IE6 is obsolete
Sunday, March 15th, 2009|
Can Internet Explorer 6 be considered a modern browser? It was released on August 27, 2001 (1). Its market share has been dropping 28 straight months to a current low of 17.4% (2). It peaked during 2002-2003 according to Wikipedia and W3schools. I find it amazing that still after all these years it still has market share at all. With Firefox, IE7, Opera, Google Chrome, how has it survived? There are so many choices why are people still using it? Corporate policies? Ignorance? Lack of knowledge? From a security standpoint it is down right frightening. |
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It has been almost 8 years since IE6 was in a public beta test. IE6 should not be hanging around anymore. It hardly follows any spec on CSS or HTML. It is Microsoft’s this is how it should be done and falling short of expectations. Though in its time it was the browser of the Internet reaching upwards of 95% (2). I was never a fan, I used Netscape, which wasn’t much better, then Opera, and now Firefox. |
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Change is Hard
I don’t think we will ever know the true reason why people still use IE6. If you do a quick search you find a ton of sites giving lots of reasons. “They don’t know any better”, “they dislike change”, “because they have to”, “they have an old computer” (3) … all valid reasons why but that is not the point. Change must occur. There are so many better choices people must be informed. This blog does not render correctly in IE6, its close but no cigar, and I think that is how people will ultimately change. We must move forward and leave people behind so they will catch up.
The Future is Now
I stumbled across a nice little blog Lea Verou that is done totally in CSS3. Very ambitous and is what a lot more sites should do. We must move forward so others may follow. We need more blogs pushing the newer standards. I don’t think corporations can do this because they are afraid of losing sales or isolating customers; a valid point. Is this a drawback of Corporations on the web? That all forward progress must grind to a halt? To a point. Yes.
There are a lot of interesting things happening right now that I think correlate to aging technology. The rise of netbooks hampers this forward progress. Vista and Netbooks never going to happen. Windows 7 and Netbooks sounds promising. I feel we are stuck right now. I think that is okay as things cannot be the same forever. The one balantly obvious fact is Microsoft’s model of stitching the browser to the OS will never work. It has to be independent to be effective. The next iteration of Microsoft IE codenamed “Gazelle” finally sounds like they are becoming a modern browser (hopefully). Looks like they are going to follow Google’s implementation of Google Chrome with a multi-process browser (each tab is a process).
The one certainty is that IE6 is dead and people need to be weaned off of it ASAP.
What browser do you use?
