The curse of Internet Explorer 6
In October 2006 when Internet Explorer 7 was released we all breathed a sigh of relief. Finally, we all thought, we could look forward to a time when we didn’t have to worry about hacks, adjustments and fixes to get web pages to show correctly in IE6. No such luck! Two years on and IE6 usage still accounts for a sizable proportion of browser usage, thus we still have all the problems it gives us.
Why is IE6 so bad?
To the average web user IE6 may seem to work just fine, you can surf the web with it and browse web pages just like you always used to. Yet under the hood it’s very old technology (released in 2001) and it doesn’t actually render HTML/CSS correctly - this in turn forces web designers to spend extra time hacking and fixing web sites so they do work in it. Needless to say all this extra work is added to the clients bill when creating a new web site.
If one thing causes more stress to web designers it’s IE6!
Why IE6 won’t just go away
Many corporates and big businesses have embedded IE6 into their iT structure so deeply that they have to use it otherwise their systems will break or only partially work. In the past they built their software and intranets using IE6 specific features which only work with IE6, and this has literally tied them down with nowhere to go unless they updates their systems, and that’s going to be very costly for many of them.
The corporate problem is mostly self inflicted by lack of foresight and too much reliance of proprietary software.
Of course there are still a lot of home users who just haven’t upgraded their browser software to IE7 (or switching to another web browser). For the most part Windows users will have had their browser updates as part of the automatic Windows updates that come through from time to time, but many people have auto-updates switched off and they either don’t want to update or are simply unaware of them.
IE6 is holding up the advance of technology
It’s a fact that, because IE6 is still widely used, innovation on the internet is slowing down. There are numerous new technologies waiting in the wings, such as CSS3 and HTML5, that will revolutionise web generated content, but IE6 won’t support them - newer web browsers such as IE7 will though!
Mounting pressure from web designers
Many people are making efforts to bring the problem into the public light.
There are numerous kill off IE6 campaigns starting to spring up as a result of the continuing frustrations. Some prominent web companies are also taking the plunge and phasing out support for IE6 with their products.
The subject of IE6 has also been very a prominent topic for debate on web design forums. Apart from solving coding issues the biggest question is “When can I stop designing for IE6?” - the answer usually being “Not yet!”.
Three different approaches
We’re at a stage where web developers are now questioning the need to support IE6 on new web sites, and they fall into 3 camps:
- If a significant amount of the sites visitors will be using IE6 then the site has to be compatible
- If only a small amount of visitors will be using IE6 (say <1%) then abandon support
- Abandon IE6 altogether
I should note at this point “abandoning support” doesn’t necessarily mean web sites will just stop working altogether in IE6. For the most part it would mean that pages might look a bit strange and some things might not work as expected!
There’s no easy answer to this. At the time of writing I will continue to support IE6 on all new sites, unless the requirements of the site dictate otherwise.
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