I just read an excellent examination of the excruciatingly slow death of Internet Explorer 6, by Popular Science. Right at the end, there’s this quote pulled from a comment thread on one of Microsoft’s blogs:
“I work for a large financial services company with 40,000+ employees. And yes, every desktop PC and laptop runs WinXP and IE6. More than 85% of all browsing is intranet. Basic news sites etc deliver the information without the frills. For our vendors who offer Web portals (eg home loan valuations, stationery suppliers etc) – we’ll simply dump them if we can’t access their sites after a ‘no-IE6 revamp.’”
In other words, if you improve your website based on W3C Standards, but neglect our antique browser of choice, we’ll sever our business relationship with you. I guess I always assumed that businesses would upgrade if they had the money, but this person seems to suggest that it’s not a priority at all and that he or she is perfectly justified in ditching valuable business partnerships if they don’t comply with IE6.
How many of those partnerships are you willing to dissolve before upgrading your intranet becomes a viable option? 10%? 50%? 100%? And to those partners: why should you have to absorb the cost of supporting IE6 rather than expecting them to join the modern world? It seems to me that the vendors hold the real power, but they are being bullied into prolonging the issue for fear of losing business.
Microsoft has stated that it will continue to support IE6 as long as it supports Windows XP, which ends in April of 2014. But with this kind of attitude, I doubt that corporations will even care. Until then, I can only hope for more exploits that assist in the demise of IE6.
Illustration by Chris Fletcher.
Mar 30, 2010
1:00 pm
IE6 is the bane of the internet. I personally am glad to see sites like, YouTube, that are abandoning support for extremely outdated browsers. If businesses want to be stuck using antique browsers, let them. I for one design for the future and try to do what I can to give small businesses an edge on the big competitors. The younger generations aren’t going to support companies that don’t push the envelope in terms of newer technologies… that is something those 40,000+ employee companies are going to have to learn. Heck, if there reasoning is that it would take to long to upgrade 40,000+ computers to IE7, or God forbid IE8, I would point them at enterprise software like KBox (now owned by Dell) or Lumension that provides software that can automatically install software from one centralized location.
Down with IE6!!
Mar 30, 2010
1:28 pm
There’s also Chrome Frame, which transforms IE6 into a crazy hybrid browser that should work on legacy intranet sites as well as sites created in this millennium.
http://code.google.com/chrome/chromeframe/