IE6 Antiquated or Necessary?
Monday, November 23rd, 2009After talking to the guys in the office it appears they still have to do extensive testing of new websites in Internet Explorer 6, when I’d finished laughing and seeing the serious yet disapproving ‘share our pain and don’t mock us’ looks I decided to look into it somewhat further. 
The most recent report I found on this is from earlier this year;
37% of people stated ‘I can’t upgrade because I don’t have administrator access on my PC’ now this has to be from large corporations locking down end user computers so as to not allow the installation of anything non work related. Plus the fact that a lot of large companies have bespoke software that will still only work with that version of IE. It seems to be popular belief that this comes down to spending hard currency (as ever) or the want to not spend. Understandable in the current climate but IE6 was first released in August 27 2001 to coincide with the release of Windows XP – over 8 years ago! I’m all for frugal but come on, surely the continued security threats to this antique version would be enough to promote an update?
32% of people claimed ‘I can’t upgrade because someone at work says I can’t’ isn’t this akin to the first reason though? So are we to believe a staggering 69% of computer users in the UK are governed by admin rights, or the lack there of, in the workplace?
Another report claims that just 30% are using the ‘because I have to’ reason with ‘Because I have an old computer’ in hot pursuit at 20%. The most popular reason, inside of the same study, claimed that 35% of people just didn’t care or actually refused all updates due to not wanting ‘change’ – now this sounds more like us brits!
Then Andrew forwarded me an article that Tim found:
“…According to October browser usage stats reported by Ars Technica, the old, incontinent granddad of the browsing world has finally been overtaken by the cool kid with all the rad accessories. Although IE6 still has 23% of the market – sadly, more than any other version of IE – when you add up the usage on every version of Firefox, you get 24.07%, enough to top that single old edition of Internet Explorer…”
One thing is for sure; when IE6 is finally put down like the sick ageing animal it is Andrew and Tim (our senior designers) will undoubtedly dance a small jig in the office, now if only they could convince me to stop using Google Chrome…
