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MSFT: Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6

Posted at 11:40 am on March 4, 2011 / tagged: , , / comments closed

“Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer 6,” says Microsoft. The campaign is encouraging, but I still feel as if IE 6 market share will only continue to drop as machines are replaced, rather than awareness being raised to newer IEs or alternative browsers on existing installs, and it doesn’t end the issue of large corporations who shelled out millions for software that only works on IE 6.

  • Deane T Rimerman

    Friends don’t let friends use Internet Explorer at all!!!! If we all work together we can get IE users down to less than 10%, at which point we’ll no longer have to check our websites for IE oriented errors ever again!

    I can’t count how many hours I’ve spent chasing bugs on websites that IE has but Firefox & Chrome don’t. I’ve even been to websites where web designers have given up wasting their time entirely and simply post across the top of the website: “Warning this website doesn’t work in Internet Explorer”

    Down with IE in every imaginable way!!!

    The day the internet doesn’t get crippled by IE browsers is the day the internet will be truly free!!!

    • http://jaredwsmith.com Jared Smith

      I hear you Deane, completely. IE 9 is a great improvement, to be sure. MSFT is very much still in catchup mode — it’s hard to make up eight years of fast-paced standards progress in three releases (though not impossible, either). That being said, from a pure CSS standpoint I still feel like some of the omissions (no text-shadow, for example) are really striking when put up against the rest of the browser lineup.

      And, again, IE 9 is only a Vista and Windows 7 improvement. To encourage IE 6 users to go to IE 8 is only helpful in smoothing out the descent that IE’s marketshare has taken in the last three years. Mike Melanson tweeted this link last night: http://statichtml.com/2011/ie6-countdown-a-wolf-in-sheeps-clothing.html — it really sums up the situation well.

  • http://www.facebook.com/kungfuadam Adam Lorenz

    Friends don’t let friends use IE at all! Use Chrome! Use Firefox! I admit that our corporate extranet and my online school site work best on IE, but nothing else really that I use

    • http://jaredwsmith.com Jared Smith

      Time to petition the maintainers of those sites to get up to snuff on Web standards :)

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