I’m not entirely sure I would prefer mobile Safari on an iPhone over MSIE6 on PC, but that might have more to do with the screen size and the lack of a keyboard than anything else. Anyway, this is a powerful slogan if you’re in telecom, so I’m printing 10 of these as we speak. I might even try to put one up against the wall of our CTO’s office. 🙂
As posts about how bad we want msie6 to disappear are the latest craze; This morning I implemented “IE6 update” on this blog. This little piece of javascript displays an official looking information bar that encourages them to upgrade and links to the official MS IE8 website. Maybe this is on the edge of what is ethical, because we’re actually faking an official browser-message, trying to trick users in clicking that link. And maybe they can’t install IE7 or 8 (or another browser) because they don’t have administrator-rights. But if users aren’t aware of the problem their ancient browser creates, they won’t bug their IT-staff now will they?
Last week colleagues of mine had a problem with an e-mail newsletter they wanted to send out; everything worked OK in Firefox and IE 7, but MSIE 6 displayed the wrong part of the page. The setup was pretty basic; the URL in the newsletter pointed to the servers of the mailinglist-provider, where each request got logged and the browser was redirected (with a http 302 status-code and Location in the http response-header) to the target URL on one of our servers. That target URL contained an anchor to have the browser to display a specific tab on the page thanks to some jQuery-magic, which worked perfectly in Internet Explorer 6 in a non-redirect scenario. The problem seemed as simple as it was annoying; MSIE 6 dropped everything starting with the ‘#’ from the URL when performing a redirect. Google pointed me to some sites that claimed that adding an ampersand should solve this, but that did not work. I made a little PHP-script to test with different encoding-tricks, but that did not work. So that old fart of a browser indeed did not support anchors in redirect-URL’s and that’s what I told the colleagues last Thursday. Yesterday I started writing this post, thinking it was a great time to demand the death of the piece of junk that Microsoft unleashed on us back in 2001 and which, believe it or not, still has 16,94% market share. So I replaced the company-specific address in the php-script with the URL of the wikipedia-page about anchors and … it just worked, even in MSIE 6! And then I remembered getting that silly popup in MSIE 6, warning me that “The current website is trying to open a site in your Trusted sites list”. Apparently the ugly bugger does not only ask you if he can redirect, but also eats the anchor in target-URL’s that are in your Trusted sites. So dear colleagues, in case you’re reading this; you can send out that newsletter now, it’ll work for everyone except for those who are silly enough to use MSIE 6 with our site in their “Trusted sites”-list. And let’s not forget; MSIE 6 must die is dead!
Een paar dagen geleden nog eens flink gefoeterd op Microsoft Internet Exporer 6. Ik moet eerlijk zijn; ik ben slechts een html- en css-amateurken, maar ik wilde in mijn eigen versie van het WordPress Indigo theme (dat ik ooit trots Greendigo zal dopen) het 2de niveau van het pagina-menu persé uitklapbaar maken. Beetje gezocht, wat copy/pasten, een paar wijzigingen links en rechts en ik had een leuke oplossing, volledig in css. Joepie! Juich! Jeuij! Maar dat was dus buiten MSIE6 gerekend. Dat onding uit 2001 ondersteund :hover enkel op links, terwijl dat volgens de css2-standaard (toch ook al uit 1998) op alle html-elementen kan. Terug de Google index ingedoken om daar -naast heel wat complexe behavior-magic en natuurlijk het alomtegenwoordige jQuery– het kleine maar fijne Son of Suckerfish te vinden. Works like a charm! Dat jQuery tegenwoordig standaard in WordPress zit, besef ik nu pas, al schrijvende. Misschien Suckerfish er toch terug uit en de jQuery-oplossing in de plaats, één dezer dagen? Maar het is ontstellend om te zien hoe hoog het marktaandeel van MSIE 6 één jaar na de release van IE7 toch nog blijft. Generaliserend kun je uitgaan van 45% van die kaduke versie tegenover 35% voor de opvolger en 15% voor Firefox. Waarom IE6 nog gebruik wordt? Beats me … Misschien kunnen de mensen die dit lezen in MSIE6 dat beantwoorden?
