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Saying Goodbye to IE6

January 18th, 2011

Information Architecture, Internet Strategy, Technology, User Experience Design, Web Development

As developers, we strive to provide the best user experience on the web, priding ourselves on seamlessly enhancing or degrading the user’s experience depending on the capabilities of the user’s browser. But at what point do we stop catering to the few, so we can deliver a much richer experience to the many?

Many freelancers are openly refusing to develop for IE6, not because they can’t, but because of the fact that it hinders the innovation they would like to see throughout the web, in web applications, and on intranet portals and websites. With so many companies beginning to open up their sites to HTML5 and CSS3, it isn’t enough anymore to be cross-browser compliant. Web Applications and websites need to be highly interactive for users to truly obtain an experience that will stand out in their mind. Developers and organizations need to think about the web in a new way.  No longer is it a place where everyone is entitled to the same experience, but it is a place where those with the right capabilities can have a truly amazing experience.

Even with the strongest developers on a project, there is a long list of bugs and deficiencies to overcome to provide even a degraded experience on IE6. When it comes to supporting modern technologies like simple transparent pngs, and CSS, the browser rebukes with nerve characteristic of a computer from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The time to upgrade is long overdue, and consumers of the web need to educate themselves about their browser. After all, many older browsers have huge security vulnerabilities, which can leave users with viruses, trojans, or even worse, a stolen identity. With the Microsoft Internet Explorer team itself vowing that its main mission “is to get people off of IE6 and onto a later version of IE as fast as humanly possible,” one can only be left wondering, why are we still developing for IE6?

Because we still choose to.

One of the largest problems is that we as developers and organizations still choose to support it. Despite the fact that more and more developers are boycotting IE6 development all-together, many agencies still support it at a premium. This in turn forces companies to address the security issues and inefficiencies that IE6 brings to their organization.

As developers and organizations on the web, we are the ones responsible for fostering the growth of the web, and for accelerating or impeding its advances. Currently, many of the big players on the web have begun dropping IE6 support altogether, including Google Apps, Youtube, Facebook, Digg and Twitter. On the official Google Enterprise blog, Google cites one of the reasons it dropped the dying 10-year-old browser: “​The web has evolved in the last ten years, from simple text pages to rich, interactive applications including video and voice. Unfortunately, very old browsers cannot run many of these new features effectively.” While there is no specific timetable for ending IE6 support for Gmail and Google Calendar, the door has begun to shut already. As IE6 support crumbles across the web, the incentive to switch to a modern browser will exponentially increase.

So who’s moving off IE6?

As Microsoft cites, “Small to medium sized organizations lead the pack in moving off of IE6, but even the largest enterprises with over 50,000 seats show similar trends – just 12.1% of web browsing in those organizations comes from IE6.” This is great news for developers and for web users in general. Even better, “In the year immediately after IE8 launch (April 2009 to March 2010), Forrester saw IE6 share cut in half on their website, dropping from 41% to 21.1%, and IE8 share multiply from 3.1% to 17.3%.” Not only are consumers finally jumping the sinking ship that is IE6, they are jumping to a better equipped IE8, which is much closer to being ready to handle the challenges of the future. The even better news is that Microsoft has confirmed that the upgrade path for applications from IE8 to IE9 will be much easier. IE9 will be the first truly modern browser from Microsoft that will support most of the web standards out there, and stir up the competition among the browser vendors.

When Net Applications reported the lowest market share in history for IE6 this November after its market share dropped globally to 14.55%, many developers jumped for joy. An important thing to consider when digesting these numbers is that much of that IE6 market share remains in China where, due to the proliferation of pirated software, IE6 usage share is 45.20%,  (The Business Software Alliance found pirated software to make up about 80% of all software in China in 2009).

Frankly, I’m not surprised that people are leaving IE6. After all, it is 2011, not 2001.

People, let’s get real, Internet Explorer is a 10-year-old browser. 10 years. I can’t think of any consumer electronic form of anything that will be remotely relevant in 10 years. A $5000 laptop? Not even in 3 years. A 52” HDTV? Maybe a year. My iPhone? Maybe another year. My car? It’s already irrelevant. With the technological revolving doors shuffling new technologies in and out, why has this one managed to stay?

The root of the problem

Many organizations are concerned about security and compliance, as well as the risk that custom applications may not work on new browsers. Additionally, along with the 70% of companies restricting browser choice and web content, many organizations limit the ability to upgrade. If you’re part of the 10.3% of enterprises still running IE6, Microsoft has a nice video for building a business case for migrating to IE8. Here is another page showcasing a great comparison of security vulnerabilities between the browsers (lets not even go into the IE6 Gmail hack by China which took advantage of vulnerabilities in IE6, 7, and 8). It clearly demonstrates the advantages of utilizing an offering of browsers at your organization.

Still, the most surprising reason of all that some are still operating on IE6 is brought up in a great article by Klint Finley.

“Some managers have realized that IE6 works fine for required enterprise applications, but makes browsing newer social media sites an unpleasant experience. This may seem like a clever way to restrict users’ Internet behavior on the cheap, but the security risks are obscene. Companies trying to block what sites people view at work should invest in proper web filtering technology.

Meanwhile, the options for enterprises that need to support legacy applications – third-party or in-house – have few options. Microsoft encourages customers to use terminal services or virtualization – but both options get expensive quick. Microsoft doesn’t support virtualizing just IE6 – users must virtualize both the operating system and the browser.

Pretty likely because Microsoft has argued for years with various governments around the world that IE was not a separate application and was instead an inseparable part of the OS. Virtualizing it as an application would run counter to this argument.”

If a user chooses to run a website in IE6, that is his decision, but the user experience for the other 80% of the population should not be hindered because of this inability to cope with the times. Should a developer have to spend time debugging code for IE6 rather than building a more immersive experience that works in every other browser? From Ferraris to consumer electronics, things 10 years dated do not stand side-by-side with technology from the present. So what is the solution?

We are the solution.

We need to foster the growth and development of new technologies on the web, and dropping styling and scripting support for IE6 is a good way to encourage the most stubborn of consumers to move to something…from this decade. If you need to use IE6 for a web application, at least download a modern browser like Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera, or my personal favorite, Google Chrome, for your browsing needs.  If you want to a real wake up call, check out these statistics which show security vulnerabilities amongst the different browsers, and more importantly, how quickly they are fixed.

It’s up to you developers. You are the ones who make the choice to support this browser. Would you rather spend time building cool interactivity in HTML5 and CSS3, or debugging IE6?