Oh yes, there's nothing quite like backwards compatability for giving headaches.

[monotonehell]

...Mono, I don't normally bother with tabs - instead I have multiple windows open...[/b]

Aeeeyeeeee how do you deal with the morass of windows open? I'm assuming you're running that under Windows with no real window management?

It's all personal preference really - what ever doesn't drive you loony.


As to the speed comparisons, as you've stated above "I've found Safari to be much faster than Firefox." Your one personal experience is hardly an empirical measure. There's been aggregations performed on a load of actual studies, which took into account different pages that perform differently under different browsers. They have found no discernible difference across the variables. And considering most websites behave differently depending on what browser you visit with - it's really hard to compare.

I'm with you on your pragmatic idealism, we should all be working to the standards. But I also agree with George, that's a tall ask considering the mess we've got ourselves into.

[Aidan]

Compatability, otoh, is a tricky subject. Few people write a page and expect it to render in Lynx or W3 anymore, so I think we can say that there are some minimal expectations that we have for which browsers we consider.

I think render is the wrong word for Lynx! However, it is still important to write web pages that can run in Lynx so that blind people can use them.

Aeeeyeeeee how do you deal with the morass of windows open? I'm assuming you're running that under Windows with no real window management?

I don't normally use full screen mode, so often I can switch window just by clicking on the one I want to go to. Where that's not possible on Windows I use the taskbar, and on a Mac I use the Window menu.