Is the scourge of developers finally on the way out?
Google announced over the weekend that it’s going to stop supporting IE6 in some of it’s web applications. I bet many developers are hoping that this message will finally get through to those *still* using it that there is better technology out there and the should upgrade.
I know that the majority of these users are probably corperate users where they don’t have a choice but if the figures of 20% are still true that is a lot of ancient browsers out there that cause almighty headaches for anyone developing websites now days. Personally as most of the people who visit this site use firefox >46% and I’ve only had 2 visits with IE6 I don’t do anything special but I know that it’s important for proper sites to keep supporting it while people keep visiting them with it.
Imagine the amount of development effort and money that could have been saved if everyone had upgraded two years ago… Come on people give it up!
Good Hunting
A lot of corporate users are still stuck with IE6 because they need to use web apps that only work in IE6.
I can name one large automotive company who have just decided to upgrade to IE7 even though IE8 is now available. This is due to the amount of time it has taken to get approval for IE7. Unbelievable.
I think part of the problem, as you say, is very large corporate environments who have stuck with XP. It is a massive headache to upgrade to IE7/8 (as expected, MS changed the security policy toolkit, so it would have to be re-written if they upgrade) - so the though process was to cost it once with the upgrade to vista - however, most companies saw vista as a massive fail, and therefore waiting for win7 - and everyone knows never upgrade to a new windows OS for at least 6 months/SP1-2 - especially in the “current economic environment”
However, I think 18mnoths should see a stop to this.
It’s also chicken and egg - if people stopped supporting IE6, people would upgrade, but then if people are paying for a service and use IE6…..