Well, according to this site anyway.
SaveIE6.com was put together by the uptime monitoring service, Pingdom, as an April Fools prank. SaveIE6.com has these goals: 1. Get everyone to use Internet Explorer 6, 2. Get IE6 ported to more platforms, 3. Get the W3C standard changed to fit IE6. That’s hilarious. There’s even a petition to sign on the site with quotes from people mentioning how IE6 has changed their life.
To those who don’t get the joke, IE6 is a web browser that is a web designer’s constant nightmare. It doesn’t display code correctly, it doesn’t adhere to web standards, and there are security issues. Web designers will make pages that work fine in all the other browsers, but when tested with IE6, they don’t work. There is all kinds of hate out there for IE6, some of it very funny, like the treehouse illustration above. You may be asking, why are people just whining about this problem and doing nothing about it. Well, it’s a difficult problem to solve. The current global market share for IE6 is around 15 to 25 percent. That is a large number of people using an outdated browser, so web designers can’t ignore them. Many people bought a computer with IE6 and aren’t computer savy enough to update the browser. Some use computers in institutions that restrict computer updates. Others probably don’t see any need to update. Why fix what isn’t broken, anyway? If pages don’t display correctly, it’s not the browser’s fault to these users, it’s that website’s fault.
IE6 Update
There are a few ways to get people to upgrade. One is a little too sneaky in my opinion. IE6 Update disguises as the yellow drop down Internet Explorer information bar when it detects people are using IE6. It offers users a link to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer. All you have to do is download the code from the website and put it in whatever page you want the bar to display on.
I don’t like the idea of tricking users into upgrading, so I prefer Pushup which urges users to upgrade to the latest version of whatever major browser they are using (Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox or Opera) a little more nicely. It accomplishes this by displaying a yellow update button that sits in the upper right corner of the browser window for a certain amount of time and then fades away. Once again, you just download the code and put it in your pages. Very classy because it is subtle, and doesn’t annoy too easily, in my opinion.
