Support for Internet Explorer 6 to cease at GCA

[caughtatwork]

Support for Internet Explorer 6 will cease at Geocaching Australia effectively immediately.

IE6 was released on August 27, 2001, nearly 9 years ago.

IE6 SP3 was released on April 21, 2008 along with Windows XP SP3. Windows XP SP3 will continue to be supported (extended) until 2014. Officially IE6 support may be retired as of 24 months after the last SP was released. This puts IE6 in an unsupported position as of mid-2010. It is possible that official support may continue beyond that point.

With the increasing lack of compatibility with modern web standards, many larger web-sites are starting to remove support for IE6, including YouTube, however with large company IT support teams forcing staff to use IE6 it is unlikely Microsoft will completely remove support for the aging browser any time in the near future. Microsoft have themselves, despite admitting to some of its many flaws, stated that they will support IE6 until Windows XP SP3 support is removed, meaning IE6 may be officially around until 2014, 13 years after its release

Support for IE6 from a web perspective is difficult to achieve, especially in terms of support for CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) layouts and design elements. The javascript engine in IE6 is also out of date and some recently utilised javascript functions will not work as expected.

A recent study of the browsing habits of Geocaching Australia indicate that use of IE6 is falling steadily in terms of page hits.
August 2009: 9.3%
September 2009: 7.9%
October 2009: 7.4%
November: 6.6%
December 2009: 6.0%
January 2010: 5.8%

As Geocaching Australia is developed and maintained by volunteers, we do not have the resources, time or technical environments to continue to develop and test specifically for IE6. This is the same for Netscape for which we stopped support some years ago.

Essentially we try to fully support the last two versions of major browsers. IE7 and IE8 are covered in our testing regime as is Firefox 2 and 3 and Chrome. Other browsers are tested as development environments allow. As the developers purchase and pay for their own development environments (i.e. GCA do not provide us with the thousands of dollars to buy, build and maintain our development machines, we pay for them ourselves) we are restricted in what we can effectively test for.

Over the last 6 months we have been testing less and less for IE6. Effective immediately we are no longer going to be testing the GCA website against IE6. Functions which no longer work under IE6 (such as some of our calls to the Google Maps) will not be in a position to be fixed.

We understand that some members use IE6 in work environments due to business not wanting to upgrade or having in-house systems that require the use of IE6. Regrettably we are no longer in a position where we are able to support your choice of browser.

Effectively immediately, we are officially no longer supporting Internet Explorer 6 or earlier. We apologise for any inconvenience this will cause.

[CraigRat]

Of course this doesn't mean you won't be able to use the site in IE6, it just means that if you find a feature (for example google maps) doesn't work and you log a support call, if you are using IE6 then we won't be engineering a workaround.

[rhinogeo]

A recent study of the browsing habits of Geocaching Australia indicate that use of IE6 is falling steadily in terms of page hits.
August 2009: 9.3%
September 2009: 7.9%
October 2009: 7.4%
November: 6.6%
December 2009: 6.0%
January 2010: 5.8%

Just for interest's sake ... what are the most recent figures on other browsers? Is Firefox more popular than IE?

[CraigRat]

IE still the most dominant over all:

• MS Internet Explorer 56.3 %
  Firefox 25.4 %
  Safari 8 %

This is from our webstats doover, and I think it's a little high on the IE side. Our old Google Analytics had is more like 45% for IE, 30% Firefox, and it's browser detection was better than awstats that we use, but it was slowing the site down too much to continue with it,

[rhinogeo]

Thanks CraigRat

SInce IE and Safari are default browsers it's impressive that ~25-30% choose to use FF

[CraigRat]

Thanks CraigRat

SInce IE and Safari are default browsers it's impressive that ~25-30% choose to use FF

And although its only at 2% right now, theres a noticeable shift occurring where Chrome based browsers are on the increase, I can see them (Chrome/Chromium/Iron etc) nipping at the heels of FF over then next year or two, unless they can extract some real performance increases in Firefox.

(I switched to Chromium last month and boy, it's quick!)

[caughtatwork]

Those stats, by the way, are for page view percentages.

So if one person with IE did 1000 page views vs. 500 people with FF who looked at 2 pages each you would get a 50/50 split.

In terms of USERS though the difference would be huge.

So it needs to be sad that 50% of our page views are from IE, not 50% of our user base use IE.

[Facitman]

... to be sad that 50% of our page views are from IE...

Freudian slip?

[CraigRat]

Also of note this week: Google are dropping IE6 support for their apps shortly.

If you are using a work PC and it's still on IE6, ask your IT guys why. And then ask them why their web app vendors haven't re-written their apps to support IE7 or above (7's been out for a few years now).....and if they say it's for security reasons, just laugh at them, and possibly point..... that is the reason my employer claims we have to use IE6 for!! Security!! (For the uninitiated, IE6 has had the most software exploits of any individual peice of software EVER, and has flaws in it still that are concerning)

[Renroc]

Thanks CraigRat

SInce IE and Safari are default browsers it's impressive that ~25-30% choose to use FF

And although its only at 2% right now, theres a noticeable shift occurring where Chrome based browsers are on the increase, I can see them (Chrome/Chromium/Iron etc) nipping at the heels of FF over then next year or two, unless they can extract some real performance increases in Firefox.

(I switched to Chromium last month and boy, it's quick!)

I switched to chrome a while ago and love it BUT it doesn't support send to GPS for my garmin. SO I have to go back to firefox to download caches.

[gmj3191]

I have used Chrome since it was released and have had no trouble downloading caches to my GPSMap 60CSX or my new Oregon 550.

I usually use GSAK to do bulk updates but single cache loads using the GC.com function work perfectly after you install the Garmin plugin.

[CraigRat]

I have used Chrome since it was released and have had no trouble downloading caches to my GPSMap 60CSX or my new Oregon 550.

Using the Send To GPS button on the caches page?

[gmj3191]

Yes

[Hoojar]

I switched to chrome a while ago and love it BUT it doesn't support send to GPS for my garmin. SO I have to go back to firefox to download caches.

I've been using Chrome since its release and have never had any issues using the send to GPS function.