Accessibility Toolkit

It's time to end the misery of IE6

Bruce Lawson

Published: 15 Apr 2009 17:25 BST

...to the rest home with Netscape 4, and stop caring whether our sites work at all in that browser?

You might think that, because I work for Opera, a competitor to Microsoft, I would be an enthusiastic cheerleader for those dropping support for IE6. But I'm not. Sure, it would be lovely to be able to ignore it, but unless you run a very specialised business selling web apps to Mac worshippers or Linux geeks, you cannot afford to.

A 'browser unsupported' message would be a barrier to a good proportion of your online customers, and may very well alienate many, as browser upgrade campaigns assume that everyone can choose to upgrade — and many cannot.

The more modern versions of Internet Explorer run only on Windows Vista and its predecessor, Windows XP. Users of Windows 2000 machines cannot run a more modern version, and Windows 2000 is supported by Microsoft until July 2010. In the present economic turbulence, companies are unlikely to want to spend a small fortune on upgrading machines to new computers that can run the resource-hungry, newer versions of Windows.

So there is only one organisation that should stop supporting IE6 — and that organisation is Microsoft.

Microsoft's move
If Microsoft is serious about wishing to persuade users and corporates to upgrade, it should address the reasons why people have not yet upgraded.

It could, for example, encourage systems administrators to upgrade corporate networks by officially announcing that IE6 has reached the end of its life and stop supporting it, and back-port IE8 to run on Windows 2000 so users of that operating system have an upgrade path.

IE6's security vulnerabilities, such as those flagged by the US Computer Emergency Readiness Team, should terrify most IT directors into upgrading.

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And then, having killed IE6 on the desktop, Microsoft should drive a stake through its heart and reverse its plan to resurrect it as the engine for Internet Explorer Mobile 6 for launch in China this year. Using the emulator, I ran some compatibility tests that show it is using the same buggy CSS and layout engine as IE6 desktop.

And then there will be wild celebrations as web developers dance over the rainbow singing: "Ding Dong, the wicked Six is dead", and customers will be happier as developers pass on the development cost savings.

That is, until they notice that new standards such as HTML 5 canvas, scalable vector graphics (SVG) and non-DRM CSS-embedded Web Fonts are missing from only one modern rendering engine, and the whole cycle will begin again.

Bruce Lawson works as an open-web-standards evangelist for Opera. He has been involved in standards and accessibility since 2002. The views expressed in this column are his own. You can follow him on Twitter.