The Internet Explorer Nightmare

Microsoft is creating a nightmare for the web development world, IE6, 7 & 8 all have significant market shares still so need to be catered for. IE9 is much better of course but won’t run on anything older than Windows Vista which means that over half the world’s computers will never be able to run it, obviously this will change as people upgrade computers but at the time of writing IE6 still has nearly 10% of the browser market and Windows XP has over 50% of the OS market.

And now it seems that IE10 will only support Windows 7, not even Vista, this means that there will be another tranche of customers with Vista machines who are unable to upgrade beyond IE9.

It is very difficult to run more than one version of Internet Explorer on the same machine, I use VirtualBox to run several virtual Windows machines but that does mean that I need a separate Windows licence for each machine.

So my full browser array (on my main development machine)  is;

1. Opera – my default browser (I like Dragonfly)
2. Chrome – almost always open too
3. Firefox 6 – for all the great extensions
4. Safari -mostly for testing
5. IE6 – if it works here it usually isn’t too bad in later versions of IE
6. IE7 in an XP machine under VirtualBox
7. FF3.6 in the same XP machine under VirtualBox
8. IE8 in another XP machine under VirtualBox
9. IE9 in a Windows 7 machine under VirtualBox
10. IceMonkey under Knoppix under VirtualBox

Browser Deployment

You may notice that I didn’t refer to different versions of Chrome or Safari, that is because by default these browsers keep themselves up to date so the “tail” of older versions is very short.

Opera & Firefox do the same but the user has to actually agree to download major version changes, hence the tail of FF3.6 users, people have to agree to update to FF4 (but I think FF is now changing to the Chrome model for deployment). The same applies to Opera but as its user base is quite small and quite geeky (I use Opera as my default browser) it tends to look after itself.

Of course the major problem in the browser world is Internet Explorer. Usage of versions older than IE6 has fallen enough that I now ignore them when developing websites but all the later versions still need to be catered for (in my opinion – some developers take a much more aggressive view).  It is possible that IE7 usage will also shrink to almost nothing but I can’t see IE6 disappearing for quite a while yet and of course Windows XP still has a huge user base for whom IE8 is the best that can be installed.  And  there are a few million Vista users who can never go beyond IE9.

I’m sure Microsoft are aware of the mess they have created, I just wish they wouldn’t keep on doing it.  If Chrome/Opera/Firefox etc. can run on any version of Windows (and Mac and Linux) it doesn’t seem too much to ask that Internet Explorer should do the same.

Domain Renewal Group - Domain Expiration Notice

Domain Renewal Group have been around for a little while now, a quick search finds their name mentioned quite frequently, usually in conjunction with the keyword scam.  There is a good little site which lists known domain name scams operating in the UK and Domain Renewal Group feature there.

It appears from various reports that Domain Renewal Group don’t actually transfer your domain name or renew it, they just take your money and do nothing.  I’m not sure if this is better or worse than actually transferring your registration to a bunch of pirates.

We always register domains in the client’s name so that they actually own their domain names and can transfer them away from us if they want to.  With personal registrations you can hide the owner’s details on the Whois database but with businesses this isn’t allowed.

Domain Renewal Group must get their information from Whois, then they send a letter to the owner asking them to pay for renewal of their domain.  This is quite cunning as proper registrars normally communicate via email rather than letter, by sending a letter Domain Renewal Group can avoid the person who normally deals with domain renewals (and who would recognise the notice as a scam) and go directly to the business which owns the domain name.  The owner will recognise the domain name and just pay the invoice, the amounts involved are small enough not to raise suspicion.

If you receive a letter like this from Domain Renewal Group or from anyone else contact your own registrar or the person who maintains your website before parting with any money.

And then there is Internet Explorer 6! The bane of any web designer’s life.  Getting IE6 to behave the same way as more modern browsers can be a real pain.  If a site works in any more modern browser it will probably be pretty good in all the others.  Anything that works in Firefox will almost certainly work  prettywll in Chrome, Safari and Opera and although IE7 and IE8 are not as good at complying with the standards they aren’t too difficult to work with.

IE6 Market Share overtakes IE7!

The problem is that IE6 is still installed on millions of machines around the world.   In fact I just checked out browser versions on the excellent marketshare website and discovered that IE6 has regained its position as the most popular browser in the world with over 25% of the market.  This is largely due to the advent of IE8, many people are starting to migrate from IE7 to IE8 which means that the market share of the newer browsers is being split.  If you combine the shares of IE7 & IE8 it adds up to more than 36%.

I guess that most people who have made the move to IE7 will be happy enough to let Microsoft upgrade them to IE8 so eventually IE7 will fade away as earlier versions like IE4 & IE5 have.  But IE6 is a bigger problem, it was the biggest browser for a  long time early on in the development of a lot of corporate systems, and it still works just as well as it ever did.
If you are running a corporate intranet the substantial cost of  upgrading hundreds or thousands of PCs  to a newer browser and retesting all your internal systems to make sure they still work properly is not matched by any real benefit.  It isn’t broken so don’t  fix it.

This means that while a corporation may have a lovely modern website for its external customers to use, it may only have IE6 installed for its own staff, that is the browser that has been tested against their internal systems.  But this means that when those staff do a bit of surfing in their lunch hour they are still using IE6 to look at everyone else’s websites.

IE6 for Ever

I can’t see this situation changing any time in the next few years, IE6 will continue its slow decline and new websites will have to contine to support it.  This support comes at a cost, extra testing, extra coding and of course a whole bunch of lovely new features like CSS2 & CSS3 which make building good websites much easier but which IE6 just doesn’t know about.

So much as I loathe IE6 I continue to use it every day for testing.   If your site doesn’t work properly with IE6 you could be losing 25% of the customers that have already made the effort to find your site.  That is like kicking out 25% of the customers in your shop because you don’t like the way they talk.  Not a good way to run a business.

That was more than a decade ago now and I have used AVG (both free and paid editions) on several machines since, and I have recommended it to many friends and colleagues.  But no more; AVG (or specifically the AVG Toolbar) has become the malware that it is supposed to be protecting me from.

Malware, short for malicious software, is software designed to infiltrate or damage a computer system without the owner’s informed consent.

Now I know that the AVG toolbar isn’t designed to damage my computer but you have to be pretty alert to stop it inflitrating your browser  and making it behave the way AVG wants rather than the way you want.  When you install AVG it will install the toolbar AND make Yahoo your default search engine unless you deselect the appropriate boxes on a fairly cluttered screen, this is annoying but sadly not uncommon, Java tries to install the Yahoo toolbar  every time it installs an update.

Now this is annoying enough but at least you can hide the AVG toolbar using the View/Toolbars option in your browser.  But No!  AVG will reinstate itself after a week, you have to use the AVG options (on the AVG toolbar) to stop it coming back every week.

Another, even more annoying, feature is that AVG will set and keep Yahoo as the search provider for your browser.  Now most modern browsers let you set a default search provider but also select from a list for specific searches.  I use Google as my default provider but I have about 8 others which I use from time to time, including Yahoo.  What AVG does is set Yahoo as the default search provider, and also make it impossible to change to any other search engine.

To change these unacceptable behaviours you have to change the Advanced Options for the AVG toolbar.  To do this you need to be displaying it, then select the drop down list just to the right of the AVG logo on the left (before the Yahoo search box).

Then select the Advanced Options tab and you will see a whole list of options, all of which should be deselected.  You can then save the changes, go to the View/Toolbars option for your browser and hide the AVG toobar for ever (or until a future update undoes  your work).

I have chosen to uninstall AVG altogether and install new anti-virus software from a (so far) better behaved provider.  I will be installing the free version of Avira anti-virus.  I have been using Avira for a few months now on one of my PCs and it seems very good;  lean, quick and well behaved,  just what AVG used to be.  The free edition will nag you briefly to upgrade once per day which I think is fair enough, it is certainly worth paying for and it isn’t expensive.

I presume that Yahoo (which I think is a good search engine) has paid Grisoft (AVG) to include these features in their software.  I hope they have paid them enough to compensate them for the customers they will lose because of it.  They won’t lose much when  I uninstall AVG free from my family PC, but I won’t be renewing the paid subscription for my work PCs either.

In the first case I found that PC tools was just converting a dollar price straight to pounds, so a product price of $29.95  became £29.95 for British buyers.  At the time the exchange rate was nearly 2 dollars to the pound so PC tools was asking British customers to pay nearly twice as much as US customers.

The sites that do this generally use your IP address to determine which country you are coming from.   Fortunately there are a number of free proxy servers available, like proxify or freeproxyserver.net which allow you to mask your real IP address.   Doing this means that the website thinks you come from the country where the proxy server is hosted rather than your own country.

But there is a catch of course, both of these proxy servers have US IP addresses, so the website you are visiting will think that you are in the USA too.  To get around this you can visit Public Proxy Servers to find lists of servers in different countries.  It is interesting to try a few different countries to see what affect it has on the website you are visiting.

I use a nice little Firefox addon called Flagfox which displays a little flag in the address bar showing you which country the server is located in. Of course the location of the server isn’t always significant, all my websites are for UK businesses but they are hosted in the USA because I use Hostgator as my hosting provider.  But for this purpose it can be useful.

I was looking at Macrium Reflect disk imaging software and noticed that the price displayed was £19.99, not a bad price but I wondered what other people would be charged.  If you come from the USA they charge $39.99 or from Germany €29.99.  I’m sure that when Macrium (who seem to be  UK based but whose server is in Germany)  set these prices they made sense but in a world of rapidly changing exchange rates they just can’t keep up.   In this case the pound has plunged far enough to make any other currency look quite expensive (at least at the time of writing  in Feb 2009).

The lesson, as always is Caveat Emptor, let the buyer beware!  But at least we have the tools available to check out the options in just a few minutes without moving from our desks, isn’t the internet a wonderful invention?

But I am pretty happy with Firefox 3 too, and it has all those lovely add-ons like Web Developer, fireFTP and firebug.  As a basic browser Chrome is very good, fast and secure but without add-ons it won’t be replacing Firefox as my main browser anytime soon.

I had a look at the excellent Market Share website and I see that Chrome has settled down for the moment  at about 0.7% of the market.  But it looks to me like Firefox’s market share has taken most of the hit from Chrome’s success.  This makes sense to me, people who have switched browsers once are more likely to switch again.  Also Firefox is probably the most common browser among web designers and any web designer worth the name would have been using the new browser to make sure that it didn’t cause any of their sites to break.

I imagine that it won’t be long before add-ons start to appear for Chrome, and hopefully not too long before it is ported to other platforms, perhaps including Android, Google’s new mobile phone operating system.  I don’t think Chrome will stay as an also ran browser for too long.  But at least I am happy that it isn’t going to break my websites.

I had a read of their comic today and I like the sound of what they are doing with Chrome.  They appear to have started from scratch with a standards compliant browser, one that doesn’t have all the baggage of older browsers.  The way they have separated tabs into different processes and the use of virtual machines should make it the safest browser yet.  And hopefully the fastest too.

They are using the Webkit rendering engine which is the same one that Apple use for Safari so support for web standards and things like SVG (scalable vector graphics) should be pretty good.  And of course Google products are usually pretty good so I have high expectations for Chrome.

But, all these good thing aside; my heart sank slightly when I first read about Chrome.

More testing

First; as a webdesigner I thought – oh no; another browser to test every webpage I design against!  I currently test everything against IE7, IE6 (and IE8 is on the horizon) Firefox, Opera, Safari and Konqueror and of course on several different machines running Windows ME, XP, Vista and Ubuntu (I haven’t got a Mac yet – maybe when I get a bigger office), another browser just adds more work.

Because Chrome uses the Webkit engine and because it should be pretty good about standards compliance I don’t expect it to be a real problem to program for, but every page will still have to be tested and that is tiresome.

But what about Firefox?

My second thought was; where does this leave Firefox?  I use Firefox as my main browser and am very fond of it, particularly with all the extensions for web developers.  Opera is very good too but I haven’t quite got used to it in the same way as I have Firefox.

Firefox in particular has been making very good progress in the popularity stakes so it is now a real force in the browser market.  Looking at the most recent month’s statistics for www.stowonthewold.info , I can see that about 81% of people are using IE (about 67% of those IE7, 32% IE6) and about 12% are using Firefox (about half 3.x and about half 2.x), Safari is 3rd with about 6% and then there is a tail of other browsers making up the other 1%.

Interestingly if I look at this website I see quite a different picture with 46% for Firefox, 42% for IE, 10% for Opera, 2% for Safari, with the tail making up less than 1%. I guess this shows the different readership for the two websites, us geeks like Firefox and Opera.

I think Chrome will be successful, partly because it looks very good (in principal at least, I will try it out later this week, if the servers can stand the strain) and partly because it is a Google product and so will get lots of publicity (I first saw mention of it on the main BBC news website, not in the technology section).  This is obviously a good thing and more competition will drive improvement in other browsers too.

But my worry is that Chrome will steal market share from Firefox rather than Internet Explorer, the sort of people who will try a new browser are the sort of people who have already moved to Firefox, not the sort of people who use the browser that came with their PC.  I want to see good browsers spread across the user base of the web.  The day when I can stop using IE6 as the lowest common denominator for my web design work will be a day I jump for joy.

Standards compliant browsers (which support SVG too) make life a lot easier for us web designers but replacing Firefox with Chrome isn’t going to help at all.  What we need (and perhaps Google has a cunning plan) is to replace the non-compliant browsers, then we can all move forward.  If Chrome can take market share from Internet Explorer instead of Firefox then I will be very happy.

After some investigation I discovered that PC Tools had determined that I was in Britain from my IP address and was therefore quoting me the price in pounds rather than in dollars.  This would be ok but they don’t convert the dollar price to pounds at any normal exchange rate, they just change the currency code.  At current exchange rates PC Tools are charging British customers twice as much as they charge US customers.

Fortunately there is a way around this.  If you go through a proxy server like proxify then the PC tools website can’t tell from your IP address that you are in Britain and quotes you the US dollar price of $29.95 instead.

I am happy to pay a fair price for software but I see no reason why I should pay twice as much just because I live in the UK.