Help Accelerate the Demise of IE6
Posted In: Browsers
- The death of IE6 is approaching.
We’ve all grumbled and complained about IE6 for years, and I don’t think there’s one of us that can’t wait to see the back of it and since seventh birthday on the 27th August the blogasphere seems to be inundated with talk of its much overdue death. And opinions seem to be varying.
Hands up if you’re sick of hearing people say “IE6 is used by 25% of the market; not supporting it is “freezing” out 25% of your customer base and basically telling them to stick it.”?
I certainly am and whenever I hear this I think to myself how can you use that as your main case for supporting IE6?
In a recent post I read the author argued that when looking at these two static pages:
IE6 has a 25% share, it’s true that each site reports that but compare the other browsers. Allegedly IE7 has 47% share on one chart and a 26% on the other, Firefox has a 43% share on one and a 17% on the other. We’re not talking marginal difference in percentages here; we’re talking so completely different they’re beyond comparison.
I wonder to myself, is it beyond the realms of possibility that IE6’s share of the market could actually be much smaller? Say 15%? Than what we think it is, and instead of comparing individual browsers, for example “Safari has a small share but we still support that”, compare standard compliant browsers to non-standard compliant ones. In which case, according to our completely unreliable static charts we have 75-85% compliant and 25-15% non-compliant. IE6 is the minority!
But I don’t want this blog to turn into a rant. The title after all is Help Accelerate the Demise of IE6. So how can we achieve this?
People Still Using IE6
There are two main groups of people still using IE6. These are people with no other choice, who have no other option but to use IE6 in there work place, and then there are the un-educated, people who don’t even know that there are other browsers out there. The first step to IE6’s demise will begin with educating these poor, poor souls.
Passive Blows
There are things happening right now that are helping us achieve this without any direct intervention from us as Web Designers.
- Release of Google Chrome – Paul Boag has speculated that maybe Google Chrome can topple IE6. I think Chrome could be the first wake up. Even though Google aren’t actively promoting Chrome to the consumer market,
they have added a nice, prominent link to the Google homepage(ed - link appears to have been removed now which is a shame.) that might just convert a few IE6 users. - Major companies are dropping support for IE6 – Facebook, MobileMe (which also doesn’t fully support IE7!) and 37signals are all dropping support for IE6. I think the most prominent to convert the average IE6 user is Facebook. Everyone’s on face book these days and when something stops working for them in IE6 they’ll upgrade.
- Upcoming release of IE8 – When IE8 comes out there will be even less excuse to not upgrade, especially when it becomes a mandatory update.
Do Your Bit!
If you visit a site that uses Flash and you don’t have it, or you need to upgrade your plugin, you’re given a link and you install/upgrade without even thinking about it. Same goes for Quicktime, you get prompted to upgrade if your version isn’t up to scratch. Let’s all (and I know some people are doing this already) do the same thing for IE6!
Provide a minimal site layout with an upgrade message or simply an upgrade your browser page. And enough of this “freezing” out IE6 users non-sense, we’re not, we’re just encouraging them to move with the times and provide them with a better experience.
Also, educate your clients, ask them what browser they’re using and why? Explain the benefits of upgrading and emphasis the list of things that can now be achieved in new browsers over IE6.
The end of IE6 is inevitable. Let’s help it get here faster.
Quotes
It's like Rails is French, and CakePHP is French in an English accent... effectively it's the same, just not as elegant. - Paul Stanton
Tech Read
A great reference book for learning jQuery, broken into sensible chapters focused on jQuery's core functions.
Leisure Listen
Book 1 of A Time Odyssey, Arthur C. Clarke's final trilogy before passing away. Time's Eye is an interesting idea, but not his strongest novel unfortunately.
2 Comments
Stone Deft
on 16 Sep, 08 at 15:49
Yeah IE 6 and lower IE sucks big time and God bless bill gates and his not so brilliant production team for making life of a web developer hell. Why coudn't they just patch IE to comply with web standards because the truth is it won't die, hey it comes packaged with windows xp to start with.
Zi
on 21 Sep, 08 at 02:04
Your missing one other category of users still on IE 6. Those on dial up. There is a vast audience out there that still lives outside the broadband reach and the download just takes too long. As a developer it's hard to convince my clients to exclude these customers on principle, because, from what they see there isn't much difference between a tabled layout and a pure css layout. I tried for several years to make pure css and standards work. I've given up and gone back to tables, and let me tell you, it's saved me hundreds of hours of pulling my hair out over ie 5.5 and 6 bugs. The benefits of pure css simply don't outweigh the hacks and headaches needed to make "it work" for the obsolete browsers. Even if I convince a client to support only modern browsers it usually comes back to bite me when their client calls up with a "bug" (aka ie 5.5/6). I then have a choice to fix it, or piss of an un-understanding client.
My gut feeling tells me that the nightmare that Microsoft created is going to be around for years to come, and even they are regretting it.