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Hope this question is not stupid since I am an amateur web designer. I use Windows 7 and want to see the website I make works decently with something like IE6 (will be using html and css only).
But instead of going through all the mess of download virtual machine software and such from MS, I was wondering if there is any other browser like old Firefox or Netscape that I can install from filehippo if they give the results similar to Internet Explorer 6?
The answer depends on how precise you need to be with your tests.
The easiest option has already been mentioned in the comments -- IETester. It's a wrapper for IE that supports running all versions of IE, from 5.5 up to v9, all in the same window. It's extremely useful for testing how a site will look in older versions of IE; I use it all the time.
Unfortunately, it is not very stable; it crashes a lot, especially when you're running IE6 or IE7 in it. It also doesn't cope well with plugin elements such as flash. If your site uses them a lot, you may be out of luck.
But if you can cope with the limitations, then this is a good program, and it does directly answer your question.
More specifically, you were hoping an older non-IE browser could be used to simulate IE6. Sadly not. IE is unique (in a bad way); it has features, bugs and quirks that don't appear in any other browser either now or in the past.
The closest you'll get might be a really old version of Opera -- in their early days, they made a point of trying to get good compatibility with IE, to the point of implementing a number of IE's proprietary features. But even then, it was never that close.
One really cheeky alternative might be to use Wine to install IE6 onto a Linux box. Again, it's likely to be unstable, but it has been known to work. I haven't tried it for a while, but it worked okay back then, and Wine has improved a lot in the meanwhile.
Beyond that, the only real option is to run a genuine copy of IE6. The best way to do that is to install a VM with a full copy of XP on it. Not great, but in truth this is the only way you'll get a really 100% accurate picture of what your IE6 users are seeing. If that matters to you then you need to do this.
But to be honest, in most cases it won't matter about it being 100%. IETester is sufficiently good for testing most sites, and frankly if you have the odd glitch left over, don't worry about it too much -- IE6 users are well used to the web not working very well for them these days.
Make it work; don't make it perfect. And for that, IETester should be plenty good enough.
Internet Explorer is notorious for misbehaving. There is no other program that isn't IE6 that acts like IE6.
My suggestion would be to use a site like Adobe's BrowserLab. It lets you pick a URL and then it takes snapshots of what it looks like on different browser's as well as operating systems. The list is far from complete but it's one of the best free solutions that I've found.
I'm a consultant working on several websites and it has been asked that I make sure my work is compatible with IE6.
Since Microsoft advised not to use it anymore and that an average of 6% of the users are using IE6: can I advise my client to forget about IE6 ?
Edit:
The website is consumer oriented on the internet. I don't think IE6 is a strong requirement for my client just an old habit that's why I ask myself if it's a good thing to advise against it.
You are a consultant working on
several websites and it has been
asked that you make sure your work is
compatible with IE6
If the person that pays you thinks IE6 needs to be supported, then it does!
What you think yourself, or what anyone else on stackoverflow thinks, is not important!
"a requirement is anything that an
important person thinks is important"
It depends. Who is your target audience?
Technical or non-technical?
Business or consumer?
Intranet or extranet?
How much effort is involved in making the site work in IE6? As much as I hate supporting a dying browser, I would avoid using features that prevent people with older browsers from using the site. Remember - some people are forced to use older browsers (because of corporate policy, etc.).
You're free to forget about IE6 if you can afford to ignore those users.
I'm sure that the 6% is not uniformly distributed across all audiences. If your application is targeted at an audience with a disproportionate IE6 holdout population you might have a problem.
Ensuring that you support progressive enhancement and gracefull degredation is important even if you don't support actively the browser.
With a bit of browser detection suggest the user upgrade their browser and educate them of the benefits of the latest generation of browsers.
If you get paid to do the work then do the job properly and your clients will appreciate it.
As the other respondents have said, it depends on your expected users. As a data point, see UK Government sticks with ie6
Depends, I've been developing sites for IE6 for a long time, and if you write proper CSS, you can get 1:1 with every browser. Same applies to javascript, if it's well written, it will work on IE6 too.
If you're sure that the audience which will browse the product is IE6 free, I'd say you're good to go about forgetting IE6. Plus, having a check for IE6 and then displaying a warning that the site is built for IE6+, and user needs to upgrade, is a good solution too (keeping in mind the little number of IE6 users).
This question already has answers here:
Closed 12 years ago.
Possible Duplicate:
Should we support IE6 anymore?
ripie6.com
I would like to know which browsers we can avoid. Many sites have stopped support to IE6. So, as developers we can also start avoiding some sites? If yes, what are all? (which versions of what broswers)
Even though I have asked the question already here: which browser to start with? IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari? , I dint get the answer since its combined with another question.
Assuming it's a business site:
What's your target market?
How long do you expect until you release a working version of your website?
If current trends continue, what will be IE6's market share by then?
How much profit/value will those users bring?
How much will it cost to support those additional users?
Unless the costs are far below the profit, then don't bother. Otherwise, it might be a good idea.
If it's not a for-profit site(hobby, for instance), then you probably shouldn't bother, unless there's a really significant IE6 market share in your target market.
By the way, remember to use graceful degradation when possible and use feature detection instead of browser detection.
Finally, avoid blocking IE6 users and instead just display a warning saying the website is untested in their browser and suggesting an update(this last piece of advice only applies if you don't plan to support IE6)
Support the browsers that your users use.
stackoverflow.com can probably be less strict than other sites in the browsers it supports, since the vast majority of users are technically adept, and likely to be using a reasonably modern browser. amazon.com probably needs to support more browsers, since it will attract a broader spectrum of internet users.
Who uses your site? Who uses similar sites? What browsers are they using? That's how you decide what browsers to support - not based on what the population of internet users use, since the population of internet users probably isn't your audience (unless you're Google, that is).
You need to evaluate a few things:
Your audience. If you are targeting home users, informal or young audience, or technically advanced audience, you may wish to consider not supporting IE6. On the contrary, if you are targeting conservative business audience or large corporations, you should take IE6 in consideration
Are you developing for yourself, or on commission? If you are developing for someone, you need to discuss this with them
Is this a restructuring of an old site? You may use instruments like google analytics, to find out who your visitors are, and what do they use
Not supporting IE6 will save you a lot of headache, and many sites are starting to avoid it, to be free to implement new features using modern tools. But there are situations where you just can't afford this.
As I found out today, it looks like YouTube is going to stop supporting IE6 pretty soon.
This begs the question, should we, as applications builders, be the ones that are helping our users to get a better Internet experience?
Should we, like Google, provide messages to users with outdated browsers?
Should we be explaining to them what the advantages are to upgrading?
I understand we cannot force them to do anything and it would be tough to decide what makes something out of date. However, it seems that this would be a two-fold win. We get to develop better applications for newer browsers and we don't have to spend so much time making new and exciting things work in older crappy browsers.
Are there any other big name sites already doing this?
I'm in favor of messages saying "you have IE, please update to something decent"... but if you're making websites for a company, it's sure that no one will let you do this, unless you're working at Google or Mozilla.
In the meantime, graceful degradation is my solution. I code for the latest browsers and I hack to get IE6 to work.
Often times the user works at a company that does not allow them to install software so bothering them about upgrading from IE 6 is pointless and needlessly aggravating them. Everyone knows that IE 6 is really not a great browser for developers (or many would argue users too) but a lot of people still use it. If your target audience doesn't really use it then maybe you can get away with bugging them about upgrading. But the question is do you really not want their money or their time on your site? You're risking that by asking them to upgrade. If you're making a product that you sell it doesn't really make a lot of sense to make them feel unwelcome on your site.
As developers and good citizens of the web, I feel it is our responsibility to courtiously educate others about the virtues of modern browsers.
IE6, and many other outdated browsers contain security holes that lead to computers infested with malware and increase the overall evil and spam on the web. Users trust developers not to hurt them, and it is our duty help our users get the best and safest experiences out of our products. Pointing out the security and functional virtues of modern browsers to our users only helps these aims.
There was a great blog post about this on Digg.com where they asked IE6 users a quick survey about why they were using IE6.
In short they asked them what they use at work AND at home, and why they used IE6.
The trouble is that a lot of them are at work, and (a) have no choice, or (b) have been told they can't upgrade, or (c) don't know why they should upgrade, or (d) they actually like IE6.
In almost all cases, there is very little you can do to help them upgrade... without frustrating them in the case of those that want to upgrade, but can't.
Linked pic (hope Digg doesn't mind)
Which applications? If your apps are for use by companies, or people working at companies, then you need to support IE 6 so it's usable. Unfortunately, many companies seem to have intranet apps that require IE 6, and so aren't going to upgrade any time soon. Moreover, a large number of people working for companies are unable to install a better browser, lacking admin rights.
If the target audience is people at home computers, then you can try to nudge people off IE 6. Provide some links (i.e., to Firefox, Opera, Chrome, later versions of IE 6, whatever), making one link more obvious, so people who don't know the first thing about different browsers will have a default choice. Bear in mind that there are a lot of people (including me) who are very unlikely to change browsers just to use your site.
I'm building a website for a small non-profit org. and I was wondering at what kind of browser marketshare a browser should have before I support it. Chrome looks like a major contender, but it's still less than 5%, as is Opera.
What browsers do you think I should completely support for this kind of project?
I'm going to second Robert S's answer, and expand a bit.
If you take the time, from the initial concept forward, to be standards-compliant and emit clean XHTML with CSS, you'll save yourself the majority of the pain. You'll probably be fairly close to your intended output across all the browsers right out of the gate. Sure, there will be some pixel-level wonkiness due to the way the box model is implemented, but you'll probably be "close enough" that no extra expense is needed.
I wouldn't go so far as to intentionally "tweak" my site to be sure it works with every browser -- not only is that expensive (in terms of time), but it's also doomed to fail as browsers come closer and closer to clean support for the standards.
FWIW, Chrome is a browser you absolutely should test with. As others have mentioned, it's based on Apple's WebKit. Testing Chrome and the Windows version of Safari will give you a very good handle on your site's user experience on the Mac platform, at least if you don't have a Mac available for testing. :)
Firefox, IE7 and IE6 are enough to cover more than 90% of the browser market share.
It is a good idea to read the new web standards and take in account what Microsoft prepares for IE8.
Then you can try to be compatible with Google Chrome.
Finally, there should be a very specific customer request to invest the time and money making support for the other browsers like Opera, Safari e.t.c.
Here's my testing/bugfixing priority list:
Absolutely essential to fully support Firefox 3 and IE7
Highly recommended to fully support Opera and Safari (no missing functionality, slightly degraded interfaces are acceptable, but only if absolutely necessary)
Interface degradation is acceptable with IE6 and Firefox 2 as long as it is still usable (I consider these as 'end of life' browsers, and frankly, rarely worth the effort), also here are older versions of Opera and Safari, but I rarely see significant problems with these.
If the interface does not rely heavily on Javascript then it must degrade gracefully enough to be usable in text based and mobile browsers such as Opera Mobile, Links/Lynx, iPhone, etc (this includes any necessary optimisations for the screen size)
Informational (i.e. non-application) sites must be at least tested with a screenreader
I will put no significant effort into supporting Firefox 1 and IE5.5 or below.
New functionality must be tested and at least working with upcoming browsers such as IE8 and Chrome. It's pointless ignoring these, as they are both likely to become very popular in the coming months and years.
Of course, the only way to know for sure what will work for you is by looking at your own usage statistics. You may find that a significant proportion of your users still use IE6 (many businesses have yet to upgrade), or that mobile device use is particularly high, etc. Check your own stats!
It's not a matter of market share. It's a matter of what our customers use.
When your customers are public schools that are often underfunded, then you eschew a lot of flash and Flash.
The obvious answers are Firefox and IE. I would suggest starting with standards-compliant XHTML and then go from there.
I don't make this decision based on marketshare alone, or even primarily. My support list (in order of priority) currently looks like this unless a client expresses a need to expand it:
Safari 3
Firefox 2
Firefox 3
IE 7
IE 8 beta
public-facing functionality works, looks correct, in IE 6
Chrome
The reason I take this approach is that, first, it's best to work in a standards-compliant browser before tweaking to broken engines. Second, Safari has the greatest standards support combined with a marketshare which isn't negligible (Opera is just hard to justify for cost:benefit reasons). Third, in my experience going from Safari to Firefox is usually less problematic than the other way around. This is subjective but it's my experience.
Also a side effect of targeting Safari first, IE is likely to be less painful, as the Webkit team has gone to great lengths to comply with existing practices wherever possible.
Chrome comes last because it's so likely to "just work" if Safari is good to go.
Edit: Firefox 2 comes before Firefox 3 because its support set is more restricted. The same is true for IE 7 before IE 8b.
Well, since Chrome is based off of WebKit, if you test for Safari, chances are Chrome will work as well.
I tend to ignore Opera altogether. That probably makes me a bad person, but I'm ok with that.
it depends how critical the application is.
for a small non-profit, I [personally] wouldn't bother testing with browsers with < 4-5% share. However, you should still aim to develop your code as browser agnostic as possible
I personally agree with Andy Lester in that the true key is to understand the platforms of your target audience. Yes globally Chrome might have a 3-5% market share, or something like that, but if your not-for-profit organization was targeted towards developers you might have a much higher rate of adoptions. So in addition to what everyone has said here, know your audience.
I know with my website targeting technology people, I see about a 30% FireFox, 55% IE, 12% Chrome, and the rest are others for my visitors. Vastly different from the norm due to my audience.
I like to keep a close eye on Yahoo's Graded Browser Support page. I generally only spend time on worrying about getting everything perfect on browsers they consider to be 'A-Grade'. I generally try to progressively enhance, instead of gracefully degrade which means in most cases I get basic functionality on 'C-Grade' browsers.
http://developer.yahoo.com/yui/articles/gbs/index.html
I personally like to group browsers in two broad categories:
IE: You should always aim to support IE, given its market share.
Others (Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome): If you strive to write standards-compliant HTML, CSS and JavaScript, what works in either of these browsers will most probably work with the rest.
Start with Firefox and IE. If you have any time left, which you probably wont, you can check out the others :)
IMHO the more important thing to do is do a good job of separating your presentation tier from your business logic. Try to be as flexible as possible and allow the users to decide the direction. You might now say, Webkit doesn't have enough users, but a month down the line your client decides to buy iPhones for all their employees. (I know you said non-profit, but I think example still holds) Just try to put yourself into a position to be flexible.
I would recomend that you will try to comply with the standards issued by w3. If your application comply you will also be safe for future versions of browsers.
Make your design using FF and make fixes for IE in the end, that way you will save work.
Regarding JavaScript use a framework such as JQuery or DomAssistant to make code that will work on all browsers. But be aware not to make navigation or content dependant on client script, provide an alternative to support almost 7% that is not java enabled.
Do the standards-compliant engines first: WebKit (Safari/Chrome) and Gecko (Firefox). Opera usually works okay, too. Then go and add IE support. Any browser whose preview release doesn't support the full CSS2 spec doesn't deserve A-grade support, IMO.
Firefox 3, IE 7, IE 6
Firefox is the most important primarily because it runs on OSX and Windows and has a high market share which means if your site runs on Firefox it will also be available to mac viewers. Follow this closely with IE 7 which is important because of its browser share and being packaged by Windows means anyone with a new windows box will have it.
Unfortunately there are people running older versions of windows (anything before 2000) who cannot update from IE 6 to a more modern browser. This ensures there should be for the next while there should be a lower cap of about 10% of people using IE 6. Realistically there are about 20% average who still user IE 6 and so this indicates that even some with modern operating systems have not upgraded.
Safari and Chrome come hand in hand as both working off a similar engine which makes them the next logical step for compatibility tests. Because they both use webkit and safari runs on both windows and mac (as the default browser) Safari is more important to test for by a small margin. Chrome is a logical choice because if you get it on Safari it will work on Chrome and it has a pretty strong start in browser stats for being so new.
Opera is completely optional unless you decide that you want to develop a website that must be viewable on a Nintendo Wii. Anyone on a computer who can use Opera is most likely savvy enough to also have another browser installed which they can view your site with. Opera uses its own custom parser and it has low browser share and so there isn't a compelling reason to go to lengths if your site shows well on everything except for Opera. The onus is really on them to make their browser work on your site honestly considering the low numbers and the other stronger browsers.
Unfortunately IE 6 and IE 7 both require a filter hack to get opacity to work and IE 6 has many incompatibilities and still requires a box model hack when not in strict mode and has float bugs regardless and so following web standards to the letter isn't an option, but wherever possible if you do follow web standards and use conditional IE comments you will most likely have a site that runs cross browser with minimal headache.