It’s no big secret that large organizations are slow to change. Especially with their technology. But I am constantly amazed by the number of people who are still being forced to use Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) by their work environments. IE6 was initially released in 2001. That’s 8 year ago! Stop reading for a second and look around the room your in. What technology do you see from 8 years ago? When are large organizations going to realize that it’s time to upgrade?
Big reason #1 for not upgrading: “Upgrading may break our current apps.â€
IE6 behaves differently than every other browser, so it requires more development time. It is a last generation browser which doesn’t support many newer features. It is half the speed of most modern browsers (on a good day). This limits new applications, not to mention the price increases that accompany longer development processes. Google has been actively pushing people away from IE6. When you log into Gmail with IE6 you get a “Get faster Gmail” message which encourages you to switch to Chrome or FireFox. Even 37Signals has dropped support with an explanation of IE6’s limitations at http://37signals.blogs.com/products/2008/07/basecamp-phasin.html. It is much easier to upgrade an app to a modern browser, than develop modern apps to run in IE6. While these organizations may need to spend money on upgrading older applications, they will save money in the long run because all their new projects will be quicker and easier to develop.
Big reason #2 for not upgrading: “We don’t know the security and compatibility implications of upgrading.â€
Even Microsoft has decided it is time to move on. They have announced that they will stop actively supporting IE6 in June. It will be grandfathered in, but will receive no more compatibility and security updates. If this isn’t an indication that it is time to move on I don’t know what is. In 2009, Secunia, a computer security company, reported 142 vulnerabilities compared to the 34 in Firefox (http://secunia.com/advisories/product/11/). I wonder how long it will take for IT departments to catch on that upgrading will be cheaper and easier than trying to support software that even the company that wrote it won’t support.
If anybody else has complaints about IE6, let’s hear it.
Tags: Development, IE6, Internet Explorer, Technology
Good summary Forest.
I’ve been thinking lately that what we need is a community around educating people about the issues of continuing to use IE6. There are a lot of groups that are trying this but they too often fall into the trap of being too technical. What they need to do is explain in simple terms why an update is required which is simple to understand and quick to read. (Something kind of like this [http://www.stopie6.org/top-10-reasons] only more serious and less techie.)
I suspect that after Microsoft’s June deadline a number of site like the one you describe will start popping up.
Yes! Yes! Yes!
And trying to develop anything in CSS or javascript for IE6 is also a pain; usually resulting in extra CSS stylesheets and javascript files just to support this out-dated monster.
TG Daily – Wednesday, December 31, 2008 – Taking a page out of Apple’s book, Google is now urging Gmail users to drop Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) in favor of Firefox or Chrome that, according to the company, run the popular web-based email service “twice as fast.” Google also labels IE6 as an unsupported browser, meaning it fails to run some Gmail features.
http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/40785/140/