Cartoon: IE6 RIP
The word that Google has decided to stop supporting Internet Explorer 6 as of March 1 will come as welcome but bittersweet news to designers and developers who have wrestled for years to make perfectly compliant sites work properly in that wretched browser.
Welcome, because this could well be the death knell for IE6. You can make a legitimate case to clients that, hell, if Google isn't supporting it, why should they?
And bittersweet, because the death of an old foe feels almost like losing a friend. No more nights curled up by the monitor together, trying to remember obscure hacks and puzzling through baffling JavaScript errors. No more repeated "!important" declarations. (sniff) No more (sob) custom script to get "hover" to work... or workarounds for (snuffle) transparent PNGs... sweetie, could you pass me that box of Kleenex?
Oh, who the hell am I kidding? The only tragedy about IE6's passing is that it didn't happen three years ago, and involve giant snowmobiles with poison-tipped 12-inch spikes embedded in their treads. (And what do you want to bet the meddling feds would have some objection to poison-tipped 12-inch spike-riddled snowmobile treads? But I digress.)
Consider the number of Web sites that have required major time-wasting workarounds. How many? 200,000? 300,000 at a very conservative estimate?
Say it took a developer two hours to get each site to work properly. That's 600,000 lost hours... or more than 1,643 years. And at an average life span of 67 years, that's... 25 lifetimes.
Now, if corporations can have the same rights as people, then surely abstract life-equivalent calculations can, too. Internet Explorer 6, you're under citizen's arrest for murder. That's right, murder. 25 counts.
Given how arbitrarily and unjustly the death penalty has been applied, I can't in all good conscience give in to the temptation to sentence IE6 to be taken from this place to a highly magnetic place and to be overwritten with zeroes until it is dead, and may Bill Gates have mercy on its soul.
Instead, install it on a computer that has also committed a heinous crime, seal it in a watertight box with a large solar panel affixed to each side, and set it adrift to live out the rest of its days on the shore of some deserted island. ("Hey, Professor, what's this?" "Don't touch it, Gilligan! It's IE6!!")
And then pop the cork on a bottle of champagne, and let the bells ring out. Ding dong, the Six is dead.
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uhhuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu!
Well, of course it's good news about google's position, but it's nothing to really celebrate.
they will stop supporting IE6 for their google docs and apps. These sophisticated tools are likely not being used by the IE6 using population anyway. Even MSFT can't be expected to support IE6 for their most complex web apps.
But of course, google's only real consumer success, search, is gonna support IE 6 until 1 woman in alaska is the last person using it.
CAn't say that I blame them, but I'd love to see them message search users to stop using IE6.
I'm quite pleased that this has happened because I think IE needs a wake up call. It's forever crashing and full of bugs. This should definitely please designers.
This is just... fantastic! I have been searching for a reason, nay, an excuse.. to stop supporting IE6, and now I have the perfect backup!
@Scott - You do have a very good point about Googles only major consumer sucess being search... but on the other hand, Google is a word that everybody knows.. Even people who have no idea how to use a computer know what Google is! The fact that they're pushing this through carries a lot of weight. And soon, other corporations will follow suit.
Personally, as soon as I get half a chance, Ill be editing my site, so that when a user of IE6 logs on, they will be redirected to a page with reference to Google's announcement, and a polite notice requesting they download a real browser...
To sum it all up... YIPEEEE!
Ideally, they could even take advantage of their position to promote the installation of a compliant browser on their home page, and not necessarily Chrome. It is just amazing what amount of JavaScript code solely exists to support IE's nonstandard ways.
Finally!!!
I just wish IE6 could disappear immediately!
My first observations are that it seems to be noticeably quicker at loading many of the sites I use regularly, and noticeably slower here at iStock.
http://www.articlesbase.com/health-articles/extreme-britewhite-review-get-free-trial-now-1815590.html
Refresh my memory...was IE6 used when AOL was big:)
I think youre off by a few orders of magnitude - there are millions of websites that unnecessarily support IE6 and it takes designers and programmers hundreds of hours to support more complex sites - IE6 should be executed for genocide, not simply put away for man slaughter.
* html #article {
content: display-normally !important;
}
* html #article .content {
content: please-display-normally !pretty-please;
}
#article
content: please-please-now-go-back-to-displaying-in-firefox;
}
.retarded {
zoom-for=no-reason: 1;
height: yes-i-really-mean-height;
Will-i-ever-forgive-microsoft: not bloody likely !important;
}
Hi,
First launched in 2001 Internet Explorer 6 is still being used by 15 - 25 percent of Internet users. So what then is being done about this? The Internet community is rallying behind a campaign to "kill IE6" and their ranks are growing....
You're overestimating this announcement. It'd be nice to drop support for IE6, but Google dropping support on one small part of its network doesn't equal freedom for Web developers. The IE6 install base is still large and for many sites, it makes up a large enough portion of their users as to require continued support.
I wrote up my thoughts a couple of days ago, which has generated some good conversation - I'd love hear what you think as I take the opposite view of this entire piece: Stop Complaining About IE 6.
Thanks for the comments, everyone!
I'm not unsympathetic to Alex's argument. (and incidentally, not too long ago would also have qualified for an @baldman user name). But Alex, your post seems to assume that change isn't possible - or at least that we can't be active agents in making that change happen, or speeding it up.
It's not that different from the argument that a significant number of users were still using floppies back at the end of the 90s, so software developers and computer makers had better keep supporting them. And then along came Apple and killed the floppy with the iMac.
Not that it died right away, and not that Apple wasn't ridiculed for abandoning a significant user base. But their announcement marked the floppy's tipping point. Theirs was the snowball that started the avalanche.
I suspect that Google is helping to play the Apple role here. And I suspect that they're helping to influence the people who are behind a big chunk of that installed IE6 base: not users, but their companies' IT departments.
That said, I'll cop to a little cartoonish oversimplifying here: there's still a responsibility for developers to help clients make an informed decision whether to support IE6. You need to dive into the analytics and see how many users are still using it - and, just as important, what those users are doing on your site. And you need to see what the trend is over time, so you're making a decision that makes sense for the near and medium term. Only then can you get a sense of those users' value compared to the cost of supporting IE6 (which is often not just a question of the initial coding, but of ongoing bug fixes and troubleshooting).
See, if I've oversimplified, can I suggest that you have too? Because you don't seem to think there's a decision to make at all: just quit bitching and break out the workarounds. But there's a real cost to continuing to support the dwindling number of users of IE6, and if that support isn't giving you or your client enough value, it's time to pull the plug. And Google's decision helps to bring that time closer, if it isn't here already.
As a web developer, it's really painful to have a client who happens to use IE6 (or even some old browser like Mozilla 1.0). I've heard the argument, "But, if I am using it, I'm sure lots of others are too!" I've even had a client drive me to his house to prove the site we were developing for him didn't work. He not only was using one of those AOL-from-a-CD installs, but it was old one (for the time.. this was a few years ago). We had to prove that statistically he was in less of 0.1% of users using such an old and obscure setup.
One last postscript: YouTube is bailing on IE6 as of mid-March. That snowball just got a lot bigger.
Although the Miami web designers here at http://WebReDesignMiami.com wonder how much of this is attributable to the Clash of the Titans (Google vs. Microsoft), the fact is that the use of outdated browser software impedes the advancement of results-oriented business website design in South Florida.