Have we seen the last of IE6? Google has dropped official support for Internet Explorer 6, and YouTube is close behind. It’s finally fallen behind Firefox in the web’s usage statistics. More and more developers are charging extra to add specs for IE6. Some people are even throwing funerals for the near-ancient browser (http://bit.ly/9ikjC1)!

No, we’re not out of the woods yet. Despite massive compatibility problems with the rest of the internet’s specifications, there’s still that last 20% hanging on, and it’s mostly for two quite understandable reasons.

First, it’s what Windows 2000 and Windows XX came with. You don’t have to do any extra work to get at it, so it’s used. Early on, automatic updates had to be enabled, and often things like that are ignored by many people. These people get missed by the upgrade path. Windows 2000 and Windows XP did quite well for a long time, and there wasn’t a well publicized reason to upgrade until Vista came around, more than 5 years after XP did.

The other big reason is that it often takes a lot of planning to make an update of that scale in a medium to large sized corporation. If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it, right? Well it’s broke, but not badly enough to necessitate putting the planning into upgrading in some situations.

So, why should you upgrade?

1. IE6 really is the internet’s proverbial dinosaur and never really worked like it should. While things might look ok to you, the presentation the website designer intended could be entirely different from what you’re seeing. Some features could just plain not work. Developers have spent huge amounts of time making workarounds to deal with this fact, but less and less developers are willing to put the time into those accommodations. The reality is that the longer you wait to upgrade, the more and more of the web will become hard to use or inaccessible to you.
2. IE6 is a huge security risk! This is the reason those medium and large corporations are looking for to upgrade. You’re putting your network at risk by using it. There are hundreds of possible ways to leak personal information by exploiting features of a web page. There are no updates for this browser anymore, Microsoft has stopped developing it 3 years ago and moved on to arguably better (though not perfect) browsers.
3. It’s free to upgrade. If you must stick with the Internet Explorer line, Version 8 is available for free for everything including Windows XP. Better alternatives like Firefox and Chrome are also free, and work on pretty well all operating systems you could ask for.
4. If you’re having someone develop a website for you, they’ll thank you.

This entry was posted by Chris Chatelain on Thursday, March 4th, 2010 at 5:25 pm and is filed under Online Marketing, Random Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.