Save IE6

by yannickmahe • 15 years ago

215 72 15 years ago

flexterra• 15 years ago

I can't believe that 2,047 signed the petition

erickhill• 15 years ago

In tiny text in the page footer it reads, "The SaveIE6 campaign was launched on April 1, 2009 and will last until April 1, 2010."

Something tells me 2K names captured across an entire year will not convince MS to change course with their own http://ie6countdown.com/

grumpybaglady• 15 years ago

April 1st.

Something tells me no ones trying to get anyone to change their minds.

nollidge• 15 years ago

And the text in the yellow box in the middle of the page says "SaveIE6.com was put together as an April Fool’s joke".

Semiapies• 15 years ago

Those people were probably laughing as they did so.

mikerhoads• 15 years ago

Viral marketing via satire!

drzaiusapelord• 15 years ago

The best thing about that site is that if you visit it using IE6 you get a script error.

db42• 15 years ago

So, you actually use IE6 ? :P

daleharvey• 15 years ago

I got a real scare when I seen this and it wasnt immediately obvious it was a joke, phew

MrMatters• 15 years ago

> I love how you can only open one tab at a time, thus focusing your efforts. Multi-tab browsing is the devil!

Just seeing someone refer to IE6 as "tabbed", albeit single-tabbed, made me realize how far we've come.

wipt• 15 years ago

I recall a friend who advocated "tabs" with IE6. He seriously used it that way, too.

mangirdas• 15 years ago

To be or not to be :)

thefox• 15 years ago

Why ppl vote for that on HN?

yinhm• 15 years ago

You should click to download it!

jrwoodruff2• 15 years ago

I think that was the funniest part of the site, thank you for pointing it out. I was afraid it might actually download IE6 at first...

sunilmohanty• 15 years ago

Same here... that was the best part...

Peppar• 15 years ago

Try downloading it

joshmanders2• 15 years ago

I love it!

joshmanders2• 15 years ago

Given negative for liking something satirical, I LOVE IT!

nakkiel3• 15 years ago

Mind if I upvote that one?

dstein2• 15 years ago

As far as I can tell there's no reason to get rid of IE6 unless you're going to also eliminate IE 7 and 8. Aside from CSS differences they are largely equivalent. Even IE9 doesn't support websockets or even half the HTML5 features of any other modern browser so for a modern web app you still need to drop IE support anyways.

melling• 15 years ago

One less browser to tweak and test. If you look at the numbers, IE7 is going away fast. That leaves IE8 and IE9.

I think writing for a cross section of IE9, and the more modern browsers (FF,Chrome, Opera), and some specialized code for IE8 where necessary, is a big improvement.

DrJokepu• 15 years ago

I have to disagree.

While IE7 (or IE8 for that matter) is clearly very far from being perfect, it's massively superior to IE6. Not just "CSS differences". I mean IE7 fixed bugs like select elements being always on top or the URL fragment (the #hash part) being submitted to the HTTP server as part of the URL. These issues are major pains in the back. Supporting IE7 is an awful lot easier than supporting IE6.

dstein2• 15 years ago

The things you have mentioned are rather trivial in the overall picture and really not a good enough reason to support IE7 but not IE6. The JavaScript engines are nearly identical and the broad set of technologies are the same.

For example, I consider not supporting SVG 10 years after standarization a major probleam. And only IE9 addressed that issue.

rimantas• 15 years ago

  Aside from CSS differences they are largely equivalent.

Sounds like "the biggest pains aside they are largely equivalent".

markkanof• 15 years ago

Also, JavaScript performance has improved in the newer versions of IE. I just ran into a situation where some DOM manipulation using jQuery was taking 35 seconds to complete in IE6, but took less than a second in IE8.

I ended up spending about four hours coming up with a bunch of optimizations that made it perform acceptably in IE6. I suppose you could argue that optimized code is a good thing, but personally I would have rather have spend that time working on something else.

iM8t• 15 years ago

Haha, what an amazing joke. Felt for it.

acconrad• 15 years ago

The only way this could be funnier is if everything was misaligned and padded funny, or objects were cutoff from the IE6 quirky box model.

khatarnaak2• 15 years ago

The worst part of this is the comparison with other browsers. http://saveie6.com/compare.php

This is just silly thing people can think of.

tomkarlo• 15 years ago

The worst part of this is folks who don't get the joke.

grimoire• 15 years ago

Pretty sure that is the best part.

khatarnaak2• 15 years ago

Oops i have taken this as a serious note!!!! :)... If we see fun aspect of this article then comparison is the BEST part of this article.....

Bud• 15 years ago

My favorite bits were:

"Get the W3C standard changed to fit IE6" (listed as a goal of the site)

"Places Internet icon on desktop (blue e)" (listed as an IE6 feature)

"No need to install (it’s there already)" (another feature)

"Highly secure (has received lots of security updates)"

PostOnce• 15 years ago

What about "Toby Tablerow, SaveIE6 founder"

Tablerow, heh.

dexen• 15 years ago

> "Get the W3C standard changed to fit IE6" (listed as a goal of the site)

Please correct me if I got it wrong, but it seems HTML 5 is a bit similar -- ``let's make a list of features our sponsors support''. Only the sponsor base is wider.

jk215• 15 years ago

haha awesome.

joakin• 15 years ago

I just hope that nobody takes this seriously...

dasil003• 15 years ago

As far as I'm concerned, this site is like joking about nazis with holocaust survivors.

calebmpeterson• 15 years ago

Perhaps a bit too much hyperbole here...

Gunkertyjeb• 15 years ago

Is this some sort of dark joke? If so, Too soon.

yread• 15 years ago

The SaveIE6 campaign was launched on April 1, 2009 and will last until April 1, 2010. A site from the geeks at Pingdom.

it's running a lot longer than it was meant to be. Just like IE6

ahlatimer• 15 years ago

SaveIE6.com was put together as an April Fool’s joke by the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. Due to the tremendous interest it has received we have decided to keep this site up and running. Thanks everyone for the great feedback and for enjoying the irony!

I guess they just didn't remove the conflicting text in their footer.

kloc• 15 years ago

I can just hope that this site renders fine on IE6.

jfaucett• 15 years ago

Oooo... Its the Big One... You hear that Elizabeth... I'm comin' to you, I'm comin' home to Georgia

bromley• 15 years ago

I was finding it hilarious until I got to:

"SaveIE6.com was put together as an April Fool’s joke by the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. Due to the tremendous interest it has received we have decided to keep this site up and running. Thanks everyone for the great feedback and for enjoying the irony!"

Perhaps it's because I'm British (we Brits can be a little particular about humour, especially irony), but I don't think a joke like that should explicitly identify itself as such.

yannickmahe3• 15 years ago

I'd agree but reading this comment thread shows a lot of people don't get that it is a joke.

jrwoodruff2• 15 years ago

Which really makes it that much more funny.

derleth• 15 years ago

> I don't think a joke like that should explicitly identify itself as such.

Ideally, you'd be right. The problem is that so many people also don't think a joke should explicitly identify itself by being funny.

diamondhead• 15 years ago

Seriously, it's better than both IE7 and IE8.

necro2• 15 years ago

So IE6 still accounts for about 1 million monthly page views on our site...about 1.5% of the traffic. Yesterday we took the plunge and decided to display an eyesore of a box on every page on our site if you surf to it with ie6.

Example of message: http://www.pinkbike.com/photo/6305769/

Imagine if many sites did this to spur the upgrade process. I'm really curious to see the results of this...will traffic plunge by 1.5% or will the usage of ie6 switch to other browsers. Note: no ie9 upgrade choice.

yannickmahe3• 15 years ago

I'm not sure it really will change anything. The assumption is that people with IE6 chose it and can change it which is often not the case (corporate users with a strict IE6 policy notably).

It's reasonable to expect that your users will stay, and the browser repartition will follow the same curves it did before.

necro2• 15 years ago

That is a possibility for sure. Since pb is a younger audience my gut feel is that there are a lot of users who are simply clueless about what browser they are using and just don't know better. Whether they do anything about is another story.

nakkiel3• 15 years ago

Well, this is 2011. That sort of policy just isn't in application anymore. Because companies with policies are companies with upgrade policies as well.

citricsquid• 15 years ago

Interesting, we have similar numbers. 1.03% on one site and 1.70% on another, totalling ~3m page views.

gscott• 15 years ago

A lot of sites are doing that, I seem them all of the time while browsing around.

njharman• 15 years ago

Wow! Digg level posting on HN, thought that was at least a six+ months off.

mncolinlee• 15 years ago

I laughed out loud... "You have been mislead by a vocal minority and are using opera, which is clearly an inferior web browser to IE6. Please switch to IE6 and sign our petition."

zopticity• 15 years ago

You have been mislead by a vocal minority and are using chrome, which is clearly an inferior web browser to IE6. Please switch to IE6 and sign our petition.

Stormbringer• 15 years ago

"You have been mislead by a vocal minority and are using msie, which is clearly an inferior web browser to IE6. Please switch to IE6 and sign our petition."

dillon• 15 years ago

I love how they have all of those quotes of people who use IE6... they all sound like idiots.

te_chris• 15 years ago

My favourite part of the site is at the bottom where there's the "Latest tweets about Save IE6" section and it's empty.

marbletiles• 15 years ago

No IE5 Mac, no credibility

jawee• 15 years ago

Has anyone tried browsing with IE6 lately? At the time, everything was probably compatible with it.. but my school still uses IE6 and I am finding more and more common web pages are broken by it. At this point, it probably serves more as a content filter than anything.

jrubyer• 15 years ago

Is the browser render speed actually true? http://saveie6.com/compare.php

O_o

rworth• 15 years ago

Geek irony. We like!

idleworx• 15 years ago

"They may take away our internets, but they can't ever take away our IIIIIEEEEEEEE666666666 .... " -braveheart

Save IE6

Related Stories