Dealing with IE6
Just like pretty much every single web developer out there, I hate IE, regardless of it’s version. IE7 made great leaps and bounds over IE6 but it was still stupidly buggy. How do you get around the annoyances of IE?
The guys over at ie6update.com have a great solution by emulating Internet Explorers information bar and giving users the bait to upgrade to IE7/IE8.
Although I’m all for this idea there are obvious problems here
The majority of users who are still using IE6 are either within corporate networks, where they will more than likely never have the administration rights to upgrade to IE7/IE8 or they are just too stubborn to upgrade to the latest version of IE any way, or they’re of course, using an older version of Windows and can’t be bothered or don’t want to upgrade to the latest OS (I can see why).
The obvious security issues with this method are stated on ie6update.com’s website…
Can I make IE6 Update point to another browser’s website? (i.e. Mozilla Firefox)
While we don’t officially recommend this, you can change the URL that IE6 Update points to by overriding the default URL in the IE6UPDATE_OPTIONS object. For example:
Errr… hello! I can see three things happening here…
- A very stupid person will serve the user a URL to a version of IE with malicious code.
- If you put this on your website, and it gets hacked (you’ve paid a fucking idiot to code your website) it’s open to exploitation, i.e. your website sends them to redtube under false pretenses and of course you get the blame. Do you really want that?
- ie6update.com getting hacked and your website being exploited by malicious code in their JS
So how do you get your users to upgrade to IE without pissing them off?
Give them shit and advise them to upgrade. Although it’s a lot of hassle lots of web developers do this, they create semantic code and progressively enhance it for the nice browsers… (Firefox, Safari, Opera, etc..) and leave the version for IE6 nice and shit and give them a little message to upgrade some where if you really want them to upgrade. A lot of this can be found in CSS Mastery, it’s on page 161, if you don’t have this book go out and buy it, it should be on every front enders book shelf.
Before you do any of this stuff, check out the stats/analytics of your website, you’ll find that there’s a gradual decline of IE6 visitors to your site and that those users are running Windows 2000 / NT who can’t actually upgrade so what’s the point in baiting them into upgrading? I know that less than 16% of my visitors are on IE6 and most of them aren’t on an OS that supports IE7+, even though there aren’t many of them I’d definitely hate to piss them off!
At the end of the day you’re creating a website for your users/visitors, not you. If your browser requirements are for IE6 and up, deal with it, use conditional comments to pull in the stylesheets for IE6/IE7, don’t hack your way through. A lot of companies are only JUST dropping support for IE 5.X, it’s going to take a very long time for developers to gradually stop developing for IE6.
To me this is counter productive as every time some one who DOESN’T or CAN’T upgrade and visits your website gets a message telling to upgrade will eventually get annoyed and go away, this is just as bad as adding alert(‘Fuck Off’); to every page.
May 17, 2009 - 1:07 am
“by activating Internet Explorers information bar and giving users the bait to upgrade to IE7/IE8″
It actually just emulates it in JS. If we could really instantiate the bar it would be more convincing, but even MS aren’t that stupid. I think.
The users with NT/2000 can still use FF/Safari/Opera/etc.
I currently advise to make the site *work* in IE6, but don’t spend valuable time making it look perfect when that time could be spent developing new features. As you say, inform the user they should upgrade. Don’t give them an awful experience, but supporting IE6 100% is expensive. Too expensive, I think, for the benefits it provides. Have you also seen http://iedeathmarch.org? Can you believe the N64 is younger than IE6?
Aside from anything else, IE6 is now unsupported by MS themselves, and full of security holes that will never be fixed. Encouraging users to upgrade is actually doing them a favour.
Otherwise, great post. I agree 100%. My main reason for not using ie6update.com (although I love the premise) is it’s essentially phishing, unethical, and dishonest.
May 17, 2009 - 1:09 am
@Antony Kennedy Oops – I meant GameCube. It’s not THAT old
Though it is older than the iPod. Nearly 8 years now.
May 17, 2009 - 1:17 am
@Antony Kennedy Cheers Kennedy, was hoping for your input of my rant. Just edited the post from your comments about emulating the bar.
That’s my point exactly, this method is just as bad as those pop under ad days which pissed people off and eventually led to lots of people disabling javascript or installing pop up blockers. (the days where JavaScript was considered cheesy as every one was copying and pasting JS from dynamicdrive.com which I have to say has some how improved quite a bit)
It definitely is expensive, how many hours/days do you think it adds to development time? That’s a lot of money in our pockets but I’d hate to be the one paying out to support it!
That sites pretty awesome, I had no idea how old the thing was!
Isn’t IE7 a high priority update in XP?
May 17, 2009 - 10:43 pm
I have everyone at work taking notes now, but I’d say one day in twelve is spent making stuff work for IE6 on very basic static stuff. Start doing overlays, pop-overs, heavy DOM manipulation – I’d say double that.
A lot of money in our pockets – a sad truth
IE6 being a pain in the arse is just one reason we are worth lots of money. In supporting standards and the semantic web, we are endangering our pay packets…
IE7 is a high priority update, but optional. In that, it will get ready to download it – but still ask you if you want it. Most people say no. And often in the enterprise, it is not up to the user what gets installed. While we still support IE6, they have no reason to update their users (which would be a cost for them too).
August 3, 2009 - 12:03 pm
One day in twelve? I’d say two – three in twelve to be honest.
That extra time tends to come in when I’m working within a team that doesn’t have as much knowledge about the quirks / issues with IE6+ as I do – resulting in another front-end / client-side developer writing code / hacks that result in even more inconsistencies that break well written CSS and/or JavaScript that I’ve coded that *should* work fine.
August 3, 2009 - 12:04 pm
Wow that’s a gay avatar btw.