A campaign calling for the immediate death of Internet Explorer 6 is picking up pace, with a host of developers castigating the browser that 'hindered the development of the web'.
.net magazine is supporting a campaign to rid the world of IE6 – a browser that is still being used by a large proportion of people – asking the industry if the time has come for sites to no longer support IE6.
The magazine – a Future publication just like TechRadar – is hoping that Microsoft will port IE7 and IE8 to Windows 2000 allowing thousands of users to upgrade.
Shunned
"Clearly, IE7 can't be shunned: not supporting the current version of Microsoft's market-leading browser would be a crazy move. However, with its predecessor now approaching its eighth birthday – positively ancient in software terms – should designers now ignore it until it fades away?" asks .net.
"That's a really attractive thought," Kleber's Tom Muller answers, "but when a fifth or more of the audience still uses IE6, we can't just drop it."
It's a valid point, and will be repeated by web designers the world over if they considered dropping support for the notorious IE6, but .net's editor Dan Oliver insists that the time has come for the plug to be pulled.
Do us a favour
"The premise is simple," Oliver told us. "Internet Explorer 6 is an antiquated browser, does not support web standards, and because of this should be phased out.
"Microsoft's lack of development in the web browser market means that many companies running Windows 2000 machines still rely on IE6 as they can't run IE7 or IE8 on this platform
"This means there's a large chunk of web users - approximately 20% - still accessing the web via IE6.
"Whilst this demographic still exists, clients will continue to pressure web designers to force sites to work in IE6, and web designers - not wanting to piss off clients - will continue to do so.
"The only way this situation can improve quickly is for Microsoft to port IE7 and IE8 to Windows 2000 (a move proposed by prominent web evangelists such as Bruce Lawson).
"So come on Microsoft, do us all a favour, and help us bury this horrible browser once and for all!"
There's more on the campaign over at .net at netmag.co.uk.
Your comments (2) Click to add a new comment
craiggrannell
February 24th
2. I'm the author of the .net article and nowhere in it does it say the browser hasn't been updated in eight years - it merely notes that IE 6 is coming up to its eighth birthday, which is ancient in software terms. Bruce Lawson also suggests porting 7 and 8 to Windows 2000, so users of that OS can upgrade and IE 6 can finally be taken out back and shot.
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northerngeek
February 23rd
1. I fall on both sides of the fence on this, I can see what they're saying and agree that it's time for IE6 to be dropped by developers (even though the hacks aren't *that* tricky to implement from my experience). On the other hand complaining that the browser hasn't been updated for 8 years when the audience in question hasn't updated their OS for 9 years seems a little off.
MS will obviously want these people to upgrade to Vista or 7 rather than provide them with IE7, but I would love to see what was reccomended back in 05 when they dropped Mac support and have the old browsers drop into open source licensing. Heck I'd rather see the entire IE suite go open source and benefit from a higher turnover rate of releases but that won't happen for a long time.
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