IE6 is the new Netscape 4

Cross-posted from the Particls blog.

“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the web.”Jeff Zeldman, standards guru

I saw the link to the bring down IE 6 site today via our friends on Twitter and simply had to announce our support for such an initiative.  IE6 while once the browser to which all others were bench marked, is now, frankly the bane of an Internet Start up’s existence.  It might have been great once, but all good things must come to an end, and for IE6, that time is now.

For Faraday Media, IE6 support has never been a priority, since our users and visitors are overwhelmingly Firefox users, so unofficially, we’d already been on this bandwagon.  Today, it’s official.

If you’re chained to IE6 due to some corporate SOE policy, you have my sympathy.  If you’re using IE6 voluntarily, then you only have yourself to blame (just for you, here is the link to Firefox).

I really encourage other start-ups to stand-up and vocally (and officially) join the movement.

Extending Explorer with Band Objects using .NET and Windows Forms

One of the great things about Firefox, is how easy it is to extend. Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer, not so much.  If you’re a ATL or COM guru then you might not find it so hard, but for those of us from a Managed Code background; its like splitting wood in your eyes.

A while ago I found a great article on CodeProject by Pavel Zolnikov, which walks you through the implementation of an Explorer bar with the help of BandObject base class. Describes implementation details of the BandObject class.

This was excellent, but it really didn’t work using the .Net 2.0 framework – that is until I found this little gem Band Objects – .NET 2.0 Redux.