I think it was said in the IPB3 preview forums that IPB3 would be made useable with IE6.

Now the company forums are updated, I can no longer use them when at work as the skin/CSS is totally useless in IE6.

What are the plans for making IPB3 useable with IE6 ?

None?

IE6 is now Obsolete, and I think IPS would be taking a step back having to edit CSS just for IE6...

None?

IE6 is now Obsolete, and I think IPS would be taking a step back having to edit CSS just for IE6...

How do you know, as I said I thought it was going to be made useable.

I know IE6 is obsolete but you must understand I have no control of what is installed on my PC at work and cannot do upgrades and therefore I am stuck with IE6.

I like to browse the IPS forums and make posts when at work (when not busy of course) but now I cannot post.

I know I saw a post on this on the preview site.
As far as I know they were going to make it usable but not spend much time on making it look correctly.

[b]How do you know, as I said I thought it was going to be made useable.

[/b]

I know IE6 is obsolete but you must understand I have no control of what is installed on my PC at work and cannot do upgrades and therefore I am stuck with IE6.

I don't, that's why I put a question mark there. ;)

As for you not having control, I understand that. We have to use IE6 at school, which is frankly terrible considering 8 is on the way. We have only just got our first Vista PC!

Robert, this may be a non-solution but are you using the Lo-Fi skin by chance?

It gave me and others no end to problems since our skin choice was set to that during the upgrade. Once I switched back to the plain "IP.Board" skin, alll my problems went away.

EDIT: After reading Rikki's reply below, ignore my suggestion. Maybe switch TO the lofi skin?

Our aim is to by default add a User Agent map for IE6 so that it uses the Lo-Fi skin, when complete. However, we aren't expending too much energy on IE6 compatibility.

Our aim is to by default add a User Agent map for IE6 so that it uses the Lo-Fi skin, when complete. However, we aren't expending too much energy on IE6 compatibility.

So I was right with what i was thinking.

Our aim is to by default add a User Agent map for IE6 so that it uses the Lo-Fi skin, when complete. However, we aren't expending too much energy on IE6 compatibility.

Rikki, that will be fine as I assume posting is being included for the Lo-Fi skin.

As you can see less then 20% use IE6. I'm glad that IPS isn't worrying to much about IE6, as no one else should either.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

IE6 is now Obsolete, and I think IPS would be taking a step back having to edit CSS just for IE6...

Going from supporting a widely used browser to no longer supporting it is taking a step back.

Going from supporting a widely used browser to no longer supporting it is [b]taking a step back[/b].

Learn your facts please. IE6 is not a widely used browser.

More people use IE7 now than IE6, so not supporting it is a step forward :) .

There be flaws with your logic Mr. Garica.

For one, those statistics are pretty much useless because it's the statistics of visitors to a website based on web development. Obviously people interested in this area have a higher chance of using a modern browser and even alternatives to IE all together. I believe W3S even states this as a disclaimer.

Also, even if we could trust those statistics, 20% is still 1 in 5 people using IE6 which is IMO enough to make sure your website is not only usable but offers a semi-decent experience for IE6 users.

On my site firefox is used more then IE :).
And according to my stats that I just looked at no one uses IE6 at least it is not listed IE7 is though.

Learn your facts please.

17% of my traffic are IE6 users so you're wrong. That's still very high.

Also, even if we could trust those statistics, 20% is still 1 in 5 people using IE6 which is IMO enough to make sure your website is not only usable but offers a semi-decent experience for IE6 users.

I disagree, technology is advancing on the web. Why should I spend more time adjusting to an out dated version of a browser? IE8 is already out, the person has a choice to upgrade to the latest browser. There are plenty of notifications for them to upgrade. Google has also announced that they will stop support IE6.

17% of my traffic are IE6 users so you're wrong. That's still very high.

I don't see how that makes me wrong. You said widely used, and I don't think 17% is a large percentage.

I was looking at awstats and it was not showing ie6 but google analistics does but only 12%.
firefox is 42%.

Why should I spend more time adjusting to an out dated version of a browser?

Because people use it. IE6 is fading away by itself, so why turn away users who may be interested in joining or posting on forum? It would put IPB forums at a disadvantage.

"the person has a choice to upgrade to the latest browser"

As he said, he's on a corporate PC and doesn't have the option of upgrading his browser.

And from personal experience, on a contract I just finished for a worldwide megacorporation that dealt with other worldwide megacorporations, I can say that a lot of those companies are still using IE6 like this one was.

They were still using Windows 2000 for the OS on all PCs, too, which made me gag. But that's what was there. I had to use it, support it, and deal with it. There was no option for any user to upgrade from IE6 to IE7.

To my knowledge, none of our vendors or customers had websites that wouldn't work with IE6, and I visited a number of them. I knew of entire departments did nothing but online business/commerce with suppliers, using a website interface of some sort, including forum software for some of them. (I never saw IPB, personally. Did see vB and phpBB sometimes, but working with those sites wasn't in my job scope so I had little exposure to that part of it.)

Some MS products may be a royal pain, but they're still the 800-pound gorilla in the living room. I'm not an MS fanboy, just (I hope) realistic.

Eventually and who knows how long IE6 will not be used by any one. Although it may be many years by what I am reading in this thread.

In my opinion, the way it looks companies will upgrade to Windows 7 from XP which most definitely won't include IE6.

A lot of big companies will indeed do that, Garcia. However, they won't upgrade for a good year or so after Windows 7 is released. So good luck with dropping IE6 support.

I'd say that support for IE6 should be a graceful degradation from the functionality provided to modern browsers. So, if it can be implemented easily for IE6, support it, if not, provide the closest match you can. The two-tone bars for example, a perfectly acceptable degrade would be just stripping out the transparent png, to make them one coloured.

Refusing to support a browser that 20% of people use is foolish in my view, if you're running a business (and let's not forget that many IP.Board users, including prominent ones, are business users) then not having a forum compatible with IE 6 is like not allowing every fifth customer from participating in discussions and suggestions with you, if those businesses are amongst those that only allow IE 6 on their work computers this may be even more problematic (as I recall some companies use IP.Board on their intranets).

The lofi compromise seems like a good one, and I would personally like to see the useragent automatically adjust for mobile phones and similar devices as well (I have tried to browse these forums on my phone and been frustrated at having to wait for the full page to load and then having to hit the lo-fi link), but refusing to support 20% of the market makes no sense from a business point of view.

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=2

IE6 having more marketshare than firefox is pretty sad...but it tells you how widely used it still is.