The Great IE6 Assassination Plot
It seems to me this year there has been a much more widespread push to do away once and for all with that bane of the web page: Internet Explorer 6.
Long the cause of many web developer’s headache and anguish, more and more websites are being circulated that have to do with the movement to banish the browser to the depths of antiquity where it belongs. On top of this, it seems there are quite a few industry names who are lending weight to this effort.
So given that my workplace (“The Office”) has recently made a development decision for one application for which one of the key requirements was “must run on IE6″, I find myself wondering: Just how likely is this campaign to succeed?
A Little History
Internet Explorer 6 was release in 2001 as part of Windows XP and Windows Server 2000. It saw a meteoric rise in use as it rode the coattails of those operating systems’ success.
However its rendering engine was massively flawed, still carrying a lot of the baggage it had picked up from the original browser wars against Netscape Navigator – presumably for legacy compatibility reasons. This meant that developers for web applications and sites needed (and continue) to use a number of different hacks and workarounds to get sites to render correctly in IE6 compared to other browsers.
Which brings us to today. A huge number of corporates and many “Mum and Dad” home users still continue to use IE6 today. For corporates, the cost involved in upgrading – from regression testing, recoding, break-fixing, deployment and user training is usually the elephant in the room that is ignored until necessity demands the upgrade. For home users, it would typically be technophobia, indifference or just a lack of awareness that prevented upgrading to the latest version.
So when Scott Hanselman – a prominent personality in the Microsoft Developer space – lends his weight to the campaign to rid the world of the IE6 legacy, I had to wonder, “Is this really likely to work?”.
It seems a number of sites have cropped up recently trying to encourage anyone who’ll listen to get off IE6 and onto something – anything – else. The following two websites are the latest in a trend
http://www.stoplivinginthepast.com/
I want to believe
I like the intent behind these initiatives. As a web developer, I’m constantly finding myself at war with IE6 trying to get the page I’m working on to render correctly. But the reasons I mention above make me think that no campaign in the world is going to matter until corporates at least are forced into pushing out a newer version (hopefully IE8). Once this happens, companies may start advertising their sites as requiring these newer versions so that we start to see a trickle-down effect whereby those late-adopters (about 20% of the global market, depending on whose stats you read) fall in line.
If you’re using IE6 (there’s about 10% of you on average) and you’re not constrained by corporate sluggishness, shame on you! But honestly, I feel reluctantly resigned to the reality of having to support that community for at least another 12 months yet.
Sorry, Scott!
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