Upgrade Your IE6… You Can Save the World!!

Posted by leepeng on January 14, 2009

We developed a website and tested it on Firefox, IE7, Safari, Opera and Chrome. After delivery, the client said that some functions were not working on their browser. We checked and found out that the entire organisation is still using IE6. So we advised them to upgrade their browser.

Shortly afterwards, the IT executive called and gave us a comment: “Your should make sure your website is BACKWARD COMPATIBLE! No way we gonna to upgrade our browser!”

We reviewed our code but can’t really figure out where went wrong. So we end up spending hours to write some really stupid fixes to make it work on IE6.

Conclusion? We spent many extra hours to do some meaningless fix, just because the IT department refuse to upgrade the browser. And they can’t give us a justifiable answer why they should not do that.

If you are in web development or web design business, this story will not sound strange to you.

We, web developers, develop websites using Firefox because it is very standard based and has many fantastic tools and plug-ins to make our life easy. After we complete the job, we will normally test it on Safari, Chrome and Opera. As most of our codes are W3C standard compliant, the website will normally run OK on these browsers. The trouble normally comes when we test on IE… especially version 6! If we had built complex DHTML with CSS2, we will end up doing lots of workarounds and fixes for IE6.

We are always tempted to make a public announcement that we are no longer supporting IE6. However, IE6 still has a market share of between 20 to 25%.

(from www.w3schools.com: http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

(from www.w3counter.com: http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php)

IE6 was launched in 2001. It does not comply to W3C standards and has some security issues.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IE6#cite_note-4, http://secunia.com/advisories/product/11/)

Microsoft will remind users from time to time to upgrade their browsers. The upgrade option is also available by default if you are performing Windows Update in XP.

So why are these 25% of users still using IE6??

• They do not have Internet connection. So can’t update.
• They use pirated XP. So can’t update.
• Their Internet connection speed is too slow. Downloading IE7 will is killing.
• They are too lazy or not bother to upgrade
• They don’t know how to upgrade
• They scared that after upgrading the browser, their computer will crash
• They work in an organisation that they don’t have the access right to update. It must be done by the IT guys and the IT guys are too lazy to do the upgrade. Or the IT guys “feel” that upgrading will cause a disaster to the organisation.
• They heard from somebody that IE6 is the best browser in the World

I really hope these 25% can give up IE6. It not just save them by having a better browser, it can save us much time and cost!

Comments

One Response to “Upgrade Your IE6… You Can Save the World!!”

1. Jim says:

   June 30, 2009 at 1:42 am

   IE6 is the last version supported by MS for Windows 2000 operating system. To upgrade browsers, many would also have to update operating systems – and the nearest is XP at pretty significant cost (in this time of short cash).

   So yeah, we’re stuck supporting IE6 for a while longer!