Facebook to kill IE6 support for Chat on IE9 beta day

[DaBees-Knees]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/08/facebook-to-kill-ie6-support-for-chat.ars

Again not a P2P article, but it will be of interest to some.

Facebook has announced that it will soon end Internet Explorer 6 support for Facebook Chat. The kill date is September 15—the same day Microsoft plans to release the first IE9 beta. Today's announcement comes just a week after Microsoft launched a beta version of Windows Live Messenger that integrates with Facebook Chat.

Facebook explains its decision by saying that many users have complained about unstable chat sessions, or ones that stop completely. In order to improve the way connections are established and messages are sent, however, the social networking giant must make changes that aren't supported by older browsers.

Microsoft plans to support IE6 along with Windows XP until April 2014; the software giant insists that "dropping support for IE6 is not an option." Instead, the company has resorted to marketing and promoting IE8 while criticizing IE6.

Meanwhile, a growing number of technology firms have taken the problem into their own hands. The IE6 hater is Google: the company has killed off support for the obsolete browser in Google Docs and Google Sites, Gmail and Google Calendar, as well as YouTube. Even Microsoft has taken some baby steps in this direction; the new Office Web Apps don't support the browser either.

Facebook's decision is reason for IE6 haters to celebrate, but unfortunately it's not going to spell doom for the ancient browser. The majority of IE6 users come from the corporate world, and as we've discussed before, one of the reasons that world keeps IE6 around is exactly because it doesn't work well with social networking sites like Facebook. Facebook's changes may mean fewer IE6 users using the chat feature, but this won't be because the change will spur people into upgrading—they can't upgrade their office machines. It will be because they won't be able to chat at all.

Last month, IE6 had a usage share of just under 17 percent; at the start of the year it had just over 20 percent. Major sites putting an end to IE6 support for popular features is not enough to kill the browser, but the rapid growth of Windows 7 should make slow but steady progress in eradicating it from the Internet.

As someone who dislikes Facebook, and I am not rushing to Windows 7 either. This won't boither me.  

[Bieb]

Glad to see some more pushes to get people moving along with the ever evolving technology.

[GhostShip]

It seems the height of stupidity to lose over half of your userbase with a forced downgrade but it seems they are a bit slow over at falsebook and need to learn the hard way.

"Moving along" may make MS and other greedy folks plenty of money but it wont mean anything better for consumers ...just different.

[Max™]

well you dont have to have Windows 7 and use IE9

Firefox was voted the best browser, it works great on Windows XP,

if it aint broke, dont try to fix it

[GhostShip]

I dont like firefox, I prefer the sawn off version ice weazel if I,m forced to use another browser.

[White Stripes]

@GS; humor me, http://kmeleon.sourceforge.net (the ui can be made to look like IE4 if you want.... and its uber-lite)

[Bieb]

I completely disagree with you ghostship. IE7, 8, and 9 have all been step forwards. Same with Firefox paving the way to break the monopolization of web browsers. We have chrome, firefox, opera, safari, and it goes on and on. All which actually support web standards the way they're supposed be... unlike internet explorer.

I know people see windows 7 as bloatware but I was the same way before I started using it. Sure if your hardware is from back in the day you wont have the same experience. But the target consumer are those that upgrade every other year or so and have the hardware that can power the new operating systems.  There will always be those that hold out but there is no getting around the majority like new stuff.


Also:  I remember in a recent thread you said you still use Internet Explorer 6. How can you live without tabs..

[Pri]

If you use IE6 you are part of the problem that is holding the web back. And I refute your claim about new browser releases make parent companies richer when the browsers are free. Opera, Chrome, Safari, Firefox and IE 8 are all free downloads and users should be updating not just for standards compliance but for security and performance enhancements.

The fact is that every other browser I just listed renders faster than IE 6.

I'm trying to write web-apps which work across browsers and I am continually having to add extra code and duplicate nearly all my work to support IE 6. Something I won't be doing much longer. And I don't think that 50% of users on Facebook will leave just because they can't use the chat function anymore. Because it never worked right on IE6 anyway and the website can still be browsed and used on IE6, the chat thing is just a single part of the site.

[White Stripes]

How can you live without tabs.

the 'way back when' method was to use a combination of the taskbar and 'open in new window' as 'tabs' .... it was ugly... but it worked... (remember; netscape 3 & 4 didnt have tabs either... opera was the browser that started that and it wasnt free back then...)

@pri; http://code.google.com/p/ie7-js/ (this thing is slow but works surprisingly well... ...you dont have to do everything twice when using it... just code to the standards and include the .js file in conditional comments...)

* Silver Stripes still wishes IE could be completely uninstalled....

[Pri]

I'm aware of that project stripes but unfortunately it has a lot of bugs and in my usage although it fixes a lot of bugs it also creates new ones.

There is no perfect 'drop in' solution to the IE6 problem except to get users to update to a compliant browser. Least we forget IE6 is 10 years old the web has come a long way since then and that browser just isn't designed for the current web.

[White Stripes]

I'm aware of that project stripes but unfortunately it has a lot of bugs and in my usage although it fixes a lot of bugs it also creates new ones.

damn ... well ... cant blame a guy for tryin'

Least we forget IE6 is 10 years old

position:very broken

lol... i know... its one reason i made mention of netscape 3 and 4 when the lion cub wanted to know how GS got along without tabs

...i kinda miss good ol netscape 3...

[GhostShip]

Tbh my browser requirements are rather spartan, I hate tabs, I want a simple back button at the top and I,m not interested in clicking fancy icons that mean nothing to find out what they are if you are saying such things are improvements then your pretty lost in convincing me.

I,m still using ie6 and it still works despite folks bemoaning that they have to do lots of work to keep it rolling funnily enough 95% of the sites i visit seem to have no problems with it and those that do break it out of spite.

[White Stripes]

nothings wrong with the UI of IE6 its - its rendering engine (the stuff under the hood... behind the dash...) thats driving webdevs nuts....

the newer versions of IE when installed on an XP machine should have kept the IE6-esce UI to blend in with the rest of the system.... (IE7 and IE8 are the ugliest damn browsers ive ever seen) ... thats where MS made its big boo boo....


but as far as banking, bill paying, shopping (amazon.com et al.) the wikipedia, blogs (some blogs may have layout bugs but should still be perfectly readable... called 'gracefull failure'... esp if they value their content over the look), other information/reference sites .... yes, you should be fine as frog hair till 2014 when security patches for 6 (and xp sp3 itself) arent released anymore...

but sites where the webdev wants to at a touch of 'modern art' to the design it will break... and ofcourse ajax sites will be 'hit or miss'.... ...with more 'miss' as time goes on...


www.acidtests.org (the second test breaks in earlier versions of firefox so not all sites 'break' things out of spite)

[Max™]

I tested IE7 when it first come out,
i found that it slowed my boot-up time adding a minute or two to the time it took,
then i noticed IE7 had a start on boot and to sit there as a running process but not with a window open,
i didnt like it running in the background when i didnt have a window open, so disabled the start on boot and my boot-up was a little quicker, but not as quick as it was,
but on using it, i didnt like it, when i uninstalled it, wow my boot-up time was back to where it was, faster without IE7.

conclusion... i wont use it, im not even going to test IE8

[White Stripes]

IE8 rendered text really funky for me so i reverted to IE6 too... tho i use another browser and let ie6 idle (since it cant be removed without breaking half or more of the apps on the system)

[DaBees-Knees]

"The target consumer are those that upgrade every other year or so and have the hardware that can power the new operating systems"

Simba,
           That's the problem. They think we all want to, or can afford to, update our software and hardware every couple of years even if it's working perfectly ok.

[Pri]

"The target consumer are those that upgrade every other year or so and have the hardware that can power the new operating systems"

Simba,
           That's the problem. They think we all want to, or can afford to, update our software and hardware every couple of years even if it's working perfectly ok.

That is innovation mate. If you want to use websites that are created by other people then you can't expect them to focus on the lowest possible denominator. Sites these days are evolving from just basic pages where you enjoy passive content to sites that offer entire applications (Google Maps is a great example of an in-browser application) and these things simply take more processing power.

At the moment you sound like a Stable Master with a horse who is feeling saddened that Cars are showing up on the road and that the minimum road speed is being increased beyond your horses capability. You can say hey not all of us have the means to upgrade from horses to cars but if you want to use the roads you gotta upgrade.

And really Firefox doesn't take that much processing power in general. Most of these newer browsers (especially chrome) render faster than IE 6 even on dated hardware. RAM usage has got higher I'll give you that but so has the complexity present in the webpages being rendered, and hey we all have swap space right ?

[Bluey_412]

1: IE 6/7/8/9/10... Yes it's free, like all the others, but hot-damn, just try getting IE8 or later  if you run a dodgy copy of windows...

2: The comment about Windows 7 being bloatware: Actually nowhere near as bad as Vista, Win 7 will actually run on hardware that makes Vista installs fail...

3: I happen to like IE8

4: Sad that so much of the faster rendering etc that Pri et-al refer to is wasted on ads

5: I hate ads, especially the kind that momentarily enlarge, or follow you down as you scroll... Yahoo pisses me off with them when trying to read a news page

6: Did I say I Hate Ads?

[Pri]

 Adblock. There are versions of it for Chrome, Safari and Firefox. And for IE well I dunno, no one should be using IE anyway haha

[DaBees-Knees]

Pri,
      Much as there are some improvements to software and hardware from year to year, what attracts users to update is when a point is reached when a perceived significant leap forward can be seen by the user. Companies and software writers have a different agenda. They are constantly striving to improve their wares and generate additional money. The amount that these improvements are to a users benefit and demand an upgrade is often questionable.