Organisational inertia means we’re saddled with an ageing, vulnerable browser across our hospitals and key government departments. That’s not good

via Why the NHS can’t get its browser act together  Technology | guardian.co.uk.

Judging by this screenshot taken by an IE6 user who was watching some videos on YouTube, it appears the Google company will be phasing out support for the browser shortly. I don’t have Internet Explorer 6 installed on my computer, so I can’t verify this first hand, but illogical it seems not and a simple Twitter search shows multiple people confirming the news. Heck, some are even downright ecstatic over the news.

The online video behemoth is pointing to ‘modern’ browsers like Google Chrome (twice on the same page even, unsurprisingly), Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives.

With the impending move, YouTube follows in the footsteps of that other Web 2.0 poster child, Digg, which recently hinted at wanting to cut support for the browser too. Digg’s User Experience Architect Mark Trammell at the time wrote that the site is strongly considering removing essential features like digging and commenting for IE6 users. He explained that while IE6 users make up around 5% of site traffic, it only accounts for 1% of diggs, buries, and comments.

The web has not stopped evolving in the last 7 years. The article from Sitepoint below, highlights that web developers jump backwards through hoops so that sites still render reasonably when viewed by IE6,  perhaps it’s time to move forward without this monkey on our backs. My latest site drops a lot of features for IE6, I see no reason to add-on many layers of complexity simply to  include some minor page styling. But with such a high percentage of users, basic page layout in IE6 is still, of course, a high priority.

One has to wonder why IT departments are not upgrading browsers? IT departments are the ones to blame, they make the decisions for most people, and they seem to have a poor opinion of IE7. There seems to be some prevailing notion that IE7 is not an improvement on IE6. One opinion I heard recently; was that IE7 was very slow. But I think the real issue is that a lot of people simply don’t like the UI (“User Interface”).

I believe Internet Explorer 7 made a major mistake when it changed the UI – If IE7 still looked the same as IE6, I think the upgrade process would have proceeded at a much faster pace. Your average user doesn’t want to learn to drive a new browser, and most people think the features of the browser are all in the UI. If both browsers looked the same, most people would not have noticed the major advantages of IE7, the increased security, the better rendering of CSS layouts, and painlessly dropped IE6.

Is It Time to Ditch IE6?

On August 27, 2001, almost exactly 7 years ago, Microsoft unleashed Internet Explore 6 upon the world. Despite version 7 having been out now for almost two years, and version 8 already in public beta, usage of the 2001 release remains strong. W3Counter reports that it is still the most popular browser in the world at 34.6% of all visits, while TheCounter.com has it second to IE7, but only barely and still commanding a whopping 36% market share.

Because so many people still use the older version of Internet Explorer, many web sites have made the choice to continue supporting it (including SitePoint — where about 12% of our visitors still come to us using IE6). But is it perhaps time to ditch IE6 support and start forcing people to upgrade?

Web application developer 37signals made the decision to drop IE6 support in July (actual support for Microsoft’s last generation browser ceased on August 15). “IE 6 can’t provide the same web experience that modern browsers can,” wrote 37signals of the decision. “Continued support of IE 6 means that we can’t optimize our interfaces or provide an enhanced customer experience in our apps. Supporting IE 6 means slower progress, less progress, and, in some places, no progress.”

According to 37signals, supporting IE6 was holding them back. And 37signals isn’t alone in their dislike of IE6. In 2006, a few months before Microsoft released their last major browser, PC World magazine ranked Internet Explorer 6 as the 8th worst tech product of all time, citing its terrible track record when it comes to security.

Security is such a big issue for IE6, that one blogger recently reported that 95% of all bots accessing his site use Internet Explorer 6 as their user-agent. “Most blog spam comes from bots that either fake or, as a trojan, use Internet Explorer 6 of infected systems,” he wrote, ultimately deciding to block IE6 completely to alleviate the blog spam problem.

Of course, security isn’t the only reason web developers are sour on IE6. Internet Explorer 6 is also dismal when it comes to standards compliance. So why do people continue to use it? As Nick La wrote a year ago, the reason people still use IE6 is that developers go out of their way to make web sites work in it. So most people don’t realize that IE6 isn’t a good browser.

“We all know that IE6 is outdated and has horrible CSS rendering engine. However, most average Internet users haven’t realized that yet. Why? Because we put our hard work on it and patch the bugs by various IE hacks,” La wrote, urging people to drop support for IE6.