Enough Already, Stop Using IE6

As most of you know I run a little Facebook application called Mood Stones which attracts a wide variety of users. I rely heavily on alpha transparency in the PNGs I use and Internet Explorer 6, which doesn't do alpha transparency in PNGs, has been a thorn in my side for ages.

Earlier this year I added in a little bit of JavaScript which displays a small message telling IE6 users that they should upgrade and, while the percentage of IE6 users has dropped since then, there are still a lot of them.

In the first 3 months of 2008, 75.4% of Mood Stones users were running various flavours of IE with 28.4% of those running IE6 (21.4% of the total). Flash forward to the past 3 months (ending October) IE's overall usage has dropped to 67.4% of the total with 22.9% of those running IE6 (15.4% of the total). The usage stats on this blog are slightly different (more Firefox oriented) but still there are enough IE6 users to worry about.

I've wondered why those people running IE6 aren't up in arms because so many things on the internet would error or just plain not work with their browser of "choice". But then I had a support request at the weekend which shone a light on the situation.

One Mood Stones user said her stone image was over the top of the text on her Facebook profile. I immediately thought of IE6 and its total lack of CSS standards support and asked her which browser she was running. She said it was IE6 so I suggested she upgrade to IE7, Firefox or even Safari. I then got the following response:

"Hi Michael THANKS SO MUCH!! I upgraded to IE7 and it's working great now...so is everything else...lol...never realized how good some things on the internet were supposed to work!! thanks again!!"

At this point I had a moment of clarity and thought that perhaps most IE6 users don't realise there's something wrong with their browser and their the assumption is that the internet is inherently broken and most stuff just doesn't work. Well, if you're using IE6, the internet isn't broken, your browser is. It was released 7 years ago and you should get IE7 or Firefox or Safari or even Chrome... just get rid of IE6.

Where'd Firefox Go?

If you're like me and waited for the release version of Firefox 3 then you may be as pleasantly surprised as me with the new look of the browser. With this release the UI guys at Mozilla decided to do somethin "out there" and instead of making the browser look the same across all platforms (Windows Vista, Windows XP, Mac OSX and Linux) they made the browser look like it fits in with the platform. So when you're using Firefox 3 on Vista it looks like a Vista app, when you're using it on a Mac it looks like Mac software.

Alex Faaborg describes the changes and the reasons for them on his blog. I totally agree with Alex on the "jarring" sensation you get when loading up software that doesn't suit the environment (I'm looking at you Winamp!) so here's a pat on the back for the Firefox UI team. *pat pat*.

While I'm patting backs, here's another one (*pat*) for integrating the Add-ons browser into the Add-ons Manager rather than shooting you off to the Add-on webpage (Hey Vista Sidebar team, look at this!).