Thursday, July 16th, 2009
Internet Explorer 6 has been a hot topic again of late. At Multipack last week we had the inevitable discussion on just when people will give up on it. We estimated six to nine months. But then we estimated that 6 to 9 months ago…
So now Digg won’t support it for certain activities and Youtube are suggesting heavily you upgrade. Last time round it was 37 Signals and Mobile Me. Same arguments turn up again.
I pretty much agree with Chris Heilmann’s thoughts on the subject. Companies that are still using IE 6 aren’t going to care about Digg or Youtube or hip new work-on-the-web stuff blocking them. They block that stuff anyway.
That last 10% will be painful and slow to get upgraded. With MS wasting money on adverts or Nickelback based promos (warning sound that plays automatically), the elephant in the room is that the majority of that 10% still on IE 6 are there because corporations, governments and SMEs are locked into it and have little intention of upgrading. Be that by IT policy, bloody minded-ness, complex dependencies or shoddy dotcom era, activeX-riddled web software that just won’t work in anything else.
Back when it came out a friend predicted IE 6 would be the Netscape Navigator of its day. Seems he was right. It just refuses to disappear.
All this creates an interesting dynamic on the web. As other browsers move faster towards new and shiny HTML 5 worlds, we’ve got a 2nd class internet of corporately hamstrung web citizens. They can’t access the better tools, or they run slowly on archaic javascript engines, they lack efficient tabbed browsing and generally take longer to do the same tasks…
With more and more commerce web dependent in some way this’ll have more of an impact as time goes by. I’d love to see somebody do a corporate whitepaper analysing relative productivity of IE 6 vs IE8/Safari 4/Firefox 3.5/Opera 10. Sure it’ll only cost you .5 seconds more rendering that Javascript intensive booking system, but over 100,000 employees, 365 days a year, 10 bookings an hour?
That hints at the real danger for the IE 6 laggards. A great opportunity for younger, more agile companies to run rings around them. In the end that’ll be the threat that convinces them to upgrade… Eventually.
January 12th, 2010 at 10:28 am
Your analysis misses out one or two points, which I see as the other side of the debate – the enterprise sysadmin.
Firstly, as I try to keep the Windows machines I look after fairly secure, I want the latest and greatest of everything, because it’s only when I’m sure everything is patched up to date that I’m secure. It’s worse here, because we have 80-something laptop users, and so I don’t even know where the computers I look after are most of the time. So, put me down for IE8!
Second, and the bigger point – some of our apps don’t work past IE6. While you can handwave this all you want as a web developer, this is an utter showstopper as an admin. If an IE upgrade, or any upgrade, breaks a corporate application, then it does not go ahead. End of.
Of course, this means that we simply install Firefox alongside IE, and allow people to use that…
January 12th, 2010 at 9:08 pm
You’re an enlightened sysadmin though, in that you at least allow Firefox as an option.
The complex dependencies and legacy systems are the tricky ones, “we can’t upgrade cos it breaks X key business system”. However, they’re also indirectly responsible for about 25% of a given front-end web build’s testing and bugfix overhead, which is effectively costing every business which demands that support money.
At some point one cost will outweigh the other. Or people will just start getting very used to the IE6 Universal stylesheet
Of course, from a web dev point of view, if it won’t work past IE6 and was built in the last 5 years, whoever built it did a shoddy job. No telling what else is wrong with it… ;)