Roger Johanssen’s post “No more pixel perfectionism in IE 6” is a clarion call for web developers the world over. We need to stop bending over backwards for IE6. The argument that “we can’t stop developing for IE6 because of the number of people still using it” is a fallacy. I’m convinced that the very reason why IE6 is still hanging around is because we keep going out of our way to make sites work in it. The moment that IE6 users see that most of the web is broken in their browser, they’ll switch.
A colleague of mine told me this morning that the reason why a lot of people still use IE6 is because they don’t have a legitimate version of Windows, so they’ve turned off Windows Update. That’s fine, they don’t need to upgrade to IE7, they can use Firefox, Opera, Chrome, or Safari!
So in the tradition of the last such clarion call, I say to hell with IE6!
Update: Der Caspers makes a good point about IT folks being the ones not wanting to upgrade. In fact I just had a conversation about this with someone yesterday. I can only think of one reason for why IT people won’t upgrade, cost. Unless it’s laziness, otherwise, it’s cost. Security isn’t the reason, IE6 has 22 out of 135 vulnerabilities that remain unpatched. To say nothing of the fact that “To help customers become more secure and up-to-date, Microsoft [began] distributing Internet Explorer 7 as a high-priority update via Automatic Updates and the Windows Update and Microsoft Update sites” in 2006! So my recommendation to these IT folks is to get themselves into the modern era and ditch that anachronism that is IE6. Before somebody gets hurt.
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