“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
Anyone who has worked with developing the presentation layer for web apps has become quite adept at creating workarounds in JS and CSS to try and give the user the same experience in IE6 that they’d have if they used an up-to-date browser. However, because of IE6′s non-compliance with W3C Standards, a ridiculous amount of extra work (i.e., hacks) is needed in order to get the page to render correctly in this most outdated of browsers. And, as Dietrich mentioned in a previous post, the problem is that these deviations from the standard end up becoming the standard and increase the amount of time required to write and maintain code.
Unfortunately, this ancient browser is still in use by a non-negligible amount of people (somewhere between 10 to 20% worldwide) who either can’t or won’t upgrade. Not all of this is their fault; people in corporate or government settings are at the mercy of their IT department (who may not want to support a non-IE browser) and their company’s budget (no compelling business reason to eliminate the company-wide Windows 2000 machines that can’t run IE7 or 8).
Ideally, Microsoft should drop support for IE6. Short of that earth shattering announcement, however, some high-profile companies have taken it upon themselves to no longer support IE6 or to support it at a lesser level:
- Facebook tells their IE6 users to upgrade in order to get a better experience.
- Google also gives an inferior experience to IE6 users, warning that some features of their products will not run in that browser.
- 37Signals no longer supports IE6 for their products
- At WordPress, Shockingly Big IE6 Warning is a plugin that shows a warning message alerting the user why it is bad to use IE6, the security risk and the bad compatibility of Web Standards.
- Finn.no, a well-trafficked eBay-like site in Norway, posted a warning on its web page for visitors running IE 6 urging them to ditch IE 6 and upgrade to Internet Explorer 7.
- .net magazine out of the UK has a bring down IE6 campaign along with the practical suggestion of “Ensure sites work in IE6, but don’t waste a lot of time fixing non-critical issues.”
Internet Explorer 6 was released in August 2001. Let’s give it a rest already.
