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IE6 posts

Filed under: Internet, Browsers

Old Man IE6 shakes fist as Firefox surpasses him in browser share

Web designers and standards advocates have tried everything to kill Internet Explorer 6, but it just refuses to die. In fact, Microsoft has extended support for the aging browser until at least mid-2010, and longer for some versions of Windows. However, there is strong evidence that people are coming around to browsers that support standards, don't make web designers cry, and have frickin' TABS, for crying out loud ...

Firefox is now more popular than IE6.

That's right: according to October browser usage stats reported by Ars Technica, the old, incontinent granddad of the browsing world has finally been overtaken by the cool kid with all the rad accessories. Although IE6 still has 23% of the market - sadly, more than any other version of IE - when you add up the usage on every version of Firefox, you get 24.07%, enough to top that single old edition of Internet Explorer.

I assume the shift is accounted for by home web users shifting to newer browsers with the release of Windows 7, because corporate IT departments are still the last bastion of widespread IE6 use. As Ars speculates, high Windows 7 adoption rates could be the stake through IE6's cold, tab-less heart.

Meanwhile, in the Webkit browser wars, Chrome and Safari both made gains this month. Chrome is still growing faster -- right now it's closing in rapidly with 3.58% to Safari's 4.42%.

Filed under: Fun, Browsers, Humor

IE6ify: a bookmarklet that breaks the web


There's a lot of rage directed at Internet Explorer 6 these days, including several very serious sites detailing the ways it's holding the web back and making designers' lives miserable. Sometimes rage isn't the best approach, though. Sometimes you need to have a sense of humor – or, if you're a designer who has to support IE6, laugh to keep from crying. That's where the IE6ify bookmarklet comes in.

When you IE6ify a site using the bookmarklet, you can see it breaking the webpage more literally than IE6 already does. Page elements shift and overlap, images are corrupted, and the whole layout generally just takes off directly for hell in a handbasket. The more times you click the bookmarklet, the closer you get to an experience as authentically horrible as actually using IE6.

Filed under: News, Microsoft, Browsers

YouTube and Digg help speed up the slow death of IE6


As browsers and web standards evolve, Internet Explorer 6 becomes a great and greater liability to web designers. Making sites compatible with the dilapidated browser has taken up countless working hours, and led to several calls to get rid of it or stop supporting it altogether. It seems some progress is finally being made, though, with YouTube ending IE6 support and Digg discussing doing the same. If other high-traffic sites follow suit, perhaps business will stop forcing employees to use horribly outdated browser.

Digg was considering adding a message encouraging IE6 users to upgrade their browsers, but ultimately decided against it, after finding that a huge number of IE6 users had to use the browser at work, or didn't have admin access on their machines to install something better. YouTube, on the other hand, gives IE6 users prominent links to each of the three biggest modern browsers (Firefox, IE8 and Chrome). YouTube hasn't released any statistics yet, but IE6 users only accounted for a single-digit percentage of Digg's traffic. If other high profiles sites decide they're sick of spending time and money to support 5% of their visitors, IE6 might finally get to rest in peace.

Filed under: Developer, Microsoft, Browsers

Someone out there wants to save IE6



Jason recently wrote on Download Squad about a Facebook group aimed at eliminating Internet Explorer 6 from the web, and Lee even found a script that reminds IE6 users to upgrade when they visit your site. Not everyone is ready to let IE6 go, though. Just ask the folks behind Save IE6, a site dedicated to the preservation of this "powerful and versatile" browser.

Save IE6 features a petition (signed by around 450 people when I checked), quotes from satisfied users, and links to download the browser. Funnily enough, some of the people in favor of keeping IE6 around are web developers, the very group that has been most vocal about being inconvenienced by Microsoft's older model. I'm not sure I buy the "how can IE6 be violating standards when it has essentially BEEN the standard for years?" argument. After all, standards change, and standards have seemingly passed IE6 by.

Updated: Ha! They totally got me. I knew this idea was crazy, but I didn't catch that it was also a really good April Fools' Joke, apparently by Pingdom.

What do you think, Download Squad readers? Should IE6 be saved, or is it time to let go?

Are you in favor of saving IE6, or eliminating it?

Filed under: Windows, Microsoft, Mozilla, Freeware, Open Source

Bring Down IE6

Bring Down IE6I'm not really one for joining causes online (Facebook has rid me of any desire for that), but as far as geeky technical causes go, Bring Down IE6 by the folks at .NET Magazine is a good one. Internet Explorer 6 is the bane of pretty much every web designer or developer's existence. Things that work beautifully in all of the standards-compliant browsers (and even for the most part in modern versions of IE) require time-consuming and painful work-arounds just to get them sort of working.

The frustrating thing is that if Microsoft wanted to do something about the situation to ease the pain of the countless numbers of people building websites, they have it in their power to do so. The problem for web developers is that IE6 is still used by a frighteningly large percentage of people online. How can this be? Well, many unfortunate corporate workers are stuck using Windows 2000, and do not have permission to install or even use a portable version of a standards-compliant alternative browser like Firefox. These people are using IE6 because it is the only option available to them.

As much as Microsoft would like to force everyone to upgrade to XP / Vista / Windows 7, the truth is that for many companies, the Windows 2000 licenses that they already own work just fine for their needs.

What Microsoft should do is acknowledge that Windows 2000 is still being actively used, and make later versions of Internet Explorer available as an update for Windows 2000. Yes, I realize that Windows 2000 is no longer an officially supported platform by Microsoft, but that just points to the disconnect between what Microsoft wishes people would do, and what they are actually doing.

Also, if you're in IT at a company that is still clinging to Windows 2000, for the love of all that is good, please add a modern browser to your standard install image. They're free, and they're a hell of a lot more secure than IE6 is. Pick one; Firefox, Opera, Safari, or even Google's currently-in-beta Chrome browser. Any of these is a better choice than IE6.

And if you're a web developer, consider using a simple script to provide a gentle reminder to IE6 users that they need to upgrade.

Let's all let IE6 die the death it so richly deserves.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Browser Tips, How-Tos, Troubleshooting

How to surf the web even if Internet Explorer is disabled

Calc IE
Ever find yourself sitting in front of a computer that's been locked down by an overzealous IT administrator who won't let you install any software or even open Internet Explorer or Firefox? If that PC is running Windows XP, there's a good chance you can still visit Download Squad (or other sites if that sort of thing appeals to you).

All you have to do is launch a Windows application like Calculator, and then click the Help button. Under Help, click "Help Topics," which will bring up a help window. Next, all you have to do is right click on the title bar and select "Jump To URL." Now you can type in any web address you like, but make sure to include "http://" at the beginning. Basically what you're looking at is Internet Explorer 6 inside a help window, but this version of the program isn't quite as smart as IE6. It won't automatically add the http:// for you. And of course, there's no bookmarking feature.

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Security, Utilities, News, Windows, Productivity, Microsoft, Freeware

Run IE 6 and 7 on the same machine

IE 7 If you do hard-core web development, which do you use? IE 6 or IE 7? I would rather use Firefox, but I have to develop for IE, since most of the world still uses it. Sure IE7 is new, IE6 is old, and they are similar, yet it is tough to develop for both, especially when you can't really install both together on the same machine. Microsoft is going to help you out with that. On November 30th, Microsoft released the Internet Explorer VPC testing image. This is a virtual PC image that lets you run IE 6 and IE 7 on the same virtual machine. The image is built on a pre-activated copy of Windows XP SP2 underneath so that could be fun for all kinds of other things too. The catch here is that the image expires on April 1, 2007. Still, it isn't a bad idea to download it and is going to help me make and break IE 6 and 7 stuff a lot faster now. You can download Microsoft Virtual PC 2004 for free to run the image (if you don't have it already). The IEblog states that the VPC image will also run on Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 (download it via connect, Windows Live passport sign-in required) if you're running Vista. Mary Jo Foley, (of Microsoft Watch fame) has written a great article on this over at her new home at ZDNet's "Unblinking Eye on Microsoft" blog that you might find interesting. Be aware, the VPC testing image is around 500MB to download, so go get yourself a cookie, a candy cane, some egg-nog or something while you're waiting.

Filed under: Developer, Internet, Macintosh, Apple, Microsoft

Run Internet Explorer 6 on Mac OS X

Internet Explorer 6 on OS XWhy would you want to do something like install Microsoft's Internet Explorer 6 on Apple's OS X? Well, the sad truth is that IE6 is still the most prevalent web browser in the world, and web designers-even the Mac kind-can't afford to start ignoring it yet. Unsurprisingly, the trick to getting IE to run on OS X is based on IEs4Linux, a tool with the same purpose, but for Linux. For the Mac, however, it takes a bit more fiddling, as described in this thread on the Ars Technica forums. Not exactly a one-click install, but probably preferable for some to actuall getting Windows.

Filed under: Internet, Windows, Microsoft

How to run IE6 and IE7 on the same machine

Internet Explorer 7Since version 3.0 Internet Explorer has had a "standalone mode" that has allowed web developers to view their work in several different versions of the browser concurrently, but earlier this month a cumulative security patch for IE6 released earlier this month broke standalone mode. It prevents, among other things, developers wishing to make their sites work with Internet Explorer 7 from doing so without abandoning IE6 altogether. The IE teams' flippant reply to the please of developers was that this is by design and standalone mode isn't supported and if they want to work with IE7 they have no choice but to use it exclusively. Despite their boneheaded attitude (brilliant, guys--for the first time in years developers actually want to work with IE, but you're gonna make it hard for them), somone, namely Jon Galloway, has found a workaround. Galloway came up with a registry patch and wrote a batch file that will let you run IE7, and then, when you're done, clean up the mess it left behind allowing you to run IE6 again. Great work, Jon!

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With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet. They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...

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