Angry Web Designer

The Bad

The slow death of IE6

With its 8th birthday coming up on the 27th of August its time to reflect on a very painful and long lived life of Internet Explorer 6.

Released on the 27th of August in 2001, IE 6 was the new browser to be included with Windows XP. IE 6 was an improvement to its IE 5 sibling and at its time, was ok for standards and compliance with CSS and HTML. In the next few years there was plans for the new HTML 5 and CSS 3 spec and other browsers, such as Firefox and Safari, started to include these new specs. IE 6 over time has become more and more behind the times and now is one of our biggest issues in the web design industry.

Why its a problem now

IE 6 and its continued existance can be put down to a few factors:

1. Enterprise and businesses have kept with IE 6 as they believe it to be ’stable’ and more ‘reliable’ than IE7 or 8
2. IE doesn’t have a update checker function nor does it let the user know there are any updates available
3. Your mum and dad users just have no clue how to upgrade (thats when their son/daughter comes in and installs Firefox and deletes the IE shortcut)

And its those main factors that have made IE6 last so long, mainly put down to a fear or lack of understanding of upgrading. 

Usage of IE falling like a rock

Its true, every day you wake up there is at least 1 person that has changed or upgraded their IE6 browser. What good motivation to get up and get designing. Recent statistics have shown that the browsers usage has dropped by 2.27% in the Jan-May period this year. Some would say thats not fast enough, the glass is half empty type of people, and I somewhat agree because the browser is almost 8 years old and should have ideally died completely.

The rate of its demise is hampered by the restriction of upgrading. In statistics by Digg it was found that 70% of their IE6 users could not upgrade because their work said they could not upgrade or that they had insufficient administrator access to their system at work. A further 17% said they didn’t need to upgrade and 14% liked IE6 or had an older system that couldn’t do anything else.

Enterprises slow change

Simply put, businesses need stability and safety. Only IE6 has proven itself in this field thus far. IE7 and 8 are either too Beta or not proven to be secure enough to be in their business, not going to go into how insecure IE is in general. Another frightening fact is that some website applications are exclusively IE and IE6 specifically, I found a government site recently that required this. It makes me furious to think that some developers would be so blind and one-eyed that they would only develop support for IE, even if they are pushed into it or not.

This is the honey pot right here, if businesses change and upgrade to a better IE or to a different browser then we are set. It’s probably not the Sys Admins fault, I know this from personal experience, because upper management might think that Mozilla Firefox is some weird pizza name (I did over hear it called “Mozzarella Firefox” at one point) or their afraid that there will be endless issues with a new browser.

Why support the bloody thing

Ill sum this point up swiftly by a post from @collis:

A few people asked about IE6 traffic.  To most of our sites it’s about 3-4%.  On Tuts+ for example though that = 150k visitors a month

Although a small percentage, that can equate to a lot of users in some cases. If you’re building a website and you have determined the IE6 user base is small then you could pass on completely testing it in IE6 but if you’re making the next Twitter then unfortunately you’ll have to suck it up and deal with it.

The future

There will be a time when us web designers wont have to worry about browser compatibility. But im saddened to say that its time is not fast approaching if the current trends continue.

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