I love IE6 and here’s why.
I started laughing just now as I told my wife what a firestorm a discussion of IE6 brings up. I saw this tweet a couple minutes ago:
Marcy Kellar: RT @pinkpetrol: No need 2 check IE6 reqmt, spend ur time educating people 2 move away from that unsupported browser> good call @drewbills
I couldn’t help but respond to this pie in the sky response, so I fired off:
Mark Miller: RT @marcykellar: @pinkpetrol spend ur time educating people 2 move away from that unsupported browser <- Unrealistic in the real world.
Little did I know what a hornet’s nest that would stir up. Here’s the rest of the “discussion”, but before you read, know that I have set up a live, public forum roundtable using Live Meeting to discuss this. If you’d like to listen in, sign up here and when we confirm the time and date, I’ll send you an invite.
Note: For those who haven’t used twitter, the name before the colon is the person who made the comment. The people with the @ sign in front of their name are the ones who the comment is made to.
John Ross: @EUSP re IE6 – unrealistic? Disagree. IE6 is 11 yrs old. Time for companies to move on.More Roi in modern browsers @marcykellar @pinkpetrol
Mark Miller: RT @JohnRossJr IE6 – unrealistic? Disagree. IE6 is 11 yrs old @marcykellar @pinkpetrol <- Tell that to billion $ company w/ 3rd party apps.
Mark Miller: RT @JohnRossJr @marcykellar @pinkpetrol That dog won’t hunt.
Scott Singleton: not to mention the security vulnerabilities. is ie6 still supported even @eusp @johnrossjr @marcykellar
Scott: ahh.. it ends 13-Jul-2010. Bad Mojo to be using unsupp software. @eusp @johnrossjr
Scott: @eusp I tell them every day. When they get a vulnerability and their entire shit crashes I dont want to be the one that didn’t preach it :)
Becky Isserman: @JohnRossJr @ScottSingleton @EUSP Federal government smaller agencies barely have the $$ 4 computers they dont wnt 2 switch & train ppl.
John: EUSP huh? SP2010 wont even support IE6
Mark Miller: @JohnRossJr SP2010 isn’t relevant for 2 to 3 years. Try again.
Scott: @mosslover @johnrossjr @eusp that doesn’t mean that as professionals we shouldn’t be telling them every minute of every day
Scott: @mosslover @johnrossjr @eusp I don’t want my clients to be the “lessons learned” examples
Mark Miller: @ScottSingleton @JohnRossJr @MossLover @pinkpetrol @marcykellar Sounds like we need a meetup. TIme next week for online recording?
Scott: @eusp not true, I’m already contracted for four systems – two for fortune 500 defense contractors
Scott: @eusp all to be delivered 3 months from RTM
Mark Miller: @ScottSingleton 4 systems out of how many clients? Come on Scott, you can do better than that.
Scott: @eusp I manage about 25 clients, so that’s a decent %
Scott: @eusp anytime after 10pm-ish Except Thursday night — on my way to boston for spsbos
John: @EUSP The cost to support IE6 is too high both for software and accessibility. You saying it is a good thing to have it around?
Mark Miller: RT @JohnRossJr: IE6 You saying it is a good thing to have it around? <- Nope, I never said that.
Scott: @eusp sure — let’s all get together next week and do a roundtable. definitely worth discussing
Mark Miller: I’ll send out email invites for live meeting regarding discussion on IE6. The core group here, plus any who want to listen. Should be good.
Marcy: @EUSP @JohnRossJr @pinkpetrol > Uggh IE support until 2014??? http://bit.ly/bIKMXi #sharepoint #webdesign
Mark Miller: Thanks @marcykellar “Microsoft to Support IE6 Until 2014″ http://bit.ly/475Ro
Mark Miller: Why do you think MS is going to continue support for IE6 until 2014? It’s not because my grandmother is still using it. Think about it.
John: @EUSP Our job as consultants is to advise. It is in no orgs best interest to use IE6. We need to continue to educate the laggards.
Scott: @eusp @marcykellar MSFT’s site says otherwise: http://bit.ly/7SfMeE
Marcy: RT @ScottSingleton: @eusp @marcykellar MSFT’s site says otherwise: http://bit.ly/7SfMeE > Happy to be wrong about that one!
Scott: @eusp @marcykellar both are reputable pages. ieBlog on msdn or official doc on support site — So who knows
Scott: @eusp @marcykellar either way my point is that regardless of a clients $$$ as professionals we need to tell them the dangers in using ie6
Mark Miller: RT @ScottSingleton @marcykellar we need to tell them <- Noone said not to tell them, but there are still reasons for keeping it.
RileBeau: @EUSP lots of our corporate students are forced to used IE 6 because their company’s custom / legacy systems require it. Nothing for it.
Mark Miller: RT @rilebeau: legacy systems require it. <- And that’s a VERY strong argument for using it.
Christina: @JohnRossJr @eusp @marcykellar @pinkpetrol I have a client that is still running Windows 2000 desktops with IE6.
Christina: @EUSP Count me in on your IE6 discussion meeting. :-)
Bruno: @eusp There is even certain networking equipment that can only be accessed using IE6 for some stupid reason. Too much built around it
Mark Miller: @BrunosITworld Thanks for that one. Going to need all I can get for next week’s “discussion”.
Marcy: RT @cwheeler76: @JohnRossJr @eusp @pinkpetrol I have a client that’s still running Windows 2000 desktops w/ IE6 > do u know the reason?
Mark Miller: RT @marcykellar @cwheeler76: @JohnRossJr @pinkpetrol do u know the reason? <- Best question I’ve heard all night. +10
Mark Miller: Ok, I’ll wrap this one up (IE6) by copying all the tweets to an article and setting up a live meeting one evening next week. — Mark
Bruno: @eusp IE6 will die when the enterprise stops depending on it, not when google says so. unfortunately not even #sharepoint can change that
Follow Up
That was pretty fun, if I do say so myself. If you are interested in listening to a live discussion with the people exchanging here, sign up and I’ll send you an invite. In the meantime, if your company is using IE6, I’d really like to hear from you. Leave a comment below, telling us about your situation.
This could get pretty interesting…
My two cents: with the explosion of client side (JavaScript/jQuery/AJAX/html5/etc.) applications, companies that stick to older browsers like IE6 or even IE7 will miss the boat. It’s both a compatibility and a performance issue. In a recent test, I found out that IE7 was almost 10 times slower than IE8.
Companies need to factor in the cost of these missed opportunities.
For whatever reason, ie6 borks menus for my external users. (using sharepoint as intranet with secure external login) They can access the site but menus don’t function. My first suggestion is to upgrade ie. They do and problem solved.
hang on a minute. IE6 is no laughing matter. :D
AS I wasw saying in my TweetReplyAll – We upgraded an entire enterprise to IE7 (Not 8) in the last 6 months only to roll back a significant portions of users (in the last 3 weeks) to IE6 because of ongoing issues with a 3rd party ERP from one of the largest software companies in the world. Am I happy about it? No, It sucks, but the real world often does.
Our company supports two energy utilities in Australia, our SOE is tied to IE 6 owing to a browser dependency in our ERP software, also hobbled by Office 2003. In this enironment we support multiple instances of WSS 3.0.
An SOE upgrade is a major project in it’s own right, the last one took over 12 months. From a SharePoint support point of view (amongst other things) I’d love to see the upgrades take place, but have to be realistic about the limitations of working in an environment with several thousand geographically disperse users.
The reality is the investment in the ERP solution far outweighs the investment in collaborative tools. There is a similar disparity in the quantitative data related to ROI.
Interesting talking point though.
So maybe instead of “I love IE6″ the title of this article should be “I hate IE”? Is IE the only browser where version upgrades come with significant compatibility issues?
I am a contractor for the government and we still use ie6, we will be switching to ie7 in the next couple months. I am a web developer, currently in charge of Branding and Design of our SharePoint 2007 intranet, which HAS to be ie6 compliant because 90% (more than 20,000 people) of our machines are using ie6 still.
@ Jeremy: ironic that you are upgrading to a browser (IE7) where support is running out **before** (or if not running Vista, the same date as) the one you upgraded from ;-)
http://support.microsoft.com/gp/lifesupsps/#Internet_Explorer
We also have several customers still running IE6 on XP, one of them even a large bank, where you would think security was an issue.
The larger the company, the longer they wait to upgrade their software. Unfortunately this also goes for patching up SharePoint. :-S
Reading an entire twitter conversation is not what I expected coming to an article on this site. I expected more.
With that said, (I skipped over all of it).
IE6 is really bad, certain versions qfe or gde don’t support alpha or opacity, and IE6 completely does not allow PNG transparency.
The world is a better place here in IE 7+
Eric,
The question isn’t whether or not IE7 is better than IE6… that’s a given. The question is why are large corporations and businesses insisting on staying with IE6 when they are well aware of it’s limitations. The discussion thread is to put a real world perspective on why it is still being used. There are VERY good reasons that consultants are overlooking or choose to ignore.
Mark