Can Norway Kill IE6?
There has been an ongoing campaign the last week in Norway, started by Finn.no, our biggest buy/sell website, to warn users of IE6 (Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 for those who don’t know jack) that they need to upgrade. It’s reached such big international websites as Wired and PCWorld.
I’ve even put the message on one of my websites to join in on the fun. That doesn’t mean I don’t support IE6 when I design websites, since about 20% of the users out there still are stuck with IE6. I say stuck, because a majority of users are stuck. They probably use it at work, and their system admin will not let them upgrade, because all the wonderful web apps they use only work in IE6.
In other words, all their web apps are full of bugs, and are not made to standards. I’m known for my weird “it’s just like” examples, but I can’t even come up with a good example of why this is so bad. I think it it is obvious that the developers didn’t have a choice (they probably did) back when there was no Internet Explorer 7 available. So instead of coding it correctly, they had to code it incorrectly for it to look correct in IE6.
I just got this from a friend in Norways largest oil companies today, and we all know a picture says a thousand words… well this says a bit less, but that is because there is actual text in the image 
Enjoy!
Info message for Statoil employees about IE6
Tags: ie6
Feb 26, 2009
You have a good point. There’s no doubt companies using crappy web apps pose a challenge to the “kill IE6″ campaign. But I still think that it is important to get home users who are still on IE6 to upgrade.
And in the long run it might also encourage companies to get their act together and get some decent systems.
Feb 26, 2009
Yeah I agree. We might not be able to make them change, but we will put a lot of pressure on the companies to do something about their apps.
Feb 26, 2009
Internet Explorer 6 was released together with Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, and at that time Microsoft had plenty of possibilities to include the already-established web-standards that were available at that time.
The biggest concern with IE6 however are the number of critical bugs and security flaws that hasnt been fixed by Microsoft yet.
I agree that the super-big companies around the globe might have difficulties upgrading the browser on 25.000 computers to a new version just over the weekend, but if they run an eight year old browser in 2009 then they’ve got nobody to blame when the whole company-infrastructure falls apart because of a 50-lines-of-code rotten script made by an asian computer-rookie.
Feb 26, 2009
Haha love the way they explain this to their employees. IT-dept don’t support it YET. Come on…
Feb 27, 2009
I run few WordPress development oriented websites and I was recently going through Google Analytics data and I find out that IE6 was used by only 6% of all users, and IE7 by some 9%.
Majority of users used Firefox. And this is good ratio, but since the websites are specialized, so are the users. But the regular users or employees in big companies are either not informed enough to make a change or company prohibts such change, or just plain lazy.
I recently upgraded friends Windows installtion, and I installed Opera as defult browser (previous was IE6). And he couldn’t believe how much better Opera was, and how many things he can do with it now on the internet.
We need more campaigns to show the IE6 user reasons to switch to better browser, and also we need for Microsoft to finally STOP making browsers.
Feb 27, 2009
Milan: I think its good that Microsoft continue to develop browsers. Their IE7 is lightyears ahead of IE6, and the upcoming IE8 will really be based on standards, as they finally have understood the importants of working _with_ the developers, not against us. Its also worth to mention that Microsoft supports these campaigns.
Regarding your 6% IE6-usage I think its higher in general. I think 80% of all Wordpress developers run Firefox 3 (the rest run Safari or maybe Chrome).
Mar 15, 2009
The websites i design are in Hebrew and non technical in most cases, so i get 70%-80% IE users and half of them still use version 6!.
I spend most of my browser debugging time on IE6. IE7 is already much easier for me although it’s not really fully standards compliant, my prayer is to get reed of IE6 as soon as possible.
Thanks for sharing your thoughts.