On August 27, 2001, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) was introduced. Since IE6 two other versions of Internet Explorer have been released, respectfully IE7 and IE8. This is not a blog post touting how glorious IE6 is and how it has made our life easier or even a happy early birthday for that matter, but merely a place for me to ask a question. The question is simple, why are we still supporting a browser that is going on 8 years old?
Over the last month or so there has been a lot of debate over whether IE6 should still be supported. This was all spurred of course by the giant YouTube which if you view in IE6 will display a banner advising you to upgrade to a more modern browser (see image below).
YouTube
Why is YouTube making this move? The answer could be as simple as they don’t want to dedicate unnecessary resources to supporting a dated browser. It could also be that they are hoping to cause a movement which would make it easier for other big name companies to stop supporting the dated browser. I remember about 6 months ago GMail introduced a similar banner notifying IE6 users that they would be missing out on functionality unless they updated their browser. This of course caught them some heat so they quickly worked with IE engineers to build a new IE6 code base and streamlined the design for IE6 users to improve response times (read more here).
As a tiny experiment I walked around the office asking a few colleagues (developers) what they thought about IE6. Strangely enough they all got red faced and began stomping their feet while covering their ears. Honestly I expected this because developers hate the browser due to its short comings and not to mention the countless hours wasted in front of a computer trying to get the archaic browser to play nice. Now the other avenue that I wanted to explore was from a business perspective. I did some online research and came across an article written by Mark Tramell at Digg titled “Much Ado About IE6″. This article went into great detail about IE6 user’s in regards to Digg usage data and used pretty charts for us ADHD readers. Digg ran a message to IE6 users asking, “Why are you still using IE6?” A majority of the IE6 users said because they didn’t have administrator rights to their work computer or because someone at work said they couldn’t. Corporations control the environment in which their busy bees work and they have the ability to dictate what can and cannot be installed on those machines. From the business perspective they not only have tons of legacy applications that may or may not work in IE7 they also have the whole money issue too. Imagine you have about 2,000 employees spread out around the country and you wanted to upgrade to Microsoft Vista. That would be a huge undertaking!! You have to worry about licensing costs, countless IT man hours, training & training material, expected employee down time etc. Now it’s easy to put the blame on Microsoft and say “You should have pulled the browser out back and put it out of its misery” and as much as they would like too they still have to support it.
As much as we would like to rid ourselves of IE6 I don’t think its going anywhere anytime soon. I think we can do more to speed this transition process up by educating the businesses of the advantages of upgrading their browser. The interesting thing about the Digg survey was that a majority of users that had IE6 installed at work had Firefox or IE8 at home so I guess there is a glimmer of hope after all.
Thanks for listening!
Cheers,
Nick Palacios
Nice read, Nick.
This movement has finally gotten enough of Microsoft’s attention that they had their GM of the IE team respond. You can view his response, and the many many insightful and entertaining comments by web developers and IT professionals below.
http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/08/10/engineering-pov-ie6.aspx
One of my favorites:
“The problems and solutions are quite clear to me:
Problem 1: IE6 is not standard compliant, it wasn’t even when it was published
Problem 2: Corporations that need IE6 for their internal pages made a mistake (or were fooled by Microsoft sales personel into) investing money in Microsoft standard non-compliant intranet platform.
Web developers solutions:
Solution: Informing visitors that their browser is obsolete with links to modern browsers and stop supporting it. It is not at all webdeveloper’s problem. It is Microsoft and corporate customer’s problem.
Corporate solutions:
Solution: keep IE6, but install Firefox or Google Chrome to each desktop. So the employees can still access the obsolete intranet and at the same time employees and company will benefit from modern browser functionality. And yes, it requires additional effort to install it on so many computers, but you are paid for doing such things. Sorry guys, but my dear sys admins, you were the one who invested into (and trusted) software that lacks standard compliance.
Microsoft developers, and PR personnel. I understand that you can’t ban your customers, but please show the guts to take the responsibility on your own shoulders for the standard noncompliance that caused the situation and stop halting the world’s technology development just because it is not in your favor.
Microsoft once was a pioneer, and that old Microsoft would felt quite ashamed of what Microsoft is today. Instead of searching for competitive advantages in rapid and smart development, the only thing you can come up with is advantages through monopoly and financial power. Most of the things you implement in your products are based on ideas coming from open source society. And it’ is nothing wrong with that, as long as you would give it credit for their input and stop the FUD towards them. They too are your customers. There is no just open or just commercial IT systems anymore.
There is a place for everyone on the market, but even Microsoft must learn to follow its rules. Your bad public image caused by arrogance of the market backfire for sure.”
Scott | August 13, 2009 at 2:31 pm