Recently more and more companies are starting to drop support for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 6. Google has announced that Starting March they will stop supporting the browser. Youtube already stopped supporting IE6 earlier.
You might ask yourself why this is news. New software comes out on a fairly regular basis and one would expect people to switch over to new software eventually. Well, apparently this is not the case for IE6. Study shows that still one fifth of the web browsers used to view websites is IE6. This is quite remarkable, considering the fact this browser is going-on 9 years old and has already 2 successor versions (currently IE8 shipped with Windows 7).
Then why still IE6?
It’s not because IE6 is so much better than the newer versions (although one could argue that about IE7) or that there are no alternatives (like Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari).
It has more to do with companies and their policies for upgrading software. The company I work for (Sanoma Digital the Netherlands) hosts the biggest online news site in Holland. For them it’s critical that everything they do still is IE6 compatible. The reason is, that the news site is most often viewed from the office. From the statistics we can tell that there are still a lot of large companies that run XP with IE6. reasons for this may vary from the logistical hassle to upgrade all machines to specific web-based applications that were made for IE6 and would need to be changed in order to work properly in a new browser (or they just don’t want to risk it).
But why do website/service making companies like Google get rid of tested technology?
IE6 predates the so-called Web 2.0 era. With shoddy CSS 2.0 support and deviating from the standards makes it really hard to make a nice-looking and well-functioning website compatible with IE6. Sure, there are workarounds for a lot of that stuff, but workarounds are band aides that take time applying. The credo time = money is very valid on this subject; you are spending extra time just making it backward compatible with an out-of-date browser. Depending on how ‘2.0’ your site is, you can spend easily up to 50% extra time, which makes it partially an economic matter. On the other hand, who wants to be wasting precious time on a project trying to make it working on a fossil when you can work on nicer projects?
I am completely behind the idea of dropping support for IE6. 9 years in the field of computers is more than a lifetime. I think it’s time we pulled the life-support on this one and retire it to the annals of history, where it belongs.
And if you are still reading this through an IE6 browser it is your duty to either upgrade or whine for one at your local IT service desk… now!