Posts and Pages Tagged ‘IE6’

CSS3PIE/PIE.htc and https and IE6 Last updated:21 November 2012

Came across an interesting one last week using https on an Opencart installation. After implementing https I discovered that all the secure pages generated a warning in IE6: “This page contains both secure and insecure items”. I couldn’t work out why this was happening at all and ended up with a test page with virtually nothing on it still generating the error.

After some more messing about it became apparent that the error was being caused by the CSS3PIE code – specifically the use of a reference to url(about:blank) in the script. There’s more info here. The suggested solution is to replace a.backgroundImage="url(about:blank)" with a.backgroundImage="none" which seems to have done the trick for me. I was a little nervous about that replacement so have created a separate version of PIE.htc just for IE6, with no problems so far.

Posted here in case anyone else has the issue as it took me a while to find the solution.

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To IE6 or not IE6, that is the question… Last updated:28 October 2011

I have now officially moved my stance on IE6 support from “must support” to “not sure”. The last two companies I’ve worked in have had IE6 as the only browser available, and I’ve been heartily fed up with sites telling me I’m retarded and lazy for not upgrading. Consequently I’ve always been quite keen on things working in IE6, or at least degrading gracefully.

Only a fifth of one percent of visitors to this site used IE6 (and even some of those were me testing) – most of them from Russia, USA and the UK if you’re interested. Some of the other sites for which I have stats, that perhaps have a more general audience (for which read less geeky…) vary between 0 and 2%.

So logic says forget IE6, but not sure I’m quite ready yet. IE6 is a pain, but it’s not like it’s that much extra effort in most cases to tame it.

Just had a look at the Save IE6 Campaign’s website. Excellent.

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The lifespan of IE6 Last updated:29 October 2010

Read an interesting article this morning about the use of Internet Explorer. Specifically, the article suggests that now that IE8 is launched, users will migrate from IE7, but many who are still using IE6 will remain, to the point that IE6 will become more popular than IE7. Sound mad? Not really, because many corporate web applications were designed for IE6 when it was effectively the only browser available, and they won’t work with IE7. Larger companies tend to be intrinsically risk-averse anyway, upgrading a browser is low priority – my own experience certainly supports the argument.

A couple of sets of web stats highlight the issue. Looking at some stats from a large public sector website, 80% of visitors are using IE, of which 40% use IE6. This website will be frequently accessed by people at work. By contrast, one of the sites I run, which tends towards consumer usage, has only 60% IE users, of which only 15% use IE6

So the bad news is IE6 may live a lot longer than we might like…

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The joys of IE6 Last updated:29 October 2010

IE6 logo

Find myself in an interesting situation at the moment – enforced usage of IE6 at work. Good reasons for this of course, one application used in this organisation will only work with IE6. Quite a common situation.

What’s interesting is what doesn’t work in IE6 – including two websites for web design agencies I was looking at last week. One of these actually said that their site didn’t work in IE6 and told me to upgrade my browser (I can’t), and the other one just broke (badly) in IE6. Another different site I viewed on the same day used transparent pngs, which aren’t natively supported by IE6. Update: Found another two web design agencies whose pages break in IE6 this week – and these were New Media Age Top 100 agencies as well.

Although I use IE6 at home, I use it exclusively for testing websites I’ve built to make sure they’re OK, so don’t normally come across so many issues.

Personally, at the moment, much as I’d like to ignore IE6, I don’t think it’s acceptable to do so. Excluding people using IE6 from using your website is equivalent to saying, in UK terms, that it’s unavailable in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Or, in US terms, unavailable to most of the people in California.

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