Internet Explorer 6 no longer supported

Mar 11, 2010

We would like to inform you that as of the end of March 2010, we will no longer develop Seller Account pages to be compliant with Internet Explorer 6.

Internet Explorer 6 is no longer supported by Microsoft and is widely considered to be obsolete. It has multiple security flaws and is considerably slower than recent browsers.

This decision allows us to use all modern web development technologies and create an up-to-date user experience.

Although existing seller tools might continue to work for some time with older browsers, if you are still using Internet Explorer 6, we strongly recommend updating your browser to a more recent version now to make sure all Seller Account pages work properly on your computer.

If you are unsure which browser version you are running or how to update your brower, please contact your local system administrator or help desk for assistance.

If you’re still using Internet Explorer version 6 (or earlier) for public Web browsing it’s imperative that you upgrade as soon as possible to a modern standards compliant browser. It’s not hard to find lots of reading material regarding the myriad of security (and many other) issues inherent to Internet Explorer 6. For those who want to take my word for it, Internet Explorer 6 is an obsolete Web browser that is incompatible with the modern Internet and may present serious security risks. Using IE6 might be compared to driving a Model T down the 405 in LA. This analogy sounds a bit exaggerated but is really quite accurate in reflecting just how outdated and dangerous IE 6 is in the modern Internet Environment.

This is not just my opinion; there’s a consensus (including Microsoft itself) that IE6 users have clear and compelling reasons to upgrade. It’s easy to find this information through a Google search, but here are a few quotes and sources to get you started:

• Microsoft Security Advisory (979352): Vulnerability in Internet Explorer Could Allow Remote Code Execution.
• PC Magazine: Microsoft Warns of IE[6] Flaw That Compromised Google
• ARS Technica: After Google hack, Microsoft asks users to abandon IE6, XP
• Information Week: France, Germany Say Stop Using Internet Explorer 6
• PC World: Google to End Support for IE6
• The Register: IE6 exposed as Google China malware unpicked
• Secunia reported 24 unpatched vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer 6 as of February 9, 2010. These vulnerabilities, which include several "moderately critical" ratings, amount to 17% of the total 144 security risks listed on the website as of February 11, 2010.
• ARS Technica: Microsoft warns of IE bug used in Chinese attacks on Google

How do you check to see if you’re using Internet Explorer 6 / IE6?

1. Open Internet Explorer, and look in the upper right hand corner it will often indicate "IE 6".
2. To to help -> About Internet Explorer and look for a version number

How to get rid of Internet Explorer 6

Recommended: Install one of the following non-microsoft modern standards compliant browsers. During the upgrade process you will have the option to import your prior bookmarks from Internet Explorer.

• Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Safari for Windows

Alternate Option: If you choose to upgrade to the newest version of Internet Explorer (not what I personally recommend) you can go to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer site and go initiate the download process for the most recent version of IE. When you upgrade your old versions are removed.

TinyMCE Text Editor

Blog and Content Management platforms such as WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Drupal and CMS Made Simple all offer great WYSIWYG text editors that allow site owners and authorized users the ability to login to their Website and add text and photo content themselves.

These text editors are suburb, but there is one very common frustration that manifests when users  cut and paste content from MS Word. When content is pasted directly from MS Word to your blog a bunch of “bad” code often gets carrying over in the process. This proprietary Word styling code is veyr likely to mess up the HTML/CSS styling of your Webpage .  Some CMS editors offer additional features for “cleaning” word code while pasting which work to varring degrees. Regardless of what other options you might have, following is a fail safe method for cleaing MS Word content on paste for any blog/CMS system:

1. Don’t paste Word content that includes photos other embedded elements. To include those elements in your blog or CMS you’ll want to upload and position them individually using the upload and layout capabilities of your Website.
2. For Windows users, open Note Pad (NOT Word Pad) then cut and paste your content from Word to Note Pad, and then from Note Pad to your blog/CMS text editor.For Mac users you’ll need to get a free text editor (I recommend Text Wrangler) and do the same cut and paste routine as mentioned above.
3. After you cut and paste the cleaned text content, you’ll need to go through and add paragraph or line breaks. Just go to the end of your first paragraph text and hit enter/return, repeat for all remaining paragraphs. If your Word content had other styling (bold text, italic text, lists, etc.) you’ll need to go through and use the CMS text editors styling features.

The best way to avoid the hassle of restyling content after a cut and paste from Word is to get into the habit of creating your content in your blog .  If you need to send that content in a Word document or email cutting and pasting the other direction, from your blog’s text editor directly to Word, usually carries over styling and paragraph breaks with no adjustments necessary.

As I understand it, the program allows registered members of the Microsoft Partner Program (the basic membership is free) to participate in the MAPS program for an annual subscription price of $299.

With that subscription you get a majority of the major Microsoft titles for internal business use, including:

• 10 licenses of Windows Vista
• 10 Office Enterprise 2007
• 10 Outlook 2007
• 10 Project Professional 2007
• 10 Visio Professional 2007
• One licence of Small Business Server 2008
• One SQL Server 2008
• One Exchange Server 2007

This is just a sample, the complete list of software titles is here.

One copy of Office Professional 2007 is $379 on Amazon so obviously a MAP subscription could save your company an exceptionally large amount of money. The caveat on the program is it’s intended, “For businesses whose primary function is to sell, service, support, or build solutions on the Microsoft platform, or to provide solutions based on Microsoft products and technologies to independent third-party customers.”

• Additional information and program registration can be found here.
• More information on program eligibility can be found at the “Download Program Details” link at the bottom of  https://partner.microsoft.com
• If you have questions about if your company qualifies you can also contact MS directly.

If you’ve used this program or have any insight on the details please let me know.

Facing Mean Streets of Information Highway by Connie Skipitares.

One of relatively easy way of monitoring your good name against the type of online identity theft mentioned in the article is to set up a Google Alert on your name. Unless you have an exceptionally unique name (like I guy I met once named Blender G. Shoulders in Tanner, Alabama) just throw in your city or state to the search query.

Feedburner’s Headline Animator Email Snippet

One of their many great tools is the “Headline Animator” which is a snippet that rotates your blog feed’s five most recent blog post titles. It’s well suited to be included in custom email signatures as a clever means of promoting your blog to unsuspecting recipients.

Enter the villain: Outlook 2007

As I’ve already complained about in a prior post, Microsoft took a big step back in HTML customization capability with Outlook 2007. Besides the horrible decision to use Word to render HTML for Outlook, the handy option for “advanced” (HTML) editing is gone from Outlook’s custom signature feature. This presents a problem to those of us who want to add the snippet code produced by FeedBurner’s Headline Animator to our Outlook 2007 email signature. It’s not that pretty, but following is a step-by-step guide to forcing Outlook 2007 to comply with our wishes.

The easy annoying workaround

1. After you set up your blog feed in feedburner (http://feedburner.google.com), go to the “Publicize” tab, and select “Headline Animator”, “Create new…”, set your preferences, name the snippet, then hit “Activate.”

2. Now click on the name of your snippet that just appeared under “Headline Animator” in the left column. You’ll see your snippet rotating headlines from your feed. Select “Other (just gimme the code)” and click next to see a pop-up with your code. Uncheck “Include a ‘Grab this’ link” and copy the code to Note Pad. You will need to use Note Pad, not Word or Word Pad, for all your edits (or an HTML editor if you have one).

3. Download this template and open with Note Pad. Open side-by-side this template file and the other Note Pad file into which you pasted your FeedBurner code. Then modify the template with your feedburner links and either delete or modify the alt tag and contact info above the snippet.

4. Enable Windows to see hidden files/folders. A guide for doing this can be viewed here.

5. In your modified Note Pad template file, choose “Save as” then navigate to:

Windows Vista— C:\Users\user\AppData\Roaming\Microsoft\Signatures

Windows XP— C:\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\Microsoft\Signatures

6. First, select “All Files” in the “Save as type:” field, then name and save your signature with an .htm extension (e.g. “feedburnersiganture.htm”).

7. Now open Outlook 2007 and go to Tools -> Options -> Mail Format -> Signatures and you should see your new signature with the feedburner snippet as a signature option.

Now, recipients will see your snazzy rotating FeedBurner headlines in your signature. All recipients that is except those using Outlook 2007 who will only see your most recent title. That’s right, Outlook 2007 has one last punch to throw. Microsoft has disabled rotating gifs from rotating in Outlook 2007 and provided us with no option to enable them. If you’re hard up for something to do you can vote for Microsoft to change this policy at this Microsoft page.

The good news is that almost all other mail clients don’t have this restriction, and even when being displayed in Outlook 2007 your snippet will still dynamically update to display a static most recent post title so all is not lost.

Because this it’s such a common misconception I should mention first that running Windows or Linux on your Web server has no relationship to the operating systems you and your site users are running on their personal system.  Individual computers running Windows or Mac OS Xand and using common Web browsers don’t care what operating system the Web server is running on.

Here highlights I took from the article:

• Both Windows and Linux are about equal when it comes to market share, reliability, performance and security.
• Because Windows is proprietary commercial software and Linux is open source software, if your business decides to own and operate your own Web servers, Windows can be more costly. However, this base cost is nominal if you choose to outsource your Web server hosting and management.
• Linux offers the inherit advantages of open source . . . in terms of flexibility and customization. The author states:

Linux distributors, using an open-source application with more flexibility, can implement “extensible” packages with greater customizability. In normal situations, the performance of the two is comparable, but if system functionality is most important to you, this may have an impact on your final decision.

Another critical consideration that wasn’t mentioned in this article is total cost of ownership. Linux is generally regarded as the leader in this category, but not necessarily, it all depends on each organization’s goals and required applications. Researching total cost of ownership can be confusing . . . since many of the most popular studies are drawing data mostly from very large IT enterprises and in very large enterprises TCO tends to level out between Windows and Linux.

As a general rule the smaller the organization, the more clear-cut are the TCO benefits of Linux over Windows. This does not imply that Linux will not be the best choice for the largest enterprise environments (examples of Linux enterprises include the city of Los Angeles, NASA, Amazon, American Fidelity Assurance Company and Overstock.com), but what it does mean is that any business should spend the time to evaluate the options in light of their specific needs to get the right answer.

A number of people have brought to my attention that they’ve noticed fonts appear much crisper and readable when viewed with IE 7.  With the release of IE 7, Microsoft introduced what they call ClearType . . . a font smoothing algorithm that increases readability for those using LCD displays. It really makes quite a difference and is probably the most impressive thing I’ve seen come from Microsoft in the last few years (I confess to not being much of a Microsoft fan).

For those surfing on a Firefox / Windows XP combo, the process for activating ClearType is quite simple:

1. Minimize all your windows and right click anywhere on your desktop.
2. Select Properties then choose the appearance tab then click the Effects button.
3. Make sure the check mark is in the box next to “Use the following method to smooth edges of screen fonts:” and select ClearType. Then click OK.

Once you start surfing in Firefox again you should notice a marked improvement to readability.

For some reason, Microsoft decided to remove some features in Outlook 2007 that made installing a custom HTML email signature a breeze. Although nowhere in the email signature feature of Outlook 2007 is HTML mentioned, the signature is still in this format, it just takes a less direct approach to get it accomplished.

Here’s one relatively easy method for inserting custom HTML for an email signature.

1. Open the HTML file that contains your signature in a Web browser such as FireFox.

2. Left click at the top left of the page, then while holding down the shift key left click in the lower right area of the page. If you don’t see anything obviously highlighted you may need to left click at the top then hold down your left mouse button as you move to the lower right.

3. Right Click and select copy.

4. Create a new signature in Outlook 2007 and then within that blank signature window right click and select paste or press ctrl-v.

5. Save your new signature and set your desired parameters.

For more insight into working with custom signatures in Outlook 2007 you might want to check out this free Outlook 2007 email signature training from Microsoft.

The most important principle to remember to protect yourself from any marketing scam is to always be extremely wary of any unsolicited communication, whether by phone, email or postal mail, that claims to:

A. Be able to do something that seems too good to be true, or

B. Presents a “bill” or “invoice” regarding your domain, Website or some other Web related service from a company that sounds official, but of whom you’ve not dealt with before.

Scam 1—Bogus Domain Registration Invoices

Almost anyone with a domain name registered has probably come across this one. An official sounding company sends you an invoice that states or implies you will soon lose your domain if you don’t register with them. If you have never heard of this company, there is a 99% chance it’s an unethical attempt to get your money. The easiest thing to do is Google the company name or do search on the FTC site. If are still uncertain don’t hesitate to fax or email us a copy.

Scam 2—Unsolicited SEO Spam

I get a kick out the chutzpah of professed SEO companies who resort to spam marketing their implied expertise in driving new customers through search engines. If they really are so good at getting business through search engines why do they have to resort to the most despised of illegal Web marketing to get their own?  The answer is obvious.

Google states it best:

Be wary of SEO firms and web consultants or agencies that send you email out of the blue….Reserve the same skepticism for unsolicited email about search engines as you do for “burn fat at night” diet pills or requests to help transfer funds from deposed dictators. No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google. (Read the whole page at Google.com)

We encourage you to read this prior post of ours where we go into more detail on the topic.