People get extremely fired up about switching browsers the very moment a site they like a lot starts failing.
For example, google has been warning IE6 users for a while now when they hit youtube.com. Now, I'm going to guess that what youtube.com is going to end up doing is start losing features for IE6 users, but the only feature anyone cares about (watching the videos), will continue to work in IE6 for years to come, so, that is not actually going to be a catalyst. Nevertheless, with the precipitous drop-off of IE6 especially amongst the early adopter and tipping-point-inducing crowd (that is, people who spend enough time on the internet that they will actively get more people involved and possibly preach the benefits of your site), these notions I'm hearing in this thread (you NEED to continue to fully support IE6, and we'll never get rid of it!) just aren't universal. And once the web *DEVELOPERS* hate IE6 enough, IE6's life as a browser ends. No matter how indifferent the masses are. I expect more and more sites to break in more and more horrible ways over time. You already see this; there are lots of sites that don't work all that well in IE6. You can add to this mix that the IT world is very driven by a top-down approach. Your average computer illiterate knows at least 1 person in their circle of friends that is computer literate. That person is going to ram a modern browser down the throat of their illiterate friends the moment they start calling with 'this site doesn't work on my machine, I don't know what to do!' - even if the problem isn't actually the browser, just because their computer literate friend doesn't use IE6, and IE6 is _EXTREMELY_ in accessible. Only the webdev diehards have taken the trouble of jumping through the enormous hoops to have IE6 runnable on their machine (e.g. involving virtualbox and an XP image). Debugging friends is extremely aggravating, and the first thing you want to do is eliminate variables and make sure you have a simile of their environment. Thus, the browser preferences of the top X% of the IT world is the only relevant factor of browser life. How big X is is debatable, but unlikely to be all that relevant; IE hate is spread far and wide, undoubtedly bigger than X if not now then soon. There are a few people in the supposed top X% class that still stick to IE6. Primarily this is the crowd that's being echoed here; the users don't give a toss, IE6 has already been vetted, I know how to support it, so screw it. I don't see how this is going to last. Even if they are idiots who don't know how to use a browser properly and thus stick themselves to IE6 as well (if they don't, change is inevitable), the complaints of users that certain sites aren't working very well inexorably push IE6 even out, there. Personal advice: Do NOT jump through too many hoops supporting IE6. Just tell IE6 users to upgrade. Especially when you start work on a new project; by the time you go live, saying that will be quite acceptable, even in the most die hard enterprisey environment. On Dec 29, 3:20 am, Jack <[email protected]> wrote: > Amen to that. IE6 is just evil. Horrible evil. > > On Dec 28, 1:23 pm, Joe Sondow <[email protected]> wrote: > > > > > Try the Antarctica data for the StatCounter graph. Of the antarctic > > researchers who use statcounter-measured sites, about 7 use Firefox, 2 > > use IE, and 1 uses Opera. Because there are 10 people in the sample :P > > > But seriously, I celebrate the decline of IE 6 more than the rise of > > any winner in the overall browser battle. The main reason browser > > usage interests me is that I look forward to the day when my pages > > behave similarly in all my users' browsers without the need to find > > and test solutions for each browser. That happy day has not yet > > arrived, but it looks like a future possibility. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
