CHRIS KULBACKI

chris, 24/03/2011 16:56,

If your local video store is closed and you are in the mood for watching something scary, I've got just the thing for you. Take a modern website and try porting it to Internet Explorer 6 (IE6).

Internet Explorer 6 is over 10 years old, but it's still used by nearly 12% of the world's population. And its incompatibility with modern web technologies is legendary. And scary.

Normally I would at least try to make the websites I work on usable on IE6, since every time I go to a government office here in Italy I see it installed on every single computer, but I think I've now come to the end of my graces. (And since it's 2011, I'm proud to discover that my graces lasted a lot longer than those of the other developers I know).

Since the major Internet portals like Google or Facebook no longer support IE6, I figured that neither should I.

But there's another side of the coin that is rarely mentioned. The popularity and the continued usage of IE6 is closely connected with the continued usage of Windows XP. IE6 was, after all, the default browser on Windows XP, and as long as Windows XP will be in use, so will IE6. There's a good chance that a company or a government office that installs Windows XP on all their terminals will not bother to upgrade the browser. And the workers might not know any better or they might not have sufficient access to upgrade. If it works for whatever they need to use it for, they won't go and upgrade it.

And it seems like Windows XP is not going away any time soon. I've just been looking over the subscriptions stats on Sprigo, and it seems like more than half of the subscribers are still using Windows XP. So there.

And here's another thing. When Firefox 1.0 came out, it was just as buggy by today's standards as IE6. You just can't judge old browsers by today's standards. The only difference is that Firefox is not a default browser on any operating system and must be explicitly installed. And if someone bothers to do that, they'll also most likely keep their browser up to date. That's why you don't see Firefox 1.0 around any more.

Microsoft came up with a nice initiative called The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown. It's an educational site that shows the current IE6 usage statistics in different countries. China's the main culprit and constitutes a third of all the IE6 users. I'm surprised to see that Italy is only at 3%, I'd expect much more. But I guess the above-mentioned government offices don't go browsing much, so they're not included in the stats.

I'll be more than happy to see IE6 rest in peace. Truth be told, I'll be happy to see IE7 and 8 rest in peace as well. The newest versions of IE (9), Chrome, Firefox, Opera and Safari conform a lot better with the W3C specs and are much easier to work with, which eliminates most of the scary monsters out of web development nightmares. That is, until we enter the arena of HTML 5 development. Like jumping from a frying pan into the fire.

But, oh well, as long as there are different companies that make different browsers, we'll have differences and we'll have to live with them. Variety is a spice of life, isn't it?