Internet Explorer 6 and 7 Users Please Read

[jon]

Going through Analytics I noticed that there are about 4% of you still using IE 6 and 10% using IE7. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE upgrade your browser to IE8, Firefox, or Chrome. It will result in a better experience for you. As a web developer, we spend an a lot of time trying to support and test for IE and it sucks. Over the course of the next six months we will be doing some substantial upgrades to cc.com that will use a lot of javascript. Due to costs supporting IE 6 and 7 will not be a priority, so please upgrade! Thanks for hearing me out

[Ryan Canfield]

I am a web designer and share your frustration. I can't stand IE! Keep up the good work!

[ivan]

i use ie8 - is the reason i hate the "share" button specific to ie? just moving the mouse around the screen often causes everything to hiccup for seconds at a time as it loads up the stupid optinos associated w/ said button

[sobo]

I'm sorry, jon, but my laptop is company-supplied and supported. It is still on IE7, but I was supposed to get a new laptop and upgraded to the latest Windows software and IE browser by the end of last month. It hasn't happened yet.

 

Since it is just me, and I am far less than the paltry 10% still using IE7, I'm not asking for any "special tr-r-r-r-r-eatment" but just wanted you to know that. I won't complain if my cc.com experience goes to shit in the future if I haven't been upgraded by then. But if I "go dark", you'll know what happened...

[JosephH]

Microsoft has recently appointed a manager who's sole purpose in life is exterminating IE6. All older versions of all browsers suck. For that matter, HTML sucks as a base technology for global communication and interaction. The only thing that sucks harder than HTML is flash and Silverlight. All browsers suck when you get down to it - they just suck less than the current alternatives.

[tvashtarkatena]

In 5 minutes you IE guys could be using Chrome. Why would anyone use IE these days?

 

Nuff said.

Edited June 11, 2010 by tvashtarkatena

[Gary_Yngve]

Mostly it is corporate dudes still using IE 6. They are afraid to upgrade, whether it is from IT/training/security costs, or because they fear that their employees will be YouTubing and FBing all day.

 

Amazing how many places are still using legacy IBM machines, WIndows NT, etc. There are still plenty of ATMs around running OS/2, which IBM had stopped supporting in 2006.

[rob]

I'm sorry, jon, but my laptop is company-supplied and supported. It is still on IE7, but I was supposed to get a new laptop and upgraded to the latest Windows software and IE browser by the end of last month. It hasn't happened yet.

 

OMG! I JUST FOUND OUT YOU CAN DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL IE8 FROM THE INTERWEBS FOR FREEEEEEEE!!!!

[froodish]

For that matter, HTML sucks as a base technology for global communication and interaction. The only thing that sucks harder than HTML is flash and Silverlight.

 

I'd agree with you about Flash and Silverlight, but I'm not sure why you say HTML sucks. In terms of adoption it's certainly the most successful language in the history of computing. I think HTML and HTTP have done wonders for communication. What's the alternative? Gopher?

[JosephH]

Ever put together a fairly complex website and try to get it to render and run the same across a majority of installed browswers? It's an ugly business under the best of circumstances.

[froodish]

Ever put together a fairly complex website and try to get it to render and run the same across a majority of installed browswers? It's an ugly business under the best of circumstances.

 

Pretty much every day ;-) (I do front-end web programming)

 

Yep, it can be challenging (although these days I'm rarely stumped by a rendering issue). I don't think it's fair to hang that hat on HTML though - that fault lies with bugs in the browsers' parsing and rendering code (esp. IE).

Edited June 12, 2010 by froodish

[JosephH]

The bugs and the cross-version / cross-browser issues are ridiculous! Who's running this joint anyway? It's definitely a lowest common denominator sort of deal and like death by a million paper cuts.

[olyclimber]

Are you guys talking about the future? Seems like a bunch of Star Trek jibberish to me.

[Josh Lewis]

Internet 8 is crappy for cascadeclimbers for me! I use internet 7 partly because of cascadeclimbers, the editor glitches in ie 8.

[keenwesh]

CHROME

[sobo]

Mostly it is corporate dudes still using IE 6. They are afraid to upgrade, whether it is from IT/training/security costs, or because they fear that their employees will be YouTubing and FBing all day.

 

Amazing how many places are still using legacy IBM machines, WIndows NT, etc. There are still plenty of ATMs around running OS/2, which IBM had stopped supporting in 2006.

 

OMG! I JUST FOUND OUT YOU CAN DOWNLOAD AND INSTALL IE8 FROM THE INTERWEBS FOR FREEEEEEEE!!!!

@ Gary-

I am a corporate dude, using a corporate-provided laptop, and we run IE7 on all company machines right now. Vista tanked when it tried to interface with our accounting and payroll software (Oracle), so we are still on IE7.

 

@rob-

I am still on IE7 because I can certainly upgrade myself to another browser, but then if I have problems with it and ask for help from IT, I will get fired for fucking with the company standard. I'd rather not have that happen, so I'll just stick with what they provide to me for free and call it good. Eventually they will settle on something and then I will be upgraded, likely by the turn of the next millenium.

[Gary_Yngve]

Sobo, I was talking more about IE6.

 

I'm actually surprised that Jon is bundling IE6 and IE7 into the same.

IE6 has many more incompatibilities than IE7, and there are even some stuff that IE7 is more standard on than IE8.

 

Our trick is to focus on IE7 and tell IE8 to run in IE7 compatibility mode.

[markwebster]

I teach web design at a technical college. Read an article recently that explained why ie6 is still holding on to a market share somewhere between 8 and 15%, depending on who is measuring, and what market. The IT departments of the large corporations have their support knowledge-base dialed in on IE6. They don't want to upgrade because it would cost money to retrain. For the same reason, our campus is still putting XP Pro on new machines.

 

And as has been mentioned, some of the new and improved features of the new browsers are aimed more at entertainment than productivity.

 

Imagine this 11AM phone call to IT: "I can't get my latest facebook update to work. I typed in a comment to my friends picture, and it doesn't show up. Can you come over and fix my computer?"

 

As a teacher, we love IE6. Anyone can get a web page to work in the new browsers. Trouble shooting IE6 separates the men from the boys.

 

Regarding the widely rumored death of flash: Nothing out there can compete with the smooth, **vector** based, bandwidth friendly web advertisements of flash. True it has been abused (games, broadband slideshows, videos, etc), but for everyday advertising on the internet, those irritating little animations that sell anything and everything, nothing else even comes close.

[Josh Lewis]

I used to dislike internet 7 myself, but then started to love the tab feature.

[LostCamKenny]

SAFARI... GO MAC!

[tvashtarkatena]

people need to be...

 

...retrained to use a browser?

 

At that point, why bother?

 

 

[Bronco]

Can one of you guys explain how to figure out which version of IE I'm using? Or just hack into my computer and tell me which version I'm using?

[wfinley]

i use ie8 - is the reason i hate the "share" button specific to ie? just moving the mouse around the screen often causes everything to hiccup for seconds at a time as it loads up the stupid optinos associated w/ said button

 

I find this uber-annoying as well. I think it should be changed on onclick which would be a little less annoying. Here's the info:

 

https://www.addthis.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=7427&start=0&view=print

Well I have been through this forum several times for the CORRECT and complete answer to opening the SMALL original window with a click - that "onmouse over" action is dreadful to say the least...

 

I have seen admin claiming that they do this because it creates more interest (for them) but they forget it is OUR websites that concern us, and people clicking accidently, etc, and out of pure frustration caused by that stupid popup window might raise traffic somewhat but does nothing for user satisfaction.

 

More:

 

Please when you claim to have resolved or come up with an idea that works please paste the entire code...

 

Simply stating things like "change onmouse over to onclick.... in your text will do it" does NOT help anyone and does not work...

 

Please paste the entire code like this:

 

 

PS: "onclick to open" and "onmouseout to close" should be the default setting here for this code... if people want to annoy their visitors with annoying popups let them decide to do that from their own choice.

[jon]

I'll change it to onclick tonight thanks for raising the issue.

[sobo]

Can one of you guys explain how to figure out which version of IE I'm using? Or just hack into my computer and tell me which version I'm using?

While spraying on cc.com, left click on "Help" at the top of the screen, right below the address bar.

A menu will appear. At the bottom of that menu will be "About Internet Explorer".

Left click on that and a dialog box will pop up. The box will indicate the precise version and update you are using.

For example, mine says Version: 7.0.5730.13, Update Versions: 0

YMMV.