End of Days: Internet Explorer 6
Internet Explorer 6 was the default browser bundled with Windows XP and has been around for nine years now. Since then there have been two new iterations of IE; IE7 in 2006 copying Opera and Firefox with the introduction of tabbed browsing, and IE8, released last year.
As more and more people upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 7 is beginning to loose ground and Internet Explorer 6 has begun its slow slip into obscurity.
I am writing this on behalf of all the designers and developers out there who wish to speed up the process.
Back at the beginning of IE6’s life cycle rival browsers like Firefox and Opera didn’t have a fraction of the amount of users they have today. As IE6’s rate of adoption increased, however, so too did the adoption rate of these new rival browsers, as many people jumped ship and never returned – much to Microsoft’s annoyance.
(In fact the company often went to some rather sneaky lengths to protect its market share.)
In addition to its long history of security flaws which didn’t provide a back door, so much as a wide open front door, to hackers, IE6 was also a web designers nightmare. For one it had issues displaying .png files correctly plus a whole host of CSS styling issues, such as its own unique interpretation of positioning rules.
In short, the browser didn’t always display pages the way it was supposed to. So whenever somebody designed a website and wrote the code to proper international web standards, the result, when viewed in the Microsoft browser, often looked terrible. This meant that web designers (including yours truly) often had little choice but to design separate stylesheets just so the design would look “correct” in the broken browser.
As for web developers… the poor people, they have suffered so much for too long.
The good news for those in the industry, now that Google has officially dropped support for IE6, is that the rest of the world is bound to follow suit. Apple are halfway there already and ongoing issues with Flash also mean that Adobe would undoubtedly be more than happy to dump the browser too. In other words, Internet Explorer 6 has become the new floppy disc drive.
Such a move makes sense for Google as it saves them a lot of time and effort in trying to retro-fit their products, such as You Tube and Google Docs, to work on an outmoded platform. Of course not all companies have the multi-billion dollar clout that Google has to dictate which browsers their websites should or should not be viewed in and must instead do their best to ensure that all users can access their content.
Or, as Adam West so succinctly put it in the original Batman movie:
“Some days you just can’t get rid of a bomb!” (SLYT)
“Some days you just can’t get rid of a browser!”
At present IE6 still has just under 15% global usage according to Statcounter. The W3C rates it at just under 8%. So, roughly, let’s say an average of 12% of people worldwide now use the browser. And whilst that’s a huge drop from 2004 where W3C rated IE6’s global use peaking at around 70%, 12% of the global number of Internet users is still quite a lot of people!
Let’s not forget either – and I haven’t from my old repair days – that not everyone is going to update straight away.
Firstly, and rightly, because many people feel that upgrading to new Microsoft products as soon as they come out isn’t always necessarily a good idea.
Windows 95 required a whole new computer, Windows 98 didn’t become truly reliable until the advent of the 98SE, XP’s flakiness didn’t really subside until the release of Service Pack 2 and the less said about Vista and Millennium the better. So you can hardly blame those people who aren’t exactly trampling over themselves to upgrade to Microsoft’s newest browser.
Some companies, meanwhile, are simply unable to upgrade. This may be due to financial reasons, software compatibility reasons or a combination of the two. You’d be surprised how many Windows 2000 boxes there are out there and even more surprised by the companies who are using them, some of them quite major ones. And, yes, there are still a fair few out there with Windows 98 boxes and even people running old database software that only work in DOS.
A third restriction on people upgrading is the speed and reliability of internet services in their locality. For many, living out in remote rural areas where broadband isn’t available, running Windows Update is not an option, not with flaky wireless, iffy satellite or intermittent 3G connectivity and certainly not when you’re crawling through old copper on dialup and paying pennies per minute for downloads that could take days.
Bear in mind that, even in Europe and the United States, there are approximately 5-10% of users still on 56k dialup. Bandwidth varies from country to country, with South Korea leading the world in connection speeds whilst many African countries and small island nations still have dial-up user rates above 90%.
(source 1, source 2)
Of course the world’s a big place and so somewhere out there there’s probably someone online right now with a 14k modem and a copy of Netscape 4.0. That’s why it’s so useful for designers, developers, administrators and website owners to keep a close eye on their sites’ usage statistics. This way, amongst other useful information such as search engine marketing data, they can also find out what browsers their visitors are using and how fast their internet connection is.
Two good ways of viewing this data is to sign up for a Statcounter and Google Analytics account and set them up on your website.