This comes shortly after the news that Digg will be dropping support as well. All I can say is: "About fucking time". Digg's polling shows that a full 69% of their IE6 users are only using IE6 because they don't have admin rights to upgrade (work PCs). This suggests that simple ad campaigns talking about how awesome new browsers aren't going to fix the problem: stuff has to start breaking for the lazy assholes in IT to get off their asses and patch the festering security hole that is known as IE6. I think Google is finally pushing very hard to kill IE6 since they recently announced their new Chrome OS, and pulled GMail, and all of their "office type" apps out of beta. I think they are finally making a serious play to sign up businesses to use google apps over MS office. No doubt that this has a little bit to do with MS previewing their own online version of office. I'm sure at this point that MS is hoping IE6 will die off as well. So now, we've got MS heavily pushing IE6 users to switch to IE8, Google making a hard push for Chrome, and Firefox 3.5 and Safari 4 also involved in fairly sizable promoting. It seems that if Digg's polls are any indication of the overall market (although I suspect Digg users are slightly more "techie" than the average website), people are trying to be off of IE6. It's just that their IT staff won't let them. I think it's time for the big boys of the online content industry to band together and STOP WASTING MONEY CODING/TESTING FOR IE6. I'm not suggesting that they purposely break it, but for the love of god, all this coddling is prolonging the issue. Big sites like youtube or facebook do NOT need to try to "hang on" to IE6 users. In general, users want to use the sites they like, and they don't care about the browser. Once their favorite site breaks and tells them "sorry, your browser is too old, please upgrade to X, Y, or Z", they will go off and do it, if they can. We also have Win7 coming out later this year, which, thankfully, ships with IE8 as the default, which will hopefully put IE7 to death relatively quickly. If there is an upside to the limited adoption of Vista at corporations, a shorter IE7 lifespan is it.
The buzz on it is actually better than decent, it's very positive. They basically swallowed their pain pill with Vista by making very drastic changes under the covers. Now with Win7 they have spent most all of their time on speed, usability, and shininess. Benchmarks are showing that it's not only faster than Vista, it's faster than XP as well. It's also going to be a lower price point than Vista, which can't hurt the adoption rate. Oh, and just some trolling: http://twitter.com/anandshimpi/status/2638294767 If you don't know who Anand Lal Shimpi is, he's the guy who runs anandtech.com, which is basically the best hardware site out there.
They want to lose/alienate part of their customer base, that's on their heads. I'm sticking with a browser that doesn't pretend the menu bar is part of the website, thanks. In a totally unrelated study, it was determined that a solid 93% of people who (1) use Digg in the first place and (2) habitually respond to such poll questions are nerrrrrds anyway.
[-]Yes, I believe I noted that already.[/-] (actually no, I removed it by mistake while editing before I did the mistake). But you are totally right, Digg is definitely comprised of users who are more likely to use an up-to-date browser. It's also the type of place that is practically MADE FOR wasting time at work. Actually the real nerds use reddit, as God intended. Digg is more for people who are just riding on the nerd pop culture wave IMHO!
