Comments on: IE6 (A.K.A. The Internet’s Ex-6irlfriend)

By: Fred

Fred — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 13:34:06 +0000

Hi Petralian,

Thanks for the comments! I think it used to be mostly pragmatism that compelled developers to continue to support IE6, but realistically we can’t justify spending our time on it, and in the last several months the push has REALLY been felt online and across social media. I think the nails are firmly planted in the coffin, so to speak. Thanks for reading, and PS you do great work, I checked out your portfolio

By: Petralian

Petralian — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 07:28:41 +0000

Although those companies’ managers and bosses are our customers… their employees are not and if they already are able to get online it is because they went around company restrictions. I used to work for a while at a call center for P&G. We were stuck on IE6 and it was impossible (lol) to use the browser for anything but intranet pages… while the managers had their laptops that had windows xp or later installed with firefox and whatever else they wanted.

I already gave up supporting IE6 in my online apps, instead of that just made a notice on top when you open in IE6 that half of the functionality sad fully is disabled… I really do not think it is worth keeping giving support. Of course I understand some people will debate this but in general… IE6 is dead… long live IE8 (and firefox, and safari and also definitely chrome)

By: Tim Smith

Tim Smith — Wed, 27 May 2009 16:55:52 +0000

Great post! You make some excellent points. I wish people wouldn’t upgrade their IE and instead moved to a superior browser like Firefox or Safari.

By: Davide Di Cillo

Davide Di Cillo — Wed, 27 May 2009 03:44:40 +0000

I agree with HB. Most of the IE6 users are from big corporations where they can’t upgrade the browser on their own and automatic updates are disable.

Sadly it happens that often those people are our clients…

By: Fred

Fred — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:08:57 +0000

Thanks for your comments, HB. Very insightful and of course, it’s useful for us to understand the nature what is causing these numbers to be that high. Very useful!

By: HB

HB — Tue, 26 May 2009 19:04:17 +0000

Nice analogy. I would think even Microsoft supports the concept at this time, since IE8 was pushed as an automatic update last month.

Only corporate users on Win2k (IE7+ not supported) whose company policies forbid installation of other browsers are likely using IE6. And if their company policies are that strict, it’s likely the amount and types of websites they can visit is restricted as well. Each site’s mileage may vary, of course, but there’s no need for widespread support.

One thing that’s keeping the “market share” numbers up is artificial inflation. Most homegrown crawlers and web bots use a stock IE6 user agent, so they get counted as though they were real IE6 visitors. Even some of the smaller search engines use an IE6 UA instead of their own custom string.