IE6 - time to die

The clamour of noise on the interweb for IE6 to (dis)gracefully hurry off to the retirement home is growing by the week (links below). PC World have even listed it (no. 8 in the hall of shame) among the 25 Worst Tech Products of All-Time.

It's way past time to drop support for Internet Explorer 6. At SkyRocket we grudgingly still test for IE6 but agree with others that our “official” stance is not to support it and we are actively educating our customers to at least upgrade to IE7 or their IE6 users, still stuck in the last millennium, will not be getting the full interaction & feature-set that folks on modern-generation browsers have.

1. Time to drop IE6
2. The Final Word on IE6
3. Twitter Twits about IE6 hatred

Creating animated Gifs in Photoshop CS3

Now ImageReady has been discontinued in CS3 the ability to make animated GIFs has been built into Photoshop instead. Good tutorial on how to do this here...

Google Insights for Search (beta)

Been having a play with the new Insights for Search tool from Google (currently still in beta) and find it very interesting and useful - if you're into nerdy style SEO trendspotting ... :/

BG Patterns

Useful website to create & download tiled patterned backgrounds. Plenty of configuration options and lots of paisley :)

Web Safe Area - resource

Useful resource detailing available or 'safe' screen real estate on various OS (Win XP/Vista and Mac OSX) and also different standard browser chrome.

Google launches "Chrome" internet browser

Google is launching an open source web browser to compete with Internet Explorer and Firefox. The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.

"We realised... we needed to completely rethink the browser," said Google's Sundar Pichai in a blog post

BBC News story

Phasing out support for IE 6

"Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008 On August 15th, 2008 we will begin phasing out support for Internet Explorer 6 across all 37signals products. In order to continue using the products without any hiccups, Internet Explorer 6 users should upgrade to a newer browser"
How about this for common sense...

"Why are we making this change? IE 6 is a last-generation browser. This means that IE 6 can't provide the same web experience that modern browsers can. Continued support of IE 6 means that we can't optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress. We want to make sure the experience is the best it can be for the vast majority of our customers, and continuing to support IE 6 holds us back."

IETester

IETester is a free WebBrowser that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7 IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process. Using IETester, it is possible to test web sites under IE6 without the need of a second computer or a virtual machine with an old XP/IE6 installed. Different IE versions can be opened on different tabs in the same window.

This is how you get sIFR to work...

Great post by David at Design Intellection on how to get sIFR to work...

"The goal of this tutorial is to distill the information at the official site for sIFR into a simple step-by-step process of how to implement sIFR on your site. After following this tutorial you will have a basic understanding of how sIFR works and will be able to expand into more advanced areas."

Create your own pop art poster

Nice article from freelance artist Rob Cubbon:

Create your own pop art poster

Open Source Text Editors

Some open source (free!) text editors to download & try...

HTML Kit
Bluefish
Komodo Edit
NVU
SeaMonkey Composer

The Web in Charts

Interesting post on TechCrunch

"Today more than ever, the Web is a global game. Below are charts from a new State of the Internet report from comScore that paints a picture of global competition on the Web. In 1996, two thirds of all people online (66 percent) lived in the U.S. By last October, that had completely flipped, with 77 percent of the online population living in the rest of the world and only 23 percent in the U.S. The U.S. still has the largest total number of Web surfers (162 million a month), but China is catching up fast (with 96 million)"

IE8 Beta

Microsoft prepares to release IE8...

IE8 will replace Internet Explorer 7.0, Microsoft's current internet browsing software program. IE7 was introduced in October 2006.

Following some criticism of IE7, version 8 is expected to more fully comply with World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) standards. W3C attempts to ensure cross-browser and -platform interoperability. RIval browsers such as Mozilla's Firefox already comply with W3C standards.

Website Law - Privacy Policy

Good Privacy Policy for UK websites. Free version allowed if you keep their author credit intact otherwise there is a standard licence fee.

"Our privacy policy document is intended for use in England and Wales in relation to websites which collect and process personal information. It may be used to help website owners fulfil their obligations under data protection legislation."