Saying goodbye to Internet Explorer 6
Today, Microsoft launched a big push aimed at “Moving the world off Internet Explorer 6”. IE6 Countdown aims to educate people about why they need to upgrade their browsers. The target is for IE6 to account for less than 1% of global share.
Web developers have long bemoaned the amount of work it takes to make modern-day websites work properly in IE6. It is a 10 year old browser — almost half as old as the web itself — but it is only in the past year or two that many web developers have begun to feel that it is reasonable to drop support for IE6.
Even so, even to have a website that does not work well for 1% of visitors may be deemed to be unacceptably high. While it is unreasonable to expect a website to work on a stone tablet as well as it does on an Apple iPad, if enough people are using certain software to surf the web — no matter how old it is — we need to make sure it works.
Worldwide usage of IE6
In February 2011, 3.5% of UK users were using Internet Explorer 6. Worldwide, 12% of users still use this decade-old browser. Most staggeringly of all, over a third of web users in China are still using IE6.
It looks like Nordic sufers are particularly savvy. Norway and Finland are the only two countries coloured green on Microsoft’s map, signalling that they have gone below the target of 1%.
St Andrews poised to go green
I have just checked the statistics for visits to the University of St Andrews website, and the percentage of IE6 users stands at 1.01%. This is a tiny smidge above Microsoft’s target of 1%. While the UK is still painted blue on Microsoft’s map, it looks like the University of St Andrews will go green soon!
Although most pages on the University website should work adequately on IE6, we have begun to stop supporting IE6 for some of the fancier, newer designs. There comes a point where supporting IE6 just becomes a waste of time — time that we really don’t have.
Why upgrade?
IE6 was a revolutionary browser for its time. But that was ten years ago, which is an absolute eternity in terms of the web. Not only are IE6 users unable to visit many websites as the designers intended, the continued prevalence of this ancient browser is discouraging developers from innovating more — making all web users worse off. Using a 10 year old web browser is also seen as a security risk.
Microsoft have been criticised for being too slow to update their browser. It was five years until Internet Explorer 7 came out. In comparison, Mozilla are poised to release Firefox 4, two and a half years after Firefox 3 was launched. Google Chrome has reached version 10 just over two years after the first ever version.
Now even Microsoft finds the continued prevalence of IE6 to be an embarrassment. Today, Microsoft are playing catch-up with other browser vendors, but have made great leaps to improve their browser in recent years.
As such, we fully support all initiatives to encourage users to upgrade from IE6. If you still use IE6, please upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer.
Better still, you could opt to switch to a different browser altogether. The future version of Internet Explorer — IE9 — is a vast improvement, but is still not perfect. Only today, I worked on some new code that works perfectly in every other major browser, but does not work in IE9 due to its relatively poor support of CSS3.
If you have held off before, I can promise you that switching browsers it is rather pain-free. You will probably end up being much happier with your browsing experiences.
I suggest you consider the following browsers:
- Mozilla Firefox – plenty of great features, and hugely customisable
- Google Chrome – lightweight, fast and reliable
- Apple Safari
- Opera