
The IE6 Equation - ctingom
http://24ways.org/2008/the-ie6-equation
======
lowkey
Why I love my Mac, hate web development, and learned to loathe IE6
<http://tinyurl.com/5skq8x> (screenshots of our website)

I am an entrepreneur and a bit of a python hacker but am new to web
development as a craft. It was a skill developed from the necessity of a self-
funded startup I co-founded.

Wasn't the web supposed to be accessible to all? WTF was Microsoft thinking
when they came out with that stinking piece of turd called IE6 and why haven't
they killed the beast by now? Instead of killing a plague like IE6 they are
killing a solid operating system called Windows XP to be replaced by another
Windows Vista ME (at least that's what it feels like).

Sorry for the rant but it's late and I don't like web browsers anymore.

~~~
halo
I don't want to interrupt the cliche fanboy hatefest, but when IE6 came out
way back in 2001, it was by far the most standards compliant browser out
there, and much better than the dying outdated Netscape in terms of feature-
completeness. They did not update it for several years while there was little
competition. Many of the features taken for granted in modern web development
are proprietary Microsoft extensions - InnerHTML and Ajax both come to mind.

It's funny you criticise Vista when the reason that you still have to develop
for IE6 is because of the huge unprecedented success of XP. IE6 has been the
XP browser since it came out. The fact is that if Vista had been a bigger
success, an OS that ships with IE7, IE6 would be less of an issue. The
"plague" was actually caused by what you praise in the next sentence. They're
unlikely to stop supporting IE6 until they stop supporting updates to XP since
it's XP's default browser.

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thomasmallen
> Fingers are crossed, prayers are muttered, but alas, to no avail. The
> nemesis browser invariably screws something up.

I must be doing something right, because while there's usually something to
fix, it seldom takes more than a few minutes (in my experience building
templates over the past few years). Recently, the nastiest bugs I find are in
IE7. They defy classification...there's some weird voodoo going on in that
browser.

~~~
josefresco
Same here, IE6 debugging only takes a few minutes. The PNG transparency issue
being the most annoying (but a simple fix)

I think most of the IE6 hate articles out there are from new web developers or
from coders who rely too heavily on complicated CSS which makes debugging
utter hell.

~~~
thomasmallen
Yep. See, I'm from the days when IE6 was just fine, and we all loathed
IE5.5/Mac (and weird proprietary Netscape stuff). My first HTML and CSS books
listed compatibility issues for every browser for every technique. This was
expected knowledge.

For me, as a designer, the lack of alpha transparency support is annoying
indeed, but it's pretty rare that a design absolutely requires true alpha
transparency. Usually you can ape it during slicing, unless the "below"
elements move, in which case I'll look to SuperSleight and what not.

------
dmix
I think the big question is whether or not Windows 7 will be any good. XP is
still very popular which means a large percentage are using the stock IE. If
the next release gets widespread adoption (or fuels the Apple fire) then
hopefully IE6 will be on its way out.

Has any tried using that JS file in production? Recommended?

~~~
ROFISH
I think that XP will be supported for a very long time. A lot of people,
including myself, have jumped onto the Apple bandwagon and only use XP for
those few programs, including IE6 and various arrays of games, via Boot Camp
or some sort of virtualization. Unless Microsoft will actually let me dumb
down Windows 7 for the bare minimum for even lower levels of boot time, memory
usage, etc, I probably will stick with XP for my dual boot.

But the problem at hand isn't people using IE6 at home, there's a lot of
companies that will not allow upgrades to even IE7. Somebody, either Mozilla,
Google, whatever, needs to implement the features enterprise values most, and
then advertise the hell out of it.

There's a business idea for somebody willing to take it: Enterprise Browsers.
They pay you for support, updates, and insurance that their legacy apps still
work. If, for any reason at all, many PHBs see free as 'cheap, inefficient,
and worthless'.

~~~
arebop
Those Enterprise intranet apps are very often dependent on IE6 bugs. Yes, some
admins are also concerned about ease of SMS or WUS deployment, or central
control over preferences such as proxy settings and the home page, but bug-
compatibility with MSIE6 is probably more important and certainly (much)
harder to implement.

I think the cheapest way to run an IE6 application will be to keep using IE6,
for as long as Microsoft is willing to collect the license revenue on WinXP or
whatever.

~~~
thwarted
I can't believe there are still people (not necessarily you, arebop) who think
pushing _proxy settings_ to clients is somehow good from a security
standpoint. If you really want to control or log what people are doing through
your network, you have to FORCE them to go through a proxy, and the only way
to do that is with a firewall and with a transparent proxy, not by putting
configuration on a piece of hardware that someone else, the user, has physical
access to and uses day in and day out.

------
mixmax
This guy obviously is a designer and doesn't do math for a living... Why is
the equation built like that? Why is it logarithmic? What are "large" values
of P.

The idea is good but the implementation is terrible.

