[BenoitRen]

"cluberti" said:

The thing that scares me the most about Firefox is - what will happen when the browser does have the vast majority market share? It's not the most secure codebase, and like anything else it'll become a target.

You seem to be assuming that a program with the most market share is insecure by default and should be avoided. This is not true. Look at Apache.

Besides, Firefox is already a target.

"PC_LOAD_LETTER" said:

I still dont think its possible for FF* to overtake IE* any measurable amount of time. IE will always control a majority of the market since it it the most configurable with GPo and the like which will always make it the bigger target.

Firefox is so much more configurable than IE. And it's open source. I also doubt most home users are into customising every aspect of their gateway to the web.

[JustinStacey.x]

Most of what you can configure in Firefox is gratuitous. At least the configuration options for IE (most of them found in Group Policy) actually do things to bolster security...

Albeit, a secure IE is most often a pain-in-the-butt to use IE, which is why I tend to use Opera nowadays.

[JustinStacey.x]

herbalist, on Jul 25 2009, 05:45 PM, said:

Quote

how can I do the same thing ... block or spoof the user agent in IE 6.

I believe there's a registry tweak that can do that for IE6 but I don't know what it is. My preference is to let Proxomitron alter the headers. Proxomitron can modify the user agent string and most any other web content of anything that connects to the web through it.

I'm finding Proxomitron to be more and more useful. It can filter out or modify undesirable or troublesome web content, remove ads, filter out malicious code, and much more. It's a small, lightweight program that you unzip and use. It can be looked at as a rule based content filter. More info on Proxomitron is available at The Un-Official Proxomitron Forum.

I edited my user agent string to say

Duke Nukem; 3D; Get back to work, you slacker!

Websites think I run Mozilla 4.0 on an 'unknown platform'

This post has been edited by JustinStacey.x: 04 August 2009 - 04:50 PM

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

BenoitRen, on Aug 4 2009, 05:33 PM, said:

Besides, Firefox is already a target.

"PC_LOAD_LETTER" said:

I still dont think its possible for FF* to overtake IE* any measurable amount of time. IE will always control a majority of the market since it it the most configurable with GPo and the like which will always make it the bigger target.

Firefox is so much more configurable than IE. And it's open source. I also doubt most home users are into customising every aspect of their gateway to the web.

Sorry i wasnt too clear what i meant there. when i say "configurable with GPo" that has nothing to do with home users in my mind (yes i know about local GPo but that hardly counts) I use FF almost exclusively My home PCs & work PCs but on the PCs I manage, IE is MUCH easier to keep up to date and manage default settings with Group Policy Object received from the domain. So my point was IE* will always have a huge presence in the corporate environment which will make it hard for FF* to overtake IE* for any extended period. Now If someone could make a version of FF that could be configured with GPo, I might think about deploy it at work but until then, my users will have to install it themselves.

[eidenk]

Jerry K, on Aug 3 2009, 04:43 PM, said:

@ eidenk
I've been using Firefox since version 1.5 and I prefer to stick to my guns.
I tried Opera 9.64 and it didn't convince me at all. I prefer the variety of add-ons Firefox offers.
I like the possibility to customize my browser in a way that it has all the functions I need.

But the point is that whatever browser you use I think they all are better than IE6.

Each one his own I guess. I never liked Firefox but at some point I needed to replace my old IE 5.5 (I don't even have 6 installed) for going online as I was too fed-up with exploits (was still "covered" by MS security "fixes" at that time) so gave a go to Opera. Well it took me a good 3-4 days to get used to it and I have never looked back since or felt I needed to look for something else. Version 10 is superb. And btw just like Firefox it has add-ons called Opera widgets, I am not using any of those though.

This post has been edited by eidenk: 05 August 2009 - 06:35 AM

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

Related article:
http://mashable.com/...04/ie6-no-more/

[BenoitRen]

"JustinStacey.x" said:

Most of what you can configure in Firefox is gratuitous.

You must not know about about:config.

"PC_LOAD_LETTER" said:

Sorry i wasnt too clear what i meant there. when i say "configurable with GPo" that has nothing to do with home users in my mind (yes i know about local GPo but that hardly counts) I use FF almost exclusively My home PCs & work PCs but on the PCs I manage, IE is MUCH easier to keep up to date and manage default settings with Group Policy Object received from the domain.

Ah, yes. That's one area that Firefox can improve in. There were some tools available for Mozilla (the suite), though.

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

wow i swear im not looking for these articles. they keep finding me. apparently this movement is picking up steam.
http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/913...et_switch_pitch

Quote

The anti-IE6 move followed reports last month that Google's YouTube was doing the same, that Digg would soon curtail support for the ancient browser and a petition on Twitter collected nearly 10,000 signatures supporting the effort. Facebook has been prompting IE6 users to swap out their browsers since February 2009.

[Fredledingue]

"BenoitRen" said:

"I" said:

There are very little CSS and even less Javascript code that woudln't work on IE6.

You are horribly wrong. Compare CSS support and DOM support between IE6 and other web browsers. If we look at just the summary, IE6 gets 51% for CSS2.1, while Firefox 3 gets 93%, and Opera 9 gets 94%. For DOM support, IE6 gets 50%, Firefox 2 gets 79% (FX3 is unknown), and Opera 9 gets 84%.

I was talking about IE6 vs IE7/8.
Codes uncompatible with IE7 or above have little use and and are largely unused, sometimes unkown. As the difference in compatibility between IE6 and IE7 is minimal, no one is stupid or ignorant for using IE6.
There is a 99% probability that a website would work reasonably well on IE6. The only reason they want want more "interactive" stuffs is advertising. Save for advertisements, the creation of a website is very simple.

"PC LOADER" said:

The anti-IE6 move followed reports last month that Google's YouTube was doing the same, that Digg would soon curtail support for the ancient browser and a petition on Twitter collected nearly 10,000 signatures supporting the effort. Facebook has been prompting IE6 users to swap out their browsers since February 2009.

It doesn't take 50% more coding time to support IE6. Just simplify the way you desing webpages.
Posting a comment on a blog is an activity that exists for more than 10 years. Why does it has to be all of a sudden not possible on IE6?

Not saying IE6 is the best browser or that poeple shouldn't upgrade, but lot of hubbub is being told about it IMO.

This post has been edited by Fredledingue: 09 August 2009 - 05:17 PM

[JustinStacey.x]

Slightly offtopic: I actually recently upgraded from Opera to Seamonkey. Although Seamonkey is dog slow at rendering pages compared to Opera, it doesn't suffer the numerous bugs (flash ads on pages invisibly moving when the page is scrolled so when you click somewhere inside that page (i.e., a text box) you actually click on the 'invisible' flash ad and get redirected somewhere; the 'save as' dialogue box not coming up after right clicking to save an item and the random lockups to 100% cpu uage) and reminds me of the old netscape 6 which is cool. What also makes me laugh about Opera, the browser with a supposed light footprint, was the memory usage totalling almost a GIGABYTE after around 3 weeks of being left open on my computer. Further to that it took 5 minutes of hard drive churning to shut the program down. I run plenty of other programs for that length of time that don't leak so much memory, so why should Opera? IE 7 and 8 are just as bad... but IE 6 is really too old to be of much use nowadays... sites are quickly becoming incompatible with it and tbh from the get go it's always been a bit weird although I do like how it resembles the earlier IE versions of the 90s.

If anyone is sick to their back teeth of the memory usages of many modern browsers I urge you all to try Seamonkey... furthermore, with the Quicklaunch feature turned on it can be launched quicker than any other browser I tried, and that's out of Opera, IE, Safari, Chrome, Firefox - it beats them all. Seamonkey is basically Netscape of the 21st century, btw.

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

In my earlier posts I was a little indifferent about IE6. My position has changed dramatically since my last post here. What has changed my position from 'Meh' to 'OFF WITH ITS HEAD!!' you ask? I wont bore you with the details but lets just say it involves me, a webpage Im paid to maintain, Virtualbox, IE6 and repeated use of the F-word and its friends.

I cant help but question my own sanity when i spend 5 minutes verifying that things work in FF/IE8/Chrome only to spend 10 minutes testing in IE6, 20 minutes locating and implementing the workaround when it inevitability renders wrong in IE6, then another half hour getting the page to render the way it was in FF/IE8/Chrome before the IE6 workaround code was added then another 8 hours trying to forget the pain in the a** that is righting code that degrades well to a browser that was replaced 3 years ago that for some reason people want to cling to even though there are far superior browsers out there.

Fredledingue, on Aug 9 2009, 06:10 PM, said:

"PC LOADER" said:

The anti-IE6 move followed reports last month that Google's YouTube was doing the same, that Digg would soon curtail support for the ancient browser and a petition on Twitter collected nearly 10,000 signatures supporting the effort. Facebook has been prompting IE6 users to swap out their browsers since February 2009.

thats a quote from the linked article not me -hench why i put it in quote tags (and thats not my handle either)

[Queue]

In my experience, usually all it takes to fix IE6 CSS rendering problems is:
margin-left: 6px !important;
margin-left: 3px;
where the numbers 6 and 3 aren't particularly important, just that there's a difference of 3 between them (since IE6 adds 3 pixels for no good reason and ignores the !important flag).

Queue

[CoffeeFiend]

Like BenoitRen said before, older versions of IE have really poor support for any modern standard (namely CSS2 and the DOM for IE6 -- before that? borked box model, no png alpha channel and TONS more). IE6 was OK when it came out, back in 2001 (compared to Netscape). But 8 years have passed and browsers have improved quite a bit. It directly makes web developers' and web designers' lives hell (like PC_LOAD_LETTER seems to have noticed), and it has real costs directly associated with it.

An old pic that's somewhat funny, but so very true (the red quarter shrank a lot since 2006 but that's about it):

I spend more time to get something to work with IE6, than it takes to design/build it in the first place (and make it work with all other browsers combined). Half my time wasted on this = double the development costs, because if IE6. There's a lot of ways to deal with that bast*** child that IE6 is: really fugly CSS hacks (which usually break with every new version of IE, and can make other browsers screw up), browser-specific style sheets (one for IE6, one for everything else), and conditional comments.

The sooner IE6 dies, the better. When it does, we can widely use features that it doesn't support (or keep using it without having to feed IE6 a separate, retarded style sheet so it kind of works), and also build web sites and apps a LOT quicker, which also means cheaper. Most of us would have better ways to spend that extra time and money than designing/developing for the absolute lowest common denominator (we'd also cut down on the swearing quite a bit too).

Millions of us are dreaming about this.

[Multibooter]

CoffeeFiend, on Aug 9 2009, 06:52 PM, said:

The sooner IE6 dies, the better. When it does, we can widely use features that it doesn't support... I spend more time to get something to work with IE6, than it takes to design/build it in the first place...

Maybe it's better not to program a website with so many good-looking features. Keep it simple. Adding fancy features to a website means a lot of self-inflicted pain.

The ultimate measure of the quality of a website is not how it looks, but how much traffic it gets. The ugly-looking www.drudgereport.com uses rather simple webcode and is one of the best websites there is:
VISITS TO DRUDGE 8/09/09
017,089,163 IN PAST 24 HOURS
673,202,344 IN PAST 31 DAYS
8,189,949,260 IN PAST YEAR

How many extra visitors will you get on your website by adding a fancy feature? Also, adding fancy features may decrease traffic by increasing browser incompatibility and thereby excluding older people who use older browsers. Fancy features should be used at sites specifically targeted at young audiences and at people who want to use the latest gadgets ("early innovators"). I prefer sites which display fine in Internet Explorer 5.5.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 09 August 2009 - 10:36 PM

[CoffeeFiend]

Multibooter, on Aug 10 2009, 12:34 AM, said:

Maybe it's better not to program a website with so many good-looking features.

So your suggestion, as a solution to IE6 sucking, is that we should make ugly looking websites?

Multibooter, on Aug 10 2009, 12:34 AM, said:

The ultimate measure of the quality of a website is not how it looks, but how much traffic it gets.

You're essentially saying that only content matters, not looks, but I believe most people would disagree and pick [X] give me both. The 2 aren't mutually exclusive.

By your way how measuring how good something is, then Google news, Yahoo news, AOL news, CNN news, NY times, MSNBC, Washington post, USA Today and several others are all far better (and interestingly enough, they also all look a LOT better too). Either ways, I'd say that's just a measure of popularity, not how good it is. I wouldn't call the music that sells the most the best music either.

Multibooter, on Aug 10 2009, 12:34 AM, said:

How many extra visitors will you get on your website by adding a fancy feature?

Is that supposed to be the only reason to make something look good? Most people like the eye candy, usability and so on.

It's easy for the most part too, it's only IE6 that makes it a pain, and it's only a matter of time before we drop support for it. As for pre-IE6 browsers, we long have stopped supporting those (it has accounted for 0% of our traffic for as long as I can remember).

[PC_LOAD_LETTER]

Multibooter, on Aug 9 2009, 11:34 PM, said:

How many extra visitors will you get on your website by adding a fancy feature?

My primary goal is not to drive traffic to our site. My goal is to assist my visitors while they are there. sometimes "fancy" features such as ability to navigate the page without obscure errors nagging my visitors while breaking my design are required.

Multibooter, on Aug 9 2009, 11:34 PM, said:

I prefer sites which display fine in Internet Explorer 5.5.

well if my sites display correctly in your browser great but if they dont, I wont be investing time in correcting the problem. I simply dont have the time. Here are the stats from the site i had the above problems with:

this is the breakdown of IE versions from May 1 to Today (IE accounts for 73% of our visitors):

7.0	66.47% 	
8.0	16.86% 	
6.0	16.64% 	
5.5	0.04%

5.5 is hardly worth worrying about and IE6 will fall into the same category likely by the end of the year.

The reality of Drudge report is they are nothing more than a link aggregator which relies on real websites to provide the content that keeps people coming to their site (which looks like a 5 year old threw it together in 10 minutes in frontpage) people often use the google main page as a example of minimalism success stories but google success is in their results not their main page. The people that pay me to maintain their site expect me to place a huge amount of content on the main page but still have things be easy to find. that and they hired me because their site looked like a 5 year old threw it together in 10 minutes in frontpage so i dont they theyd like it if i gave them a site that looked like drudge just to satisfy 0.04% of their visitors.

[Multibooter]

CoffeeFiend, on Aug 9 2009, 10:21 PM, said:

So your suggestion, as a solution to IE6 sucking, is that we should make ugly looking websites?

www.drudgereport.com isn't investing much in good looks.

Quote

You're essentially saying that only content matters, not looks, but I believe most people would disagree and pick [X] give me both. The 2 aren't mutually exclusive. By your way how measuring how good something is, then Google news, Yahoo news, AOL news, CNN news, NY times, MSNBC, Washington post, USA Today and several others are all far better.

It depends on the audience. "An ounze of image is worth a pound of performance" applies very often. I personally am more interested in content. My favorite news site for the past 12 months has been Xinhua http://www.chinaview...world/index.htm because of the content; it does look much nicer than www.drudgereport.com but I never mention to my wife how nice a website looks, only that something interesting was on such-and-such a website. But this is just one man's opinion, and I personally have not gone to the news sites you mentioned, in the last couple of years, except if linked from www.drudgereport.com The only other news sites I visit every day are http://www.elpais.com/global/ , http://www.nzz.ch/ and http://www.bloomberg...ml?Intro=intro3

Quote

I wouldn't call the music that sells the most the best music either.

I fully agree with you. A bestseller novel is not necessarily good literature, it just makes good money for the publisher and the author. But websites are an investment, and traffic is probably the most important objective of most owners of a website who employ a website programmer.

Quote

Most people like the eye candy, usability and so on.

Yes, nice to to have.

Quote

it's only IE6 that makes it a pain, and it's only a matter of time before we drop support for it. As for pre-IE6 browsers, we long have stopped supporting those (it has accounted for 0% of our traffic for as long as I can remember).

If a website looks good in an old browser, it probably also looks good in a new browser. Maybe by initially programming a website for an outdated browser like IE 5.5, even if it accounts for 0% traffic, you stay away from incompatible new features and may save yourself a lot of headaches. But somehow state-of-the-art bells and whistles are the pride of an up-to-date website programmer.

This post has been edited by Multibooter: 10 August 2009 - 05:05 AM

[rainyd]

Despite that we (Win9x users) are limited with browser choice, I agree with those who think that IE 6 should die.

I was never fan of IE and IMHO even in 2001, IE 6 wasn't a good browser.
Nowadays this is just terrible piece of software.

With help of KernelEx you can ran Firefox 3.5 (yesterday, I've tested pre 3.5.3) and without it SeaMonkey, Opera, K-Meleon, Flock (maybe something else).
If some security issues are not a problem there's also Firefox 2 (last version released on December 2008).

[Multibooter]

PC_LOAD_LETTER, on Aug 9 2009, 10:43 PM, said:

5.5 is hardly worth worrying about and IE6 will fall into the same category likely by the end of the year.

My main browsers are Opera 9 and Firefox 2, and I try to stay away from Internet Explorer for security reasons. I use IE 6.0 on my laptop and IE 5.5 on my desktop only if a site doesn't display right in Opera or Firefox.

I would program a website from the oldest browser up, not from the newest browser down. If you made IE 5.5 your lowest common denominator, you possibly would have less browser compatibility problems. But the extent of backward compatibility depends on the features essential to your website.

Quote

The reality of Drudge report is they are nothing more than a link aggregator which relies on real websites to provide the content that keeps people coming to their site (which looks like a 5 year old threw it together in 10 minutes in frontpage)

I disagree. The selection of the articles and their ranking/location on the page (headline, top, middle, or bottom) is the content of the drudgereport. When the drudgereport has 4 links for a topic it means the topic is red hot and a crisis is coming up (e.g. some time ago with Iran); when the number of links drops to 1 or 2 it means a situation (as seen by people with inside knowledge) is calming down.

[BenoitRen]

"Fredledingue" said:

I was talking about IE6 vs IE7/8.
Codes uncompatible with IE7 or above have little use and and are largely unused, sometimes unkown.

Have you ever made a website using CSS? Pseudo-selectors like first-child and last-child are very useful, as is the > selector. None of those are supported by IE6. They were also often unused, because IE6 still had a big market share, and you also had to support IE6.

The JavaScript DOM is very useful for little animations, interactive features, and web applications. Something as basic as getComputedStyle is not supported by IE6, and has to be worked around.

Quote

The only reason they want want more "interactive" stuffs is advertising. Save for advertisements, the creation of a website is very simple.

Utter nonsense. I've made interactive stuff, and none of it has been advertising. The same goes for many things. Websites aren't that simple anymore. Just google for complaints about CSS by people who don't understand it.

Quote

It doesn't take 50% more coding time to support IE6. Just simplify the way you desing webpages.

Bogging down the design is not a good proposition, and proof that IE6 isn't that good. Nevertheless, Phantasy Star Cave's main page is pretty simple 2 column design, yet I had to use a CSS hack to get it to render properly in IE6.

Another site of mine, SeaMonkey.be, doesn't render properly on IE6 because it doesn't support the CSS min-height property. And that's a very basic design.

Quote

Posting a comment on a blog is an activity that exists for more than 10 years. Why does it has to be all of a sudden not possible on IE6?

This is about much more than weblog posting, which is handled server-side.

I urge you to learn about web design instead of making wildly inaccurate statements.

"Multibooter" said:

Maybe it's better not to program a website with so many good-looking features. Keep it simple. Adding fancy features to a website means a lot of self-inflicted pain.

See above.

"Multibooter" said:

I prefer sites which display fine in Internet Explorer 5.5.

Good luck, because that had a wrong box model that could lead to serious rendering quirks.

Quote

But somehow state-of-the-art bells and whistles are the pride of an up-to-date website programmer.

Look, most CSS is not about bells and whistles. It's basic style information.