CAMPAIGN: Death to Internet Explorer 6

Is it finally time to take IE6 behind the shed and shoot it? That’s the question being asked at Bring Down IE6, a site created by UK magazine .NET to spur efforts by the professional Web community to shift users away from Microsoft’s seven year old browser.

“This isn’t about being anti-Microsoft, it’s about Microsoft’s lack of development in the browser market” the site claims. “Internet Explorer 6 is antiquated, doesn’t support key web standards, and should be phased out.”

“IE6 is the new Netscape 4. The hacks needed to support IE6 are increasingly viewed as excess freight. Like Netscape 4 in 2000, IE6 is perceived to be holding back the Web.”

“Clients pressure designers to ‘force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money. Microsoft needs to fix this, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on.”

Released in August 2001, two months prior to Windows XP, Internet Explorer 6 ruled the Microsoft roost until the arrival of Internet Explorer 7 some five years later. IE7 overtook IE6 in market share in June 2008 according to the browser statistics report from W3Schools .

None the less, Net Applications’ Market Share report for February 2009 pegs IE6 as the third most popular browser on the Web, claiming an 18.9% share – just behind the 19.1% of Firefox 3.0, and dwarfed by the 47.3% of IE7. (Other browsers are all well in the single digits, beginning with the Safari 3.x family at 6.9%)

The biggest factor keeping Internet Explorer 6.0 afloat, according to Bring Down IE6, is that its 7.0 and 8.0 successors don’t run on Windows 2000 – leaving businesses with legacy-based Windows 2000 systems little choice but to run IE6 until they upgrade their corporate platform.

.NET writer Craig Grannell makes the case for the eradication of Internet Explorer 6.0

“In today’s market, surrounded by Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera and its own successor, Internet Explorer 7, version 6 of Microsoft’s browser looks positively ancient. Many argue that IE6 hinders development, due to the number of hacks required to get sites working in it. (There are) horror stories of a third of a site’s development time taken up by dealing with IE6; major display issues requiring a partial site rebuild, despite everything looking fine in all other browsers; elements randomly disappearing entirely due to the ‘hasLayout’ bug.

While Bring Down IE6 doesn’t call for an all-out jihad on the browser, it wants developers to make a concerted effort to encourage users to upgrade to, well, anything other than IE6.

“Ensure your sites work in IE6, but don't waste a lot of time fixing non-critical issues” suggests the site. Providing an “upgrade notice for IE6 users” is also suggested, with sample source code available from the site. There are also links to related items such as the The Shockingly Big IE6 Warning, which plug-in author ‘matias s.’ describes as “a warning message alerting the user why is bad to use IE6, the security risk and the bad compatibility of Web Standards.”

37signals, the creator of popular Web-based apps such as Basecamp, Backpack, Highrise and Campfire, has already “dropped the rusty weight of IE6” across its entire suite of online services.

“IE6 is a last-generation browser” declared the company’s blog. “IE6 can't provide the same web experience that modern browsers can. Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimise our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.”