Startups unite to drive nail into the coffin of Internet Explorer 6

August 4, 2009 | Anthony Ha | Comments | |

ie6nomore-logoIf you’re still using Internet Explorer 6 — the frequently criticized web browser that was first released in 2001 — the Internet is becoming an increasingly hostile place.

Popular sites like YouTube are telling visitors who are using IE6 that they need to switch to a “modern browser” like Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, or Microsoft’s own Internet Explorer 8. There are even sites like Bring Down IE 6 devoted to getting web users off IE6.

Now a group of startups including easy-to-use website builder Weebly, user-generated news site Reddit, video site Justin.tv, simple blogging tool Posterous, and commenting service Disqus (which manages comments for VentureBeat) are teaming up to increase the pressure on IE6 users to switch. Not only are they adding a “switch to a modern browser” warning that shows up whenever someone views their sites through IE6, they’ve also built an IE6 No More promotional site. On IE6 No More, developers can take snippets of code and add them to their sites, allowing them to display similar warnings.

Why the rage? Here’s the companies’ explanation:

As any web developer will tell you, working with IE 6 is one of the most difficult and frustrating things they have to deal with on a daily basis, taking up a disproportionate amount of their time. Beyond that, IE 6’s support for modern web standards is very lacking, restricting what developers can create.

IE6 has been on the decline for a while. According to W3Counter, the browser accounted for 15 percent of the market last month, compared to 35 percent the year earlier, and 48 percent in July 2007. But it’s still one of the most popular browsers around, which means it continues to cause headaches for developers.

I wonder whether a group of startups are really the ones to promote change — I’d think their audiences are more knowledgeable about tech, and therefore less likely to be using such an old browser. Still, IE6 is presumably an issue for all them, or they wouldn’t have joined the campaign. Weebly’s and Posterous’ users may be a good fit in particular, since the companies are all about making tech tasks (website-building and blogging, respectively) more accessible to the general public. Plus, providing the code (which Weebly chief executive David Rusenko says can be installed on another site in 30 seconds) means that the campaign shouldn’t stop with these five companies.

ie6-warning

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About the Author, Anthony Ha

Anthony is VentureBeat's assistant editor, as well as its reporter on enterprise technology, cloud computing, and tech policy. Before joining VentureBeat in 2008, Anthony worked at the Hollister Free Lance, where he won awards from the California Newspaper Publishers Association for breaking news coverage and writing. He attended Stanford University and now lives in San Francisco. Reach him at anthony@venturebeat.com. You can also follow Anthony on Twitter.

  • Ha! Here's two more of those sites:

    http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/23/woah-peopl...
  • Robin, that link took me to a password protected area, I could not close the login box, or the tab, or even Firefox itself. Had to ctrl-alt-del shut it down.
  • Yeah we had a technical prob for about 5 minutes, apologies. Should work fine now.

    Sites are http://hey-it.com and http://ie6update.com by the way.
  • Thanks Robin, would have included a link to your other article too, but there's only so much TechCrunch linking I can I can get away with in a single post.
  • Ha! I wasn't looking for an extra link to our post, but rather the two other anti-IE6 sites.
  • WebStarts.com is no longer supporting IE6 either.
  • You do realize that a large portion of people that are using IE6 are at work where they have NO control over the browser...

    Stupid startups. I like the idea but...it's not practical when you hear that a majority of the computers are businesses...where some IT guy controls the issue.
  • When the CEO can't take his YouTube breaks he'll have the IT guys update the company's browsers.
  • Facebook User
    That's exactly the idea. Even if a bunch of the remaining IE 6 users are corporate, hopefully a few of them will become aware of the fact that their browser is almost 9 years old and start putting pressure on IT to upgrade.
  • duke
    The line needs to be drawn sometime. 2 major versions and most of a decade (how much time is this in internet time?) are a good indication that these people/companies have no intention of upgrading. At this point, the only reasons to not upgrade are all poor excuses to cover up failure.

    If a company can't afford to upgrade their internal apps, they can cry on someone else's shoulder. I refuse to suffer as a developer because they don't have sysadmins who know how to audit applications. If they don't have the money/time to do it now, they should just give it up. They'll use the same excuse in 6 months, next year, 5 years from now, etc. They will never have the time or money to do this, but the excuses... those never run out.

    If you can get by and easily support this relic, then more power to you, but enjoy your maintenance costs. I can no longer justify this, for sure.

    I'm happy to leave these dinosaurs in the dust. Good riddance.
  • rojo
    They need to include IE 7 and 8 in that too.
  • Tim
    Yeah, I'm a web developer and I find IE7 and IE8 no better. The support for CSS is marginally better but still different enough from FF/Sf/Chr/Op that it needs to be separately tested and needs its own custom stylesheet. The support for vector graphics and bitmap graphics is exactly the same (VML instead of SVG, and nothing instead of Canvas, respectively). Plus IE8 added all kinds of new ways for things to break, especially with its two rendering engines ("kind of like IE7 but not exactly" and "completely different from anything else in the world"), and you can never be absolutely certain which you're getting.

    Some of the people I work with hate IE8 even more than IE6. In the past couple months, we've certainly spent the most browser-compatibility time on IE8. At least IE6's flaws are well-known and well-documented. IE8 sucks in twice as many all-new ways, and doesn't actually fix any of the big-picture problems that IE6 had.

    I guess they're trying to do this in a way that's Microsoft-friendly, but really, IE6 is no worse than IE7 or IE8.
  • Ie 6 is dead for me and internet .
  • What, they introduced IE 6? I totally missed that.. still surfing on IE 2.0 :-)
  • AJ
    Did the folks at justin.tv, posterous, and weebly previously A/B test the messaging on that banner?
  • namenameere
    Bah IE6 rocked and I wanna use Netscape Navigator once more!
  • Matt
    Why is Opera not listed as one of the suggested alternatives?
  • jirolico
    Opera, as good as it is, has 2% market share and is thus, quite unfortunately, looked over by most people.
  • Here's one of those ideas that's too tempting to admit at first that's it's stupid:

    What if we just cicumvent IE completely with a browser emulator?. If someone is using IE, we just open up a full-screen flash player and run a pixel by pixel emulator of, say, Firefox. Yeah, it's insidious, but it just.. might.. work...
    -thinksketchdesign.com