Bill Gates was a young, reckless, Harvard dropout in 1977. Just the type of criminal mastermind who'd conjur up IE6.

Want to have some fun with your Web Developer friends? The next time you’re chatting with them,  ask for their opinion of IE6. They might smirk a bit and maybe do a little fake nausea routine. Then as your query sinks in, they may exhibit some genuine exasperation as they explain to you the myriad hoops that must be jumped through to get a modern website to work reasonably well in an old, buggy browser.   You see, Internet Explorer 6 - Microsoft’s nearly 8 year old, bug-ridden browser  - is bad news.

All browsers have bugs, but IE6 has lots of them.  There are workarounds to most of them, but these workarounds invariably lead to compromises. For example, unlike all “modern browsers”, IE6 does not support transparent PNG images. There is a well known hack which lets you achieve the desired support of transparent PNGs in IE6, but this hack can lead to other layout problems, and is essentially incompatible with some other modern techniques, like using image sprites. The result of all this hacking? Compromises in the site design as well as the cleanliness of the code.

The complexities of a modern web application are getting harder and harder to accurately replicate in IE6. More importantly, there is a significant amount of project time spent resolving IE6 issues, and there are some techniques that just don’t work. Most websites use conditional statements to test if the site is being viewed in IE6, and include a seperate stylesheet or javascript file if so. This can mask some of the buggy behavior, but the user experience for someone using IE6 will be different than someone using virtually any other browser.

So, why are so many people still using IE6 in 2009? Why is this still a problem? For starters, IE6 shipped with the extremely popular and well distributed Windows XP operating system in 2001. After the enormous success and proliferation of XP, Microsoft didn’t release IE7 until 2006 - 5 years later. Given the predilection towards Windows networks in the corporate world, Windows XP and thus IE6 became firmly entrenched during this five year period, to the dismay of web developers everywhere.

According to some recent reports, IE6 is finally dying. In January of 2009, global usage of IE6 dipped below 20%, while Firefox, IE7 and IE8 all continued to gain market share at it’s expense.  Add the introduction of Google Chrome and Safari for Windows into the equation, and it looks like we could be witnessing the end of an era. As a matter of fact, according to ripie6.com, IE6 has already died.

While debugging a site recently in IE6, I checked our YouTube Channel, and noticed an ominous message from YouTube/Google: “We will be phasing out support for your browser soon. Please upgrade to one of these more modern browsers.” They have links to IE8, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chrome. A notice like this from YouTube to their extremely broad audience could produce a significant migration towards modern browsers.  37 Signals, the creators of the very popular Ruby on Rails framework, as well as the collaborative project management application Basecamp - phased out support for IE6 in October of 2008, citing that support for IE6 resulted in “slower progress, less progress and in some cases no progress.” Ouch.  Finally, there’s idroppedie6.com. It’s a place to officially declare ones independence from IE6 to the world. As of today, there are 473 sites and counting.  With all of this gathering momentum,  I’m expecting to see a growing list of large sites announce a “phasing out” of support for IE6 over the next year.

So, what should an IE6 user do?  Well,  Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Google Chrome are all free to download, easy to use, and closely conform to established web standards.  If you haven’t tried any of them, give them a shot, and join the world of modern web browsers.

To their credit, Microsoft has also released two major, significant upgrades to IE6. If you’re still using IE6 and you’re weary of non-Microsoft browsers, for Pete’s sake, try IE7 or IE8!

In 2001, IE6 was the best way to browse the internet on a PC. But it’s now 2009.  Browsers have evolved. The web has evolved. IE6 is a relic from another time, and while we’ll continue to support IE6 for the rest of it’s (hopefully short) lifetime, it really is time to say…”buh bye”.

This entry was posted on Friday, July 24th, 2009 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Browsers, Ideas, Web Standards. 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.