Internet Explorer 6 is an old browser, in internet terms it is a dinosaur. Released in 2001, it has been the mainstay of peoples internet experience over the last 9 years.

The masses are often reluctant to change unless something pushes them along.

Firstly, Firefox gave users a good alternative browser to use (Better in my opinion)

Then came regular security issues, each time a further section of the browsing public moving to another browser. Most recently was the security hole that caused a breach in Google and over 30 other companies.

The key thing to note about this last issue was the speed and loudness of some governments urging people to look at other browsers to prevent further problems.

Some say that Firefox has overtaken Internet Explorer as the first choice in some countries.

However, there are still about 20% of the internet population using Internet Explorer 6.

I have now just read of Googles impending chang in in policy to cease support of IE6 from the 1st of March. This specifically deals with Google Docs and Sites, but shows a willingness to help push the remianing 20% into more modern browsers.

I support this as it has the following benefits:

1. Wider support for the new HTML5 (IE6 would not be able to offer this new technology)
2. Improved browser compatibilty with web standards
3. Speed

It would be great if those 20% could not use Google at all, that would really send a message!

If you want to know more you can visit IE6 No More, a site dedicated to helping it disappear as soon as possible

If you use IE6, why don’t you upgrade?

I have recently moved a site over from an ASP content management system to Joomla.

One of the tricky things was creating the redirects for the pages on the old site to the new.

Normally this is easy enough when you are redirecting a static page to another static page. Unfortuntely the mod_rewrite in Apache that is responsible for doing the rewriting of the URL’s cannot manage parameters after file name in the standard way, ie:

I wanted to send oldsite.com/index.asp?id=1 to newsite.com/news

However, everytime I used the standard redirect:

redirect 301 /index.asp?id=1 http://www.newsite.com/news

I ended up with a URL like : http://www.newsite.com/news?id=1

So I found a great resource here >> http://bit.ly/5WLc8q

It broke down the workings of the redirect and included the followign example

RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} ^id=1$
RewriteRule ^page\.php$ http://www.example.com/content/page? [R=301,L]

Once I used my own page references it worked great.

A big thanks to Alex Juel ( http://twitter.com/seoholicc ) for this tip!

Kick it to the Kerb?

That would be nice, as most web designers have come unstuck when a nice design fails spectacularly in IE6.

But unfortunately, there are still lots of people (over 30% in most cases) that are still using it, that is too large a number to upset with messages about compatibility and the like.

Some new designs from template makers will not work properly in Internet Explorer 6 and they provide warnings and encourage users to upgrade.

If you target corporate users, this is not a wise choice as some will still use IE6 across their organisation and IT are not keen to roll out IE7 or 8.

I have even recently visited a primary school that is still using IE6 in all of it’s classrooms.

For designers, testing in multiple browser brands involves installing the different browsers and testing as you go, however, my suite of browsers include:

• IE8
• Firefox 3
• Firefox 2
• Google Chrome
• Opera 9
• Opera 10

Notice that some browsers allow multiple versions to be installed simultaneously. This is a great thing for testing.

However, you can only install one version of IE, (there is a hacked version that allows older ones as well, but that seems a bit scary)

Recently, I found out about BrowserLab from Adobe, (Thanks @kalena) it is a great tool that lets you test browsers online without having to install them on your machine.

You enter the address of the site you want to test and the browsers you want to test on, and let it do it’s magic, you get presented with an image of what the result is for each browser.

Here is a list of all browsers:

• Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 under XP
• Internet Explorer 6.0, 7.0 and 8.0 under XP
• Chrome 3.0 under XP
• Safari 3.0 and 4.0 under OSX
• Firefox 2.0, 3.0 and 3.5 under OSX

Having Safari and Firefox under OSX is great too. No Opera yet, but I assume they will appear in time.

Good to see a useful resource hitting the web.

Do you have any web resources that you “must have”, let me know in the comments.

Had this problem for  a while, but since I use Firefox mostly, it hasn’t been too bad.

Anyway, I decided to find a dsolution and Google Help came to the rescue

The link is here http://bit.ly/d4mC2

Here is the solution

Go to Tools, Internet Options and select the Advanced tab.  Under the Browsing section remove the tick from “Enable visual styles on buttons and controls in webpages” and click on OK, the change should be instant.

So, a nice and easy fix, Thx to mooredc54 for this.

HTML 4 has been around for many years, and it looks like the newest incarnation HTML5 is going to make some serious changes to the way the web works.

Here is a video for those who are interested (it is over an hour long, and targetted at a technical audience, but very informative)

Here are some Highlights:

• Offline Storage including offline database storage
• Adding video will be as simple as adding an image to a webpage
• Forms will be much simpler, yet complete (things like calendars for dates etc)
• Geolocation API’s so you can get the location of a mobile device via the browser
• Drag and Drop
• Better interaction with the Operating System
• Canvas, being able to generate images dynamically

So there are plenty of cool things coming. Alreadt Google Chrome, Safari and a few other browsers (including iphone and android mobile devices) are already handling HTML5. However, there are not many websites that are written in HTML5 to take advantage of this.

Older versions of Internet Explorer (version 6 and older) won’t work as it is too old and one fight will be getting people to upgrade their browser so they can access these new features

We may be building dual websites for a while!

TinyURL.com, bit.ly and the new su.pr from Stumbleupon are all tools you can use for shortening URL’s, especially useful for Twitter and other micro blogging sites due to their limitation on each message.

However, I had never thought of the possible implications of shortened URL’s, primarily the ability to hide any references to bad sites hosting malware, phishing scams etc.

I found this in my server logs when someone used longURL.org to expand one of my shortened URL’s for a recent post, most likely found on my Twitter account or Digg as these are common places to find shortened URL’s.

It really made me think about how blindly we click on shortened URL’s expecting them to go to where the description says they will.

Have you had any bad experiences with shortened URL’s taking you places you hadnt expect? Is this a huge problem waiting to happen?

I cam across WP Greet Box, looking for some kind of Twitter integration (of which it isn’t really)

Anyway, looked like a great way to interact with visitors and from a social point of view a great way to encourage others to network via RSS, Twitter, Facebook etc.

By default the following are covered

• Delicious
• Digg
• Stumbleupon
• Technorati
• Twitter
• Google
• Yahoo
• Live and MSN
• Blogmarks
• Blinklist
• Diigo
• Facebook
• Furl
• ma.gnolia
• Mister-Wong
• Myspace
• Newsvine
• Reddit
• Simpy
• Plurk
• LinkedIn

There are other you can activate including Youtube, Wordpress, Tumblr and more.

It will be interesting to see what come of the change, if it drives more social interactions.

I’ll report back as to it’s success or otherwise (By the way, once I installed it, got three new Followers on Twitter, coincidence? mmm)

Video is getting more and more prevalent on the web, Youtube is the largest video platform and amazingly provides the second most searches of all search engines, behind Google.

This is a great opportunity to base marketing and SEO for your site / products / services

Here is a great video with the product manager for Youtube. Talking about some basics.

I am just starting on some video marketing with a client and will post some things I have found during the process here.

Have you had success marketing video on the web? Let us know.

With April 1 hard coded into the Conficker virus, expect some headaches shortly. We will either hear the gnashing of teeth and wails of “Not Me!” or a whimper as the virus is reactivated.

Here in NZ, there were some high profile casualties, Ministry of Health, Polytechnics, Newspapers sites

Whether lessons have been learnt, we will have to see.

Symantec’s protection steps against Conficker / Downadup.C / Kido

F-Secure’s removal tool and instructions for downadup variants

They say between 9 and 15 million PC’s are affected, how many after 1 April?

Owen Thor Walker, a 19 year old, who was wanted by the FBI for his part in leading the group the A-Team has been employed by Telstraclear for nearly a year to provide information for seminars.

Telstraclear made an interesting comment when they said:

He said it was not the equivalent of hiring a bank robber to advise on bank security.

Of course it is, however, that is not necessarily a bad thing. Hackers have been used for years to test and break into systems, giving large networks the kind of testing they would not necessarily find elsewhere.

These legitimate hackers can be a very good resource for corporates, it takes some strong leadership to bring in someone whose past is a little questionable and let them loose on the security side of things.

There have been many security breaches in New Zealand, we even have our own Hackers Conference : Kiwicon where there were sessions on such subjects as

• Walking Through Walls Ninja Style – The Art of Non-Destructive Entry
• Black SEO Exposed
• Tracking NZ Based Malware Distributors
• Mobile Phone Network Security

Security is a serious business and corporates like Telstraclear must be able to use the resourses available to it to make it’s products and services as secure as possible.

But do we trust them?