When will IE6 die?
by Martin TylerJuly 21st, 2009
At Caplin we put a lot of effort into supporting our products on IE6, because our customer based is mainly in the corporate world where IE6 is still commonplace. A couple my my colleagues have recently blogged about this, Supporting IE6 - a poison chalice or the holy grail? and Browser wars: the ceasefire is over.
Also, over at Ajaxian they are talking about the slow death of IE6
With all the great new versions of browsers out there, Chrome, Firefox 3.5, Safari, even IE8, and, more specifically for Comet, talk of HTML5 WebSocket etc, it’s a shame that the web is still restricted somewhat by IE6.
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July 21st, 2009 at 1:53 am
A few main reasons:
* enterprises locked on expensive software (e.g. a company that bought an old version of Siebel that works fine in IE6, and doesn’t want to pay for the new version that supports IE7
* enterprises that are understaffed and don’t want to spend money testing a new environment
* old machines that just won’t die, running older versions of Windows, and Microsoft’s inability to backport IE8 functionality into IE6 (e.g. multiple rendering environments for older browsers)
July 21st, 2009 at 2:07 am
The corporate world might be stuck on IE6 for some time to come for all kinds of reasons, but that doesn’t give them any excuse not to install an *additional* browser. Firefox for instance is very unobtrusive (no shared DLLs or whatever dependency) and works on old Windows machines perfectly well.
July 31st, 2009 at 2:48 pm
Unfortunately IE6 is not going to die, Microsoft is including IE 6 in the new versions of Windows Mobile (since 6.1.4), and is the real IE6 from desktop including bugs.
http://www.engadgetmobile.com/2008/09/29/shots-of-microsofts-internet-explorer-6-on-6-emerge-deepfish/
August 1st, 2009 at 6:27 pm
Microsoft did a good job with marketing IE in its early days. I’m still amazed how, firstly, companies didn’t abandon it a long time ago, secondly, how they didn’t see the trap they’d be setting for themselves, and last but not least, why developers are forever pandering to compatibility issues for those users. I left web design for 12 months and naively thought it would be dead but the beast is still alive! Jose’s post about 6 on 6 is news to me and is *shocking*. I’m appalled!! I’m tired of png transparency issues, IE’s box model, quirks mode, IE specific stylesheets and the rest of it. http://ie6update.com/ - now they have the right idea lol. Sadly most approaches will just hurt the owner of the website, except maybe youtube’s approach but none of this deals with how to move the corporate giants onto something else, except the (hopefully inevitable) move towards RIA’s. Who would have thought one version of a browser (of all software) could stick around for 8 years!
August 1st, 2009 at 11:54 pm
I hate IE6, i wish someone whould create a virus to force people to upgrade the browsers
November 17th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
I’m tired of these excuses about corporations locked in with IE6.
It is time to invest in the future. Did companies adopt phone systems, fax machines, etc during the last century or did they keep phone operators and mail carriers like old days?
Sure it took money, but progress is expensive.
Corporations need to upgrade their browsers and spend the money to get programs fixed
or
get out of the way!