There’s been quite the noise on the internet that Microsoft would be supposedly forcing IE7 on customers via Windows Update. Ars dove into the issue, and hands out milk and cookies to everyone while explaining there’s nothing to worry about. “They key to understanding what’s happening in two weeks is WSUS. WSUS is not synonymous with Windows Update. WSUS is a management tool that works alongside Windows Update to allow IT admins to control how patches and updates are applied across a deployment. If you’re an IT shop, run WSUS and have it configured to install update rollups, then you’ll be getting IE7 that day. However, by default, WSUS is not set to automatically approve update roll-ups. Equally as important, users who aren’t in tightly managed business environments (e.g., most users) will not wake up to find that Internet Explorer has been installed on their Windows XP SP2 systems without their say-so. Fret not: Microsoft isn’t making you do it. They’re not making anyone do it, not even WSUS users.”
As a web designer/developer, I see no further need for IE6 on XP to be left in existence any longer. The only sites that break are those using stupid CSS hacks. Problems with CSS hacks could have easily been averted by using Conditional Comments (provided since at least IE5.5) which degrade gracefully on other browsers (they are standard HTML comments with some special stuff inside).
I will shed a tear of joy the day the last IE6 install bites the dust. I know this won’t happen for some time, as many still using pre-XP OS’s, such as 98SE and 2000.
IE8 will use IE6 and IE7 mode by default and if you want it to fallow standards you’ll have to add a microsoft meta tag to all your webpages so IE6 is forever
Not really. You can have IE8 to use standards mode without meta tag.
If you put HTML5 DOCTYPE in your page, IE8 will use IE8 standard mode. Good thing is, if you use this doctype, it will also switch IE7, Firefox, Opera, etc into standard mode.
i’m not going to use html5
i’m not going to use html5
You don’t use HTML5. You just use HTML5 DOCTYPE. Major browsers don’t really support HTML5 yet, specs aren’t even finalized. All of them do however recognize HTML5 DOCTYPE, and all of them go into standards mode when they see it.
i code is in xhtml and im not going back to 1990s html code
This is not about you. Majority of programmers use HTML. Certainly, if it’s good enough for John Resig (Mozilla Corp., jQuery) it is good enough for me.
For the rest of us, there’s no good reason to reject both suggested solutions:
1. Use HTML5’s <!DOCTYPE html> and be done with it. It will set ALL major browsers to standards mode (including IE8). No meta tag required.
2. You can add that meta tag to set IE8 into standards mode.
Anyway, it will be some time before IE8 gets any significant market share.
Edited 2008-01-25 21:59 UTC
I stopped designing for IE6 a couple of years ago. The way I look at it, a) I get paid the same either way, b) IE6 is a heap of junk and anyone still using it deserves to have stupid looking web pages.
So what? Just put the meta tag into your web pages and be done with it. It’s not as if your pages became non-standard with it.
While I agree that it is kind of absurd that Microsoft will force web designers to use a special meta tag just to have their pages rendered in standards mode, it is not as painful as some people say it is.
easier to just block the damn thing
Sure. Go ahead and block it on your personal website that no one visits. The rest of us that have to develop sites that get actual visitors will have to make the sites work in the major browsers.
Yeah, no hope of dumping IE7 in my compnany. It’s completely incompatible with all the intranet web apps that we use, and also with iNotes webmail.
In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if both IE7 and Vista, both get the cold shoulder forever, as our department looks forward to the release of IE8 and Windows 7.
I could sense why people would be annoyed,disturbed,pissed off,(insert any other anger management emotion here) about this.
At my workplace they replaced the desktops with XP and expecting IE6 , version 7 was dumped into our laps without warning.To say the least it was a shock and a little difficult to use at first but now its ok.
Personally I have not yet let it install on my home computer, since I use Firefox. That does make me wonder though: since the IE rendering engine is used in more than ‘just’ IE (often, forced), perhaps I should install IE7 + updates anyway… is that ‘safer’ somehow?
At work it was total confusion for a lot of people… 95% of them still aren’t using Tabs even after I showed them how to. Personally I prefer it slightly over IE6, but still use FF whenever possible; from web pages to help files to file management (one in a dark moon).
At one of the corporate, medium/large websites I manage, nearly 16% of visitors are Firefox users; the number is perhaps even higher since nearly 4% are reported as ‘Netscape’.
IE has about 77,5%. I still remember when it was up there at 93% a couple of years ago.
Compared to the year before, IE grew 8%, Firefox 37,5%, Netscape 93% , Safari 55% and Opera 24,5% . Of course that’s for a particular website and country, but I reckon those trends are more or less representative, i.e. the trend that all other ‘alternative’ browser families grow faster than the IE family. For more scientific results, there are studies out there.
That all to say that IE7 probably has made less of an impact than MS hoped it would.
If you don’t actually use IE directly, you’re better off installing IE 7 and keeping it up to date than sticking with IE 6.
The ideal would be the ability to uninstall both of them, but that ain’t gonna happen soon.
The only people who really need the horrible kludge of a web browser that is IE 6 are people who have specific corporate apps that won’t work without it—the solution to that would be for Microsoft to officially sanction something along the lines of MultipleIEs (which is a wonderful, wonderful hack), rather than delaying the inevitable.
The amount of time spent writing IE6-specific CSS and Javascript on any reasonably complex standards-compliant site is immense. The same cannot be said (thankfully) for IE7 most of the time, though it itself isn’t quite up to scratch.