You are all invited by a Denver Web design firm who will be holding a tongue-in-cheek funeral for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6 on March 4 to celebrate the aged browser’s decline.

Aten Design Group Inc. announced IE6’s funeral on Monday with a site, IE6funeral.com, that offered a short obituary and an invitation to a wake.

“Internet Explorer Six, resident of the interwebs for over 8 years, died the morning of March 1, 2010, in Mountain View, California, as a result of a workplace injury sustained at the headquarters of Google, Inc.,” the obit read. “Internet Explorer Six, known to friends and family as ‘IE6,’ is survived by son Internet Explorer Seven, and grand-daughter Internet Explorer Eight.”

The Google and March 1 references come from the search giant’s recent announcement that it would drop IE6 from the list of supported browsers for its Google Docs online applications and its Google Sites hosting services starting on Monday, March 1. Yesterday, Google’s popular video site YouTube named March 13 as the end-of-support date for IE6.

“We thought it would be funny to do an IE6 funeral,” said Justin Toupin, Aten Design’s founder and creative director, in an interview. “It’s a humorous spin on a browser that a lot of us have loved to hate for a long time. We’re just saying that it’s a fun way to celebrate companies like Google saying that they’re no longer going to support IE6.”

But Toupin admitted that the reaction to the funeral announcement has taken him by surprise. Aten Design regularly hosts small in-office parties for the Denver Web design and development community, but those typically draw 30 or 40 people. So far, Aten has received more than 700 RSVPs to its March 4 event via its site.

“Now we have to figure out what to do about the actual party,” Toupin said.
“We have a pretty small office. This kind of blew up on us.”

Aten’s clients include several major nonprofit organizations, including the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and Habitat for Humanity.

Toupin said he had nothing personal against IE6 but acknowledged that, like many other Web designers, he wouldn’t be sorry to see it go. “It does involve, toward the end of a project especially, considerable work adjusting things like CSS and JavaScript to make sure they work,” he said. Aten now evaluates IE6 support for its projects on a case-by-case basis, Toupin said.

More than anything, he added, the decision by Google and others to stop supporting the nearly nine-year-old browser marks an important step in the Web’s evolution. “But it’s also a great excuse to get together,” he said.

“In lieu of attending, please send flowers,” Toupin said in a blog entry posted yesterday.

Used Stationary Bikes is also supporting this IE funeral.

Microsoft’s browser has weathered a “kill IE6″ campaign since February 2009, when Facebook prompted IE6 users to upgrade. That movement accelerated last summer when Digg announced that it would curtail IE6 support, and an “IE6 Must Die”.

Twitter petition collected thousands of names. Microsoft has endorsed the anti-IE6 efforts, going so far as to say that “Friends don’t let friends use IE6,” although it has refrained from forcing users or companies to upgrade to IE7 or IE8, arguing that the old browser is still required by some enterprises.

According to Web metrics firm NetApplications.com, IE6 accounted for 20% of all browsers in use last month, while IE7 and IE8 held down about 15% and 25% shares, respectively. Much of the measured IE6 50% of the browsers in use. In the U.S., IE6’s share is less than 10%. Microsoft did not respond to a request for comment on the funeral, or answer questions, including one about whether it would be sending a representative to the wake.

“We’ve obviously struck a chord, and maybe in some cases, a nerve,” said Toupin on his blog. Source http://www.computerworld.com

Dear IE haters / IE users / Readers,

So far we have been expressing our views on how much IE SUCKS. we have expressed our bad/worst experiences about IE. As Developers and Designers we have shared our opinion and explained why IE sucks!

But we would now like to get the views of our readers… We think its important to know what you people think about it!  You are an IE hater? An IE user? Or a fan of IE? Please share with us  your surfing experience on Internet Explorer.

IE Haters – Let people know why you hate Internet Explorer.

IE users – Please share your best/worst experience.

IE Lovers – Come! Prove us wrong!

www.IEsucks.info

It messes up my pages and it’s giving me headaches.
Images won’t load, and text is backwards?
Lame, just lame. I’m not even going to bother with this anymore, and the sad
thing is lots of people still use this piece of garbage, and the
only reason why I’m using it right now is to check the compatibility of my
website. Well forget that.

Hopefully the day will come when internet explorer shit browser disappears and Firefox prevails. Internet Explorer sucks so much, we won’t stop this internet explorer sucks campaign.

Date: 23 April 2009
Time: 10:44

For the past 15 mins I’ve been sitting in front of my PC starring at the image u can see above.

Refresh / Load / Reload  / close and reopen – nothing is working seems to work!!!  Everytime it’s the same crap!

I was logging into IEsucks just for time pass but now can u imagine: u have an important work to do, a research to make, a mail to send and all u get is craps like above???

The page can’t load in IE but when u try with other browsers it loads without any difficulty. It remains a fact that most organizations or even individuals still use IE but then why don’t they improve the browser.. or if they can’t then WIPE IT OUT.

IE sucks sucks sucks!
IE is DUMB!
IE is ROTTEN!
IE is SHIT!

Posted by
Mandish
Mauritius

To be true am not an expert like some of those who have posted on this blog.  Most of the words are too technical for me (like an alien language LOL).  But one thing is clear and even a common user like me will understand this: IE SUCKS, it’s dumb and not at all user friendly as they are trying to make us believe.

Below are two screenshots of error windows that I frequently came across while using IE

Here if you do the mistake of clicking on Cancel it closes all the IE pages you have opened (all your efforts are gone in few seconds only).  So many times I’ve nearly broken my PC because of this and have had to restart my searches afresh!!! A real PAIN!!!

Whenever I saw these I thought “Gosh my PC is getting old!!! I must change and take a brand new one with latest technologies and facilities.  (I know some of you must be laughing at me but well I just really didn’t know that my poor PC is not to be blamed) and then I would often come across these at work also (hey i’ve got a brand new PC there!!!!) so  the truth is that INTERNET EXPLORER has become OLD, PERISHED, STALE!!!!  and must be removed (I would say banned!!!!)

This is how I started looking on the net and try to understand this “PHENOMENON”.  Many persons have expressed their dissatisfaction with IE but so far nothing has been done to either improve or to ERADICATE it (which seems more appropriate to me).

So my message to all the BIG BRAINS out there is “IF YOU’VE GOT ANY BRAIN LEFT PLS PLS PLS PITY US AND WIPE OUT IE FROM THE NET AND SAVE US THE MANY TROUBLES THAT WE ARE FACING!!!!!!!!!!!” IE is the worst (or rather “worstest”!!! If only this word existed LOL) browser ever developed and for common users like us it is a real headache, a pain in the a**! IE sucks and its FINAL!

Posted by
Tifanie
New Zealand

XHTML is the future of the web, and the most important part of it is the MIME type used to serve it. Although most web sites are served with the MIME type of text/html, the latest version of XHTML (version 1.1) needs to be served with a MIME type of application/xhtml+xml.

Internet Explorer doesn’t understand this important MIME type, but every other browser does. Safari, Firefox, Opera, and Konqueror are all standards compliant. Internet Explorer is not standards compliant.  ie sucks and should be banned now.

So I’m giving my readers fair warning and giving them a mechanism to install Firefox. They’ll be so much better off if they switch as ie sucks and sucks and we want it dead.

Yeah, ie sucks, every attempt at dom based scripting always leads to headaches with IE. CSS scripting is a pain. The market is all IE, so as a web developer, you have to support the damn thing.

I couldnt tell you how many hours ive spent trying to develop something around IE. First, dev it in FireFox (1 hour), then, get it working in IE (2+ hours). Its crazy, i couldnt really care about the security of the thing, leave that to MS to mess things up.

Solution, if you cant get rid of IE because stupid people still use it (and ultimately end up paying more on dev time). then you need a work around. A abstracted layer for dom scripting would be nice. As for the CSS and rendering problems, abstract that away with additional script. Web sites get slower, everyone suffers, angry people throw bricks at MS. Revolution !

After seeing that, you can check out http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2006/8/16/4999, which is a response to IE Group Program Manager’s response to people bitching about IE and standards compliance.  I found this after building a Web Site in Visual Web Developer 2005 (a Micro$oft product) and having it look perfect in FireFox, only to bring it up in Internet Explorer and having some wierd shit happen.  An ASP:Panel changed border styles and text colors (white text was showing up as blue, even if I used ‘#FFFFFF’ instead of ‘White’).