This is kind of cool – a bunch of people in charge of big web sites in Norway have put up warnings on their website to people using Internet Explorer 6.0 (which is from 2001 and horrible to code for) that they have out of date browsers and that they should upgrade. Here’s a long string of screenshots of these warnings. There are a LOT of sites with the warning, and the sites target pretty much all Norwegians – not just webheads.
Interestingly, there’s a surge of IE6 users every Monday morning, showing that the issue is actually old browsers in the work place, not at home. Embarrassingly, Statoil has a lot of those Monday morning IE6 users.
A kind of cool aspect of the campaign is that it started on Twitter, where Erlend Schei, the guy in charge of Finn.no’s website suggested it and rapidly others followed on. I’ve been using Twitter more over the last few weeks and while I’m still not convinced about its being all that much better than, say, del.icio.us, Facebook and/or blogs, you do get some good links on it. I’m jilltxt on Twitter. Of course!
Bradley Wentworth
Jill, how easy is it to update Twitter from a mobile in Norway? In Canada and the United States it’s generally possible to send an SMS to a special number or to your own Twittermail for free and with minimal setup. Unfortunately, Twitter recently discontinued the Twitter to mobile updates in Canada, leaving only the United States and India (I think) where the Twitter-mobile conversation is two-way for non-smart phones.
I find Twitter most useful for blogging random observations on the go. Also, there’s a vibrant community of Transit advocates and ordinary riders who Tweet as soon as they encounter a bus, tram, or metro delay. It trumps Toronto’s official electronic updates both for speed and level of detail.
Jill Walker Rettberg
I think it’s easy – I don’t use Twitter from my mobile because I don’t want constant SMSes (I like to keep my mobile for stuff I actually need to know) and I’m mostly interested in using it to share web discoveries. I like the transit delay tweeting though!
Trond Pettersen
Jill: I believe that the large number of enterprise users stuck with IE6 — like StatoilHydro, as mentioned in your post — is caused by the fact that a lot of companies have invested a lot of money on applications that simply require IE6 (due to its tigh integration with the Windows operating system). Applications that were written years ago, back when IE was considered “the browser”.
Also, there’s a lot of Windows 2000 installations out there (which don’t run IE7 and they probably don’t want to support e.g. Firefox / Opera / Safari (upgrades)), and IT department are often not interested (and rightly so) in upgrading to Windows Vista.
Unfortunately, breaking one critical (as in $$$) application can be enough to postpone a system wide upgrade. After all, I doubt using the latest browser is the no. 1 concern in enterprise IT systems.
In any way, this is a great initiative that hopefully will make more people aware of the problem that the dreadful IE6 is, and putting some pressure on IT departments can’t be all that bad either 🙂
Hopefully, less time and money will be spent on optimizing web sites for IE6 in 2009. After all, the “IE6-platforms” of large corporations will have to be upgraded at some point — and so the question is how much money such corporations are prepared to flush down the toilet while waiting…
Koenraad
Google has now launched its own browser. It will be interesting to see its innovations and impact. But in terms of digital culture, the way Google announced its new brainchild is actually even more interesting: they announced it through a comic strip, digitally readable on Google books (http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/med_18.html).