The interesting question is, does it have any effect? Pål Nedregotten, Channel Manager at API, which has 50 news papers with IE6 warning under their wings, posted some stats which he keeps updating with numbers for hour by hour and per hostname. The graphs show IE6 usage Friday 13th compared to Friday 20th of February.

From the updates we can see that there actually is a decrease in IE6 usage. (Red numbers are good) At the same time we know that there are winter holidays in Norway this week, and thus we will not know for sure before 1-2 weeks have passed.

It’s also important to remember that the impact of the campaign is not not likely to be visible from day one. As has been mentioned numerous places, the biggest job isn’t to make average Joe update his machine, but getting the big companies’ IT departments to update their machines. We can clearly see this with numbers from Budstikka.no, where I work. On a typical work day we see 23-25% with IE6, while on Saturdays and Sundays we see a drop down to 10% IE6 usage.

Big companies are of course reluctant to upgrade their machines. They have everything working right now, both intranet and internet. They have also applied all possible patches to IE6 to make it more secure, so security isn’t that much of an issue. Why would they want to upgrade?

The hope of this campaign is to make direct and indirect pressure on the IT departments to update their machine parks. By putting this banner out on all possible sites, users and IT departments will be constantly reminded that using an eight-year old browser is unacceptable, especially when you think about how much www has evolved.

Hopefully this will be the push most companies need, and that they will start planning to upgrade. This however requires testing and patching before it can be rolled out. I only hope that before the summer, the IE6 numbers will be so low that we can ignore IE6 completely.

I can also reveal that on budstikka I’ve been given green light for ignoring IE6 in our new design. The reason we can do this is that we will have the old design, which supports IE6, running too, and we can just forward IE6 users there automatically by doing some user agent sniffing.

Being on a Mac, I have no easy way to actually see these warnings. I thought it would be cool to see, so I started asking around for screen shots. The result can be seen here.

Apparently this campaign also spread to Sweden and Australia, so now I’ve created this post to try to keep track of international pages working for the same campaign: To push IE6 percentages so low that you don’t have to take it into consideration when you create web sites anymore.

axbom.se is a Swedish site about web strategies and web trends:

travelfish.org is an Indonesian travel intelligence site

mappic.org is a site where users can add pictures from places around the globe

travelfusion.com is a search engine related to travel information

aftonbloadet.se is one of the biggest news sites in Sweden

travellerspoint.com is a site to share and plan travels

flashmagazine.com is a site striving to give the best information about flash and related productions. Offices in Norway

whoa.nu is the biggest hip hop site in Sweden

easyimagesoftware.com is a site for a product site for easy image software

Willhaben.at is a big online market place is Austria, eqiuvalent of Norwegian finn.no

tv2.dk is the danish TV2 channel

hogyan.org is an Hungarian how-to site

Anyone missing? Please send me a message on twitter with a screen shot. (Having a hard time doing them myself, as I don’t have access to IE6 on my mac)

Being on a Mac, I have no easy way to actually see these warnings. I thought it would be cool to see, so I started asking around for screen shots. In this blog post I’ve collected as many images as I can to show how the differnet sites are “edutcating” the Norwegian masses.

For international sites, you can look here.

finn.no is the biggest online buy and sell market in Norway. Their blogpost. They were the first to suggest doing the campaign, on Twitter

tu.no were first to publish a post about it

gamer.no is the biggest gaming site in Norway, and have a whole 47% of their users on Firefox. Still they want to help out

nettby.no is the biggest norwegian community online. Owned by vg.no

nextgentel.no is one of the bigger ISPs in Norway, they also run broadpark.no which has the same message

pwned.no is the biggest online game tournament site in Norway:

rb.no is a local news paper owned by the umbrella corporation A-pressen interaktiv. API has about 50 online papers, all with the same warning

sesam.no is a norwegian search engine and portal, who also have their own mapping service. They are a part of finn.no

start.no is an online entertainment arena for youth in Norway

studentersamfundet.no is the Norwegian student society

vg.no is the biggest news site in Norway. They don’t like IE6 either

db.no is the second biggest news site in Norway. Although late, they are now participating in the campaign. They also have an article

sol.no is a large news portal forwarding clients to articles on other sites

dn.no is a big site about business news

foreldreportalen.no is a parent portal

lavkarbo.no is a portal for taklking about different diets

nwo.no plans to take over the world and have one global unitarian government. They have a slightly different approach, where they actually thank people for using IE6 as the insecure browser it is, making it easier for nwo to accomplish their goal

gulesider.no Yellow pages

telefonkatelogen.no online phone book. Owned by gulesider.no

keyteq.no does online marketing

mac1.no is a mac portal

linux1.no is a linux portal

ipod1.no is an ipod portal

kreativ1.no is a portal for creative work and people. They also have an article about the IE6 campaign

aftenposten.no is the third biggest news site in Norway

morgenbladet.no is a news paper with emphasis on culture, art, literature and politics

sysedata.no is one of Norway’s biggest hosting providers and ISP

The WebKit team behind Safari have earlier released what I would classify as firebug lite with a beautiful user interface. This made Opera fall behind amongst the browsers promoting standards, and they in particular lost many developers to other browsers. Opera have previously released some developer tools, but they’ve been too simple and too unstable to be used as an everyday tool.

After two years in development a new era is on the steps. Opera Software have announced Opera Dragonfly alpha, a tool that aim to take a neck shot on firebug. As previously mentioned this is an alpha, and thus lacks features but not bugs, however, this is a great step ahead and I may move back to my favourite browser once again. The current featureset is also pretty scarse:

1. JavaScript debugger
2. DOM inspector
3. CSS inspector
4. Command Line to allow commands to be inputed
5. Error Console that outputs validation errors and warnings exhibited by the CSS and JavaScript connected with the page
6. Proxy to allow debugging directly on mobile devices

Features planned for next alpha:

• Improved handling of threads in javascript
• Inline CSS editing
• Infrastructure for localization.
• Improved remote debugging

It should also be mentioned that Opera Dragonfly will be open source and any software implementing “the Scope module” (spec soon to be published) will be able to use it. I think this is great, because that means that other software also can use Opera Dragonfly and that other developer may push patches too.

Further reading:

• Opera Dragonfly introduction
• Opera Dragonfly blog
• Opera Dragonfly product page

Normally you’ll write your html something like this. (One may argue that a form is a list of things to fill out, but I’m using paragraphs for simplicity)

<form> <label for="name">Full name:</label><input id="name" name="name" type="text" /> <label for="email">Email:</label><input id="email" name="email" type="text" /> <label for="phone">Phone number:</label><input id="phone" name="phone" type="text" /> </form>

Result:

label { display: inline-block; width: 90px }

W3 has this to say about inline-block

This value causes an element to generate a block box, which itself is flowed as a single inline box, similar to a replaced element. The inside of an inline-block is formatted as a block box, and the element itself is formatted as an inline replaced element.

Catches

Like all good stuff, there are a few catches: Normally you would expect to see that IE6 or even IE7 doesn’t support this, but this time it’s actually firefox(!) not supporting the inline-block value, at least not the standard value.There’s been a bug report for this since mozilla 1.1 (!), but the good news is that it’s ready for firefox 3. Only took 9 years. In the mean time they have -moz-inline-block which seems to do the trick, so our full label css will look like this.

label { display: -moz-inline-block; display: inline-block; width: 90px; }

Another catch is that IE only supports this property on elements that are inline by default, and only when in standards mode. (I.e this is a no go for those playing in quirks mode) You can however mimick the behaviour on block elements to by giving the elements hasLayout (zoom: 1 for instance), and then setting display: inline.