Have you heard of the recent efforts to finally kill IE6?
Webmaster of the big Norwegian website finn.no, Erlend Schei recently decalred war on IE6 when i decided to put up a warning on the frontpage for all visitors using IE6. He also suggested that webmasters of other big norwegian websites did the same. All the biggest norwegian newspapers now have this warning, and the champaign quickly spread to the big sites in Sweden and also to some American sites like Wired which eventually hit the frontpage off digg.com
Have you heard of this champaign?
What do you think of it?
You can follow this on twitter or read more about it on the wiki
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23 Answers
I think it’s a great idea. I have no experience with web design and coding, but I always hear how IE6 renders horribly.
I’ve also seen someone use a script that causes the page to render in grayscale when it detects that IE6 or lower is being used. Another great idea to get people to switch.
@Eambos Your second point is why there are the rumors in your first point.
My take on this is: I wonder what’s in it for Erlend Schei.
If he doesn’t like IE6, then don’t test on it and don’t support complaints on it.
But if he blocks it, he’s losing business, it hurts him, not Microsoft. There are a boatload of people out there who haven’t (because they don’t know how) to upgrade to IE7 or other browsers.
Thank fucking god… I welcome the attempt to save the sanity of all the people that know what CSS is.
@Grisson Remember that finn.no is the ebay of norway, it’s one of the biggest websites. He got all major newspapers to add the warnings (read: the biggest websites)
Erlend Schei do support IE6, but that is because ~13% of the users still use it. he wants to make those people upgrade, so he can stop worrying about ie6 and be able to make the site better and take advantage of newer technology and more powerful javascripts. He is not blocking ie6, just adding a big green box at the top of the site telling people to upgrade to IE7 or switching to another browser.
The results so far shows a small amount of people upgrading their browsers. It’s working! I just hope this doesn’t die during the weekend…
@wilhel1812 That seems reasonable, encourage upgrading. The truth is, you’ll always be stuck with IE6 though because some small percent of people will want to use it and not upgrade. The moment you break it is the moment those small percent of customers become your call-center nightmare.
@Grisson But what if when a ie6 user sees that green box on every major site he’s visiting. think Google, wikipedia, twitter, major newspapers, amazon, ebay, heck fluther! I think it’s the thing that might reduce the share to the level where you’ll earn more money giving a better option to those 99.9% of good users than downgrading your whole site to the browsers of those 00.1%. Don’t you agree?
Ok… but out of curiousity, what is .1% of the population of Norway computer users that would use those services?
The dilemma: Break them and lose them as customers? Or spend some development krone[plural?] to continue to (minimally) support IE6.
My point is, follow the money.
I believe the word you’re using should be “campaign” – a group effort, & not “champagne” – a bubbly alcohol drink, though, you combined the 2 spellings & wrote “champaign” which is a group effort to drink champagne.
@Grisson ok let’s put it this way:
let’s say there’s 0.1% users using ie6. The question is what will make most money? Making your website available for 0.1% of your users or make it easier to use for 99.9% of your users? What if the limits of ie6 makes your website so hard to use that you lose more than 0.1% of the users? The thing Erlend and many other webmasters around europe is trying to do with this is to reduce the share of ie6 users to a number so low that you will earn most money ditching it, creating a better site and eventually kill ie6
@psyla haha i wasn’t sure how to write it so i used the spell check… stupid spell check! :)
Spell Check is known to have a low IQ, failed its SATs, & couldn’t get into college. I always remember how to spell “champagne” by calling it “Sham-Pag-Knee” when I’m drunk.
@wilhel1812 I would take a similar approach. Ignore browser versions that are more than a few years out of date. Make the web site as robust as possible and deal with the consequences. But then I’m not the E-bay of Norway, so I can afford to p*ss off IE6 users, or AOL users, or Navigator users or whatever is till out there on the fringes, of course, since I’m developing internal web apps I can also p*ss off Apple users, and Chrome users, and even Firefox users if I want.
This application is suppported on IE7 or above only
(Most of what I do is WinForms, not Web, but that’s another thread).
larre, another of the webmasters at finn.no just tweeted that ie6 shares on finn.no is down by 1%. And this is after a few days, it’s working. Imagine how this would be if more international sites joined this!
But does it mean that people are upgrading? Or just not buying. Probably not a good thing in a recession.
It’s definately a good idea. As a web designer/developer myself, I used to have to resort to using hacky code to get IE6 to behave. I think a better policy is for web developers to use modern standards compliant code, but serve IE6 with a “dummed down” version of the website with an optional message that suggests to users to upgrade to a more modern browser. There’s really no reason that IE6 has to hold the web back anymore.
@Grisson I meant that I always hear people who code webpages talking about how it takes them forever to get anything working in IE6. I did not mean it to seem like I was talking about end users complaining about the rendering.
@Eambos
It does take forever. IE6 will always find some way to fuck up your website. The day that the IE8 developers announced that it renders the Acid2 Test correctly was a day of rejoicing!
For personal stuff stuff IE6 isn’t supported. It just renders all fucked up. I don’t care.
I support IE6 for stuff that people pay for.
IE can fuck off and die.
@Grisson It means people are upgrading/switching :)
@Vinifera7 Really? That’s great! Microsoft finally caring about the standards. I guess Acid3 is to much to ask…
@wilhel1812
Yes, really, in December of 2007. At least the developers showed that the wip version did. The beta may not. Who knows?
@johnpowell
Yeah, unless I am paid to support IE6, I don’t care much that it looks like shit.
Aha, wonderful :) lovely news to see, I hope it catches on internationally quickly. My school still uses IE6 sadly (makes me want to weep, Google Documents works but in a slightly screwy manner and some sites don’t work at all and so on and so forth). It’s so silly, we don’t have the newest flash version nor Silverlight (and this isn’t for non-educational sites, I’m talking about sites I’m trying to use to improve my knowledge).
browser = BrowserDetectParser();
if (browser == “IE”) DisplayOfferDownloadNonMSBrowserDialog();
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