Neoco

In August of 2008, Internet Explorer celebrated its 7th birthday. In browser years that is pretty old. I was still a teenager waiting to go to university. It was a long time ago! The problem that most developers have with IE6 (other than wasting countless hours of our lives trying to support it) is that we now live in a world where everyone talks about ‘accessibility’ and ‘web standards’, and IE6 simply does not comply. It is out of date, insecure and terrible at rendering pages to modern standards. Yet nearly 30% of internet users still use it as their main browser (W3counter).

Everyone wants their websites to use the latest cutting edge technology, but a significant proportion of people still continue to use a product that is incapable of supplying that to them.

So why have people been so slow to upgrade? one theory is that companies still have it installed as their default browser and it would be too expensive and time consuming to roll it out across hundreds or thousands of machines. While this may be true there has to come a point when everyone catches up with the modern world.
The last few years, particularly since the introduction of Firefox as a viable alternative to Microsoft’s web browsers, there has been a steady rise in the number of anti IE websites on the internet including:

“IE Death March,” “STOP IE6” and “Save the developers”

They all encourage web users to upgrade their web browser to a newer version, be it Microsoft’s more standards compliant IE7 or an alternative browser such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, or Apple’s Safari.

The relative success of browsers such as Firefox and Safari wrestling some market share away from Microsoft means the worm may be starting to turn. InfoQ point out that “Since attaining a peak of about 95% usage share during 2002 and 2003, Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been rapidly losing market share. As the end of 2008 approaches, significant online services, vendors and web frameworks are dropping support for IE6.”

Some of the big names that are dropping their support for the browser include Apple’s MobileMe (the rebranding of the .Mac service), 37signals (a prominent online software supplier), and Facebook, which now recommends upgrading to a newer browser.

It is this last one that could sound the death knell for IE6. If the world’s foremost social networking site ends up ending all support for the browser, then it can’t be long before the rest of the computing world follows suit. I for one hope that this day comes sooner rather than later.

Tags  37signals accessibility Apple Browser browser support developers Facebook IE6 InfoQ Internet Explorer Microsoft MobileMe Mozilla Firefox Opera Safari upgrade web standards