14th August 2009
Microsoft backs long life for IE6
Why would they do this to me? IE6's support was due to end next year, but now it's been announced that support will continue until 2014.
While I can understand the reasons for this, in part, in my opinion it is a diesase that we need to be free of.
So why have Microsoft decided to continue support for the Swine Flu of the browser market? Well, for businesses (and non-savvy consumers).
While only 15-20 percent of Inernet users are using IE6, a great proportion of these are businesses. Big businesses that have various infrastructures in place. Up until last year, I worked for a FTSE 100 company employing around 35,000 people in the UK. The head office population was around 2000 with outlets spread all over the UK. Why is this relevant? Well, because their entire systems, be it HR or Finance and right down to booking/EPOS systems used software that would only run on Internet Explorer 6. These systems had cost in the region on £40million.
Needless to say, an ugrade of such a scale isn't something businesses want to do, and especially in an economic climate such as the ones we see before us today.
Unfortunately, this means new (and some quite old) technology still can't be used to full effect. Microsoft knows the drawbacks to IE6, developers know - probably a good proportion of consumers know - yet it just won't die.
CSS3 styles, such as rounded corners on elements we'll still not be able to use and have to work around it with images (although until MS put it in a new IE, you should probably still do just that).
Most annoyingly for me, however, is that it means genuine use of CSS3 and HTML5 are still five years away, and possibly more frustrating, I'll still be wasting valuable time fixing bugs for a browser that's nearly ten years old. I doubt many people have a PC that old, as it would be obsolete by now. And that's just what IE6 is, obsolete.
Microsoft, I beg you, if you're not going to put the lame creature (and developers across the globe) out of it's misery, at least try and make it more compatible - start with PNG support, maybe?