Daily Archives: March 3, 2010

Internet Explorer 6, the bane of web designers for years (including me, when I worked on my company’s websites and web-based software), has an interesting story behind it. The browser was first released by Microsoft 10 years ago, but even with Internet Explorer up to version 8 and alternatives like Firefox and Chrome freely available, 20% of web users continue to surf with this behemoth. It can’t display modern websites correctly and is no longer supported by giants like Google. So why do people continue to use it?

Internet Explorer 6 came out when the web was still the Wild West, so to speak, and Microsoft and Netscape were battling over browser dominance. Microsoft won that war and so developed a browser, Version 6, that ignored many of the standards the web had been built on. This forced many web developers to hack their websites so they would “work” in both browsers, or to eschew leaps forward in web design like Cascading Style Sheets because IE6 didn’t display them properly. You could say that IE6 kept a lot of web developers employed, since we had to spend so much time forcing our sites to work in that one browser, while still displaying correctly in the standards-compliant browsers.

Now 10 years later, IE6 is the second most popular browser, behind IE8. But why does it keep hanging on long after the plug should have been pulled? Is it because dinosaur corporate IT departments won’t upgrade their employees? Is it because users just don’t know any better? It’s a mystery for the ages, although this PopSci article does a good job of delving into the reasons.

In the meantime, try to remember what the web was like back in the Year 2000. That was the age of Web 1.0. We had barely survived Y2K. We didn’t have blogs or Twitter or YouTube or RSS feeds.  What a desolate time for us all. Isn’t it time we moved on?

Inside the Excruciatingly Slow Death of Internet Explorer 6 (PopSci)
IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On (Mashable)
Modern browsers for modern applications with upgrade links (Official Google Enterprise Blog)
Save IE6 and IE6 Funeral