Last Orders for IE6

davecoventry posted this at 13:18 — 15th July 2009.

Joined: Jun 2009

Interested to see that according to Slashdot, Youtube has started recommending that IE6 users upgrade and will be phasing out support.

This is really good news for web technicians.

I posted on a thread on this forum where I questioned whether it was worth taking into account people who have switched off Javascript but was subsequently horrified to find out that some 10% of web visitors have disabled Javascript.

I would have thought that navigating the 'web without javascript would be pretty frustrating, but apparently not!

So the solution is, of course to use CSS instead. Which is why the demise of IE6 and it's bizarre raft of CSS inconsistencies and non-compliance is such a positive event.

Just an additional note: the one thing that CSS does not seem capable of accomplishing is the ability to set timers on event. For this sort of fucntionality we will still have to look toward javascript.

Megan posted this at 16:19 — 15th July 2009.

She has: 11,421 posts

Joined: Jun 1999

Whoo-hoo! Awesome that YouTube is doing that. All we need is for some big sites to start phasing out support. I've always maintained that people need to be told that there's a problem with continuing to use old browsers. They're not going to upgrade if they don't know.

Where did you get that number that 10% don't have JavaScript turned on? That seems really high to me... the one site I have access to that tracks JavaScript shows 1%.

Megan
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JeevesBond posted this at 21:06 — 15th July 2009.

He has: 3,956 posts

Joined: Jun 2002

I was really happy to see that story too. Waiting for IE6 to die has been annoying.

Interesting that figure of people without Javascript, wouldn't be surprised if that were people using NoScript to selectively enable Javascript. Would like to know what the source for that 10% is though.

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webwiz posted this at 22:10 — 15th July 2009.

He has: 629 posts

Joined: May 2007

Chris Heilmann has a thoughtful discussion of this on his blog. He concludes:

Quote:

Right now Microsoft is battling itself over an issue that keeps them from innovating. Google OS is an unashamed attack to the old-school office world, and I for one would love to see it succeed as stagnation and maintaining a status quo that makes people hate computers and programs that they need to use to do their job is not what building software for people is about.

See Did Digg and YouTube just spell the end of Internet Explorer 6?

Cordially, David
--
delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;

davecoventry posted this at 20:57 — 16th July 2009.

He has: 112 posts

Joined: Jun 2009

Actually the figure of 10% is indeed a bit high. The article I got that from must've been a bit old.

The figures are here.

In January 2000 the figure was 20% (prolly due to older browsers not supporting it) and in January 2006 it was 10%. It was apparently 5% as of January last year. Since then I would expect it to be a bit higher than 5%, possibly around 7 or 8 because of the resurgence of computer malware in the last year or so.

Greg K posted this at 02:49 — 18th July 2009.

He has: 2,145 posts

Joined: Nov 2003

Also one thing to consider, the stats for w3schools.com I would say is not a good sampling of the "general public"....

Statistics Are Often Misleading

You cannot - as a web developer - rely only on statistics. Statistics can often be misleading.

Global averages may not always be relevant to your web site. Different sites attract different audiences. Some web sites attract professional developers using professional hardware, while other sites attract hobbyists using old low spec computers.

Also be aware that many statistics may have an incomplete or faulty browser detection. It is quite common by many web-stats report programs, not to detect the newest browsers.

(The statistics above are extracted from W3Schools' log-files, but we are also monitoring other sources around the Internet to assure the quality of these figures).

This site (http://www.thecounter.com/stats/) used to be good for stats when they were one of the major counters available, but now like everything, things are more spread out on what they use.

-Greg

webwiz posted this at 17:36 — 17th July 2009.

He has: 629 posts

Joined: May 2007

If the subject is "how many have JavaScript turned off" (???) then I believe the answer is "nobody knows". Most of us likely have as many 'bots visiting our sites as people. 'Bots of course don't use JavaScript. Stats trackers rely on scripting being enabled. Since 'bots don't always identify themselve as such, we really have no way of knowing what the real figures are, even for our own sites.

One thing I do know is that many large corporations wisely set their Internet security level to "high". With that setting, scripting is disabled in IE...

Cordially, David
--
delete from internet where user_agent="MSIE" and version < 8;

pr0gr4mm3r posted this at 14:36 — 18th July 2009.

He has: 1,502 posts

Joined: Sep 2006

I would agree that we don't know, and it differs from site to site. The best thing to do is get the trends on your site, and then adjust your practice based on that. If you see IE6 visitors are a minority on your site, then you may choose not to support it in your next side design.

davecoventry posted this at 22:33 — 19th July 2009.

He has: 112 posts

Joined: Jun 2009

True.

As I said, I would have thought navigating the web with javascript turned off would be a frustrating experience, and I for one would have thought that it would be taking paranoia to extremes.

However, if you visit slashdot or el reg (theregister.co.uk), you will see that a lot of tech-heads do this (or say they do).

Persoanlly I'm in favour of catering to as large a customer base as I possibly can, and I'm moving towards pure CSS solutions.

However, there are some implementation that CSS is not capable of (setting timer events, for one) and which javascript is really the only solution.