Kill IE6

For a better experience using this site, please upgrade to a modern web browser."

Sure, move to Firefox

IE6 isn't going to "die" any time soon. Of all the people still using IE6, how many are using it at work through a tightly managed and locked down IT environment? Perhaps those sanctimonious "developers" should get off their soapbox and get on with the job in hand. Besides, when did web development stop being centered around the end-user? If the user persists with using IE6, then much as you may dislike it you're bound to developing to meet that particular need.

Easy way to kill IE6? Don't support it on your web pages. Stop looking for someone else to solve YOUR problem.

You don't want to support it, then don't.

ignore it. Hopefully it'll go away.

The easiest thing to do is alter the code than Web Sites have for detecting IE6 and change to report a message "Your Browser is not supported. Please upgrade to a W3C compliant browser" then direct them to Mozilla.

Why? Because the websites I develop have to look correct in IE6, 7, 8, FF, and Safari, because our company supports all those products. You can still download Netscape 7 (and yes, I've seen several computers with that installed), I don't see any campaigns calling for the death of that product even though it's nearly as old as IE 6.

Guess what Developers. YOU choose the web as your platform. Therefore, you DO NOT get to choose what browsers people use. If you want a closed off, reliable platform, then develop for Windows, OS X, Linux, or with a controlled VM like Java. The web is a absolute cluster and any notion that a Twitter Petition is going to unravel 15 years of people crying "Freedom! I want Freedom" is foolish at best and more likely downright ignorant.

I use Firefox all the time, but some work clients have IE only sites (in which case I am forced to use IE6 - which I usually use with a wrapper like Avant Browser).

I'm not about to scrap my entire OS (Windows 2000) to use XP (which I don't particularly like) or Vista / WIn 7 (which I absolutely despise).

If Microsoft made IE7 / IE8 available on Windows 2000 then they could get rid of a hell of a lot of running copies of IE6 in the corporate world, but of course Microsoft deliberately chose not to do that in order to force people to upgrade their OS.

unfortunately you cannot tell your customers to ditch their browser because you don't want to develop for it. i know, ie6 is pain in the ass, so is ie7. i pull my hair everytime i code something and then preview it in ie6 but with a bit of planning you can avoid quite a lot of problems if your design allows that.

and there's very important point you're missing completely - you don't design/develop pages to satisfy you but your customers/visitors :) Because without customers/visitors your page won't be needed don't you think?

So basically the user gets presented with two options - ugrading their browser which may not be possible (limited PC access rights), or just not using the site. I'd say the vast majority will choose the latter. I agree that IE6 is outdated and the web would probably be better without it, but to avoid alienating the user base it's best to just code for it.

MS are doing the right thing here. Encouraging their customers to upgrade as soon as they can whilst providing support for their products.

The whole point of doing business with corporations like MS is that you get safety and stability. You can trust them not to go bust any time soon, and that they'll support you for many years to come. What would it make MS if they pulled the plug on IE6 now? I'd be seriously pissed off as a corporate customer.

I think the best way forward is to almost silently provide clunky fallbacks for old browsers whilst rolling out new features for modern browsers, then let the luddites stumble across the same sites on other people's PCs and wonder why it looks so much different. That won't just teach them to change from IE6 to IE7/8, it'll make them aware that they need to keep all their software updated or they'll miss out.

To the idiot's saying just don't use it if you don't like it - thats now possible. As a developer you have to support what people are using. But that doesn't mean we should just sit quietly and accept it. Providing websites which work with IE6 while also advising users there browser is out of date, will not be supported in the future, or some very minor features may not work is the best we can do. When the percentage of IE6 users drops low enough then we can finally move on.
The day when IE7 is also abandoned is a far out dream - but I look forward to it.

If you do not want to support my browser, that is fine. Just get used to the idea that I will be doing business with your competitors.

I tried IE7 and IE8 (I use the latter at work), and I disliked them both. Maybe it is me, but I really dislike tabbed browsing - one time too many I have closed a window and lost several pages I had open, and I despise being asked every time I want to close a tab.

Firefox has its problems, as well - it is slower than IE6, which for now is something I won't put up with. It used to be quite fast, but when it got bogged down, I ended up going back to IE6. The Firefox of today feels more like Mozilla NetScrape than the fast, efficient browser it was when I started using it in 2004.

Because the companies I have worked for still use it for internal web applications that don't work with newer browsers. Also they still run NT4 in some instances. Also the computers they use are underpowered and can't meet the memory requirements of modern web browsers. Also upgrading all that costs money. Also they don't fix stuff that works fine for them, that's called wasting money. Also employees shouldn't be screwing around on the internet at work. Need more reasons?

@Oliver

Have you tried Opera? It seems to solve your problem. It will never ask you anything when closing (assuming properly that if you push the button you just want to close the damn thing), and it will just resume last session with all tabs open on next run, without asking any questions as well (including emails that you were writing).

Of course it would be easy for Microsoft to "port back" the rendering engine to any version of IE, even 5, but than suckers would have one less reason to upgrade the OS and things, would they?

By the way Oliver... do you suck up for free or do you get payed?

I'm guessing people making these comments aren't the *good* web designers with a good understanding of CSS/HTML + All the the goodies of HTML5.

I'm sure if you still are building butt ugly 90s style table-cell layouts, then you might not see why it's important.

IE6 is what religion is to humanity!

Sorry, I LIKE IE6. The old technology means web developers have a harder time adding all the bug-prone, high-bandwidth crap that on average makes advanced web pages lousy.

These developers idea of "progress" is to the determent of backwards compatibility, speed and especially simplicity.

It appears, that all those ie6 (all MS browsers in fact) fans don't know anything about xhtml, css, dom... You see, theese things are standards, developed by W3C, which has lots of members, MS being one of them. Yet MS is practicaly only one who's allowed to ignore theese standards... Don't take my word for granted, check your browser http://acid3.acidtests.org/ Theese days you have to develop for three different MS browsers and standards compliant browsers and you ask what is wrong with that? This is an absolute waste of development time (and clients money), instead of doing something productive you spend your time on tinkering with html, css and js, and in the end have to compromise design features for the sake of compatibility with MS. So much for right business decisions.

Nope-
You are probably refering to Flash animations, which usually take the most cpu time and are bandwidth heavy. There is a way to cure that, flash disabler plugin for a browser, FlashKiller for FF for instance. Browser's JS engine performance may come in to play on JS heavy sites as well.

As a developer making a 100% XHTML 1.1 strict and CSS 2.1 site is easy, fast, looks great and works on every W3c compliant browser without anything more than minor tweaks that take a hour or two.

But then IE 6's market share comes in so i have to break that coding and CSS to make it work with IE 6 or risk alienating 30% of the target audience. This process can take a few days to weeks depending on the complexity of the site and is often an ongoing issue.

The next bit of course is graphics. To get transparency .png is the way to go, however to cater for IE 6 one must use .gif which is takes up more bandwidth and does not support as many colours and only one level of transparency.

I am not sure about it. My company has got many Windows 2000 running and these computers are great with IE6. IE7 or above does not install on Windows 2000. FF is great, but it does not support Internet policies like IE6 does. It seems IE6 is the only choice here. Convince me why should I dump IE6.

"Having to work with IE6 adds about 50 per cent more development work and it is holding the web back."

Stop whining and use web 2.0, the web doesn't need any more bullshit.

Oy veh! If only Microsoft had not written non-HTML standard compliant code in the first place, this little problem could have been avoided, yes?

BUT, Microsoft was too busy trying to convert the Internet so only ITS proprietary web browser could work on sites, placing other HTML-compliant browsers at a competitive disadvantage (and we are still suffering from the after-effects of this).

So, why exactly should we now trust IE7, IE8, IE9...or Microsoft? I think Firefox, Opera, or Chrome would be the way to go (ABM- anything but Microsoft).
Then Microsoft could perhaps be coaxed into no longer playing its little "non-standard standards" game.

Why not just make code for IE7+

and then use to code to display
*your using an outdated browser, it's time to upgrade* notification.

Im using IE8 and FF3.5, while ff isnt bad i still like the interface of IE8 better.. and also FF is slower to start.

"I'm guessing people making these comments aren't the *good* web designers with a good understanding of CSS/HTML + All the the goodies of HTML5."

probably then you're not a good developer as with this opinion you wouldn't meet business's requirements.

Customers rule not developer. Once again, if there's a large group of customers using certain browsers you should develop your project so it renders correctly on that browser. Long story short.

I use windows 2000 you can't upgrade to IE7 or IE8 with this operating system,
fortunately Mozilla firfox works fine on it so far....if Microsoft would stop being so picky about older systems maybe we can use thier software!

There is one and only one reason "developers" are screaming about upgrading IE. It's not because of anything even remotely related to the web. MS and it's cronies want you to upgrade your OS. There are still people running *cough* WIN95-98, WINME, WINNT, and WIN2k. None of which will run or support IE7 or IE8. MS sees it's upgrade revenue stream disintigrating. How do you get people to upgrade without extolling the virtues of of your new OS? You claim that one of the underlying components of said OS is weak, outdated, and adds complexity and money to end projects. This has nothing to do with the browser people. MS and intel both have as much as said to us that it's time to upgrade. Now do your civic duty and be the little lemmings you are, go out and purchase a new rig with something on it that's inferior and buggy. But hey. They told me to do it!

Ha haaa you must be one of those 'super' web designers that when we look at your websites for cross browser usage we just burst out laughing when they fall apart.

Lack of skill and laziness, thats what it is. We love those 'professional' designers that just make a website fit with the browser they are using at the time. Even a lot of so called top agancies fall into this trap.

If the customer needs it, you make it so. Coding for IE6 will be around for a long time yet. Suck it up or find a job elsewhere!

As any webdesigner worth his salt should know, IE7 is essentially IE6 with a spiffier GUI. It still has the same broken CSS box model, almost no support for CSS 2.x (~1999) and more bugs in other areas than you could shake a stick at. All they really did in the back-end was fix a few IE6 bugs which were used to circumvent CSS bugs.

So basically, IE7 sucks as badly as IE6. Why isn't the former being forced out of the market as well? I know I would love to see IE7 vanish as badly as IE6. Fortunately I only see a <10 s still weird that only IE6 is being asked to roll over and die.

Simply encourage the owners of major web sites to enforce the update. For example, huge sites such as MySpace, Twitter, Facebook, Yahoo, Youtube, Google, etc., could advertise something similar to that of the "Big Switch," when consumers were forced to switch to digital television. Simply advertise something like this on major sites:

"You are using [browser name and version here], which is an outdated browser. You MUST update your browser by December 31, 2009 to continue using [site title]. Click here for a list of up-to-date browsers that can be installed."

If you can get EVERY major site to agree on this together, you will have things worked out in no time. There are no more than about 30 major sites that are used by the vast majority so they have the power and it is something the end-user cannot avoid. You can't just quit using Facebook and switch to MySpace to avoid it because they will have the EXACT same banner posted on THEIR website front page. There should be like this one banner that every major site displays so that the user will see that it is the EXACT same enforcement being controlled by one force.

Hey Jonathan, I agree with your idea. Unfortunately, the majority of PC users have no clue how to update IE, let alone download Firefox, Google Chrome or Safari. That's why I constantly tell them...."GET A MAC!" I have done my own coding for my website and the pages always look great on FF and Safari but IE, forget it! Not to mention that Microsoft stopped supporting IE for the Mac years ago.

I don't support IE6 because I don't want customers who use it.

I'm a web designer focusing on small businesses, startups and community orgs. I attract some awesome clients, and a few who have no idea what a website is for. My mindset is a bit like that of Inara on Firefly, except that what I sell is better than sex.

Fortunately a number of my clients are artistically-oriented and understand where I'm coming from visually (or, better, they give me new ideas).

But extremely tech-inept clients are so much trouble that the money isn't worth it unless it's a very small project using one of my templates. Anything beyond that is like trying to sell a car engine to someone who's only dealt with horse-drawn carriages.

Obviously the sites I sell support IE6. But my own site is there to attract clients who will be able to articulate what they want, and whose projects will appeal to me not just monetarily but also personally and artistically. Most of these clients don't use any version of IE, and none use IE6.

That said, I'm in Los Angeles these days and Los Angelenos are simply less rational than normal people.