The topic of site support for IE6 has had a lot of discussion on the web recently as a result of a post on the Digg blog. Why would anyone run an eight-year old browser? Should sites continue to support it? What more can anyone do to get IE6 users to upgrade?
For technology enthusiasts, this topic seems simple. Enthusiasts install new (often unfinished or “beta”) software all the time. Scores of posts on this site and others describe specific benefits of upgrading. As a browser supplier, we want people to switch to the latest version of IE for security, performance, interoperability, and more. So, if all of the “individual enthusiasts” want Windows XP machines upgraded from IE6, and the supplier of IE6 wants them upgraded, what’s the issue?
The choice to upgrade software on a PC belongs to the person responsible for the PC.
Many PCs don’t belong to individual enthusiasts, but to organizations. The people in these organizations responsible for these machines decide what to do with them. These people are professionally responsible for keeping tens or hundreds or thousands of PCs working on budget. The backdrop might be a factory floor or hospital ward or school lab or government organization, each with its own business applications. For these folks, the cost of the software isn’t just the purchase price, but the cost of deploying, maintaining, and making sure it works with their IT infrastructure. (Look for “nothing is free” here.) They balance their personal enthusiasm for upgrading PCs with their accountability to many other priorities their organizations have. As much as they (or site developers, or Microsoft or anyone else) want them to move to IE8 now, they see the PC software image as one part of a larger IT picture with its own cadence.
Looking back at the post on Digg, it’s not just IT professionals. Some of the ‘regular people’ surveyed there were not interested in upgrading. Seventeen percent of respondents to the Digg IE6 survey indicated that they “don’t feel a need to upgrade.” Separately, a letter to a popular personal technology columnist last week asked if people will somehow be forced to upgrade from their current client software if it already meets their needs.
The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have.
As engineers, we want people to upgrade to the latest version. We make it as easy as possible for them to upgrade. Ultimately, the choice to upgrade belongs to the person responsible for the PC.
We’ve blogged before about keeping users in control of their PCs, usually in the context of respecting user choice of search settings or browser defaults. We’ll continue to strongly encourage Windows users to upgrade to the latest IE. We will also continue to respect their choice, because their browser is their choice.
Dean Hachamovitch
Makes sense. I'm sure there'll be lots of ornery opinions about this, but it does make sense.
"We make it as easy as possible for [people] to upgrade [IE6]."
No you don't. If you made it as easy as possible, then it would be as easy as upgrading Firefox, which is currently much, much easier than upgrading IE.
Perhaps you mean that you make it as easy as possible for huge organizations to push IE updates to hundreds or even thousands of machines. I'll give you that. But you certainly don't make it as easy as possible for the average user, or even the technically-inclined user, to upgrade IE.
As long as IE upgrades are tied to OS upgrades, or require OS restarts, or cannot be installed alongside previous IE versions, you have failed to make upgrading IE as easy as possible.
@Ryan: by your own blog link, you're "a bitter software engineer." Dude, you're complaining that it's hard to upgrade? It's just running setup. What's your problem?
Be that as it may, as a web developer, I know firsthand that IE6 (both in terms of script interpretation and HTML rendering) functions in a way throughly inconsistent with other browsers (including later versions of IE), meaning that adding IE6 support to a website can add days, if not weeks, to the development time of a web application.
Personally, I believe that the best solution would be for a large portion of internet sites to cease support for IE6, which would "encourage" users to upgrade. Unfortunately, that's not going to happen yet.
@Dan: as a user, I don't care if writing your site was hard. I care if it works with I chose to use (IE6, IE7, IE8, FF, Chrome, iPhone, Nokia, etc.). Playing chicken with your customers over what client software they're running is not a great plan.
@ Dean Hachamovitch [MSFT]
People will upgrade to IE 8 or switch to another browser if they have+understand good, sensible, acceptable reasons to do so and if they have appropriate documentation and adequate tools (softwares, tutorials, assisting softwares) to help them to upgrade their websites, to successfully carry such transition. Right now, they do not have all of the above requirements from Microsoft to do so. More buttons, managed lists, settings, etc. do not upgrade any websites whatsoever.
On top of all this, Microsoft is definitely not leading and not promoting such trend to begin with by not adopting/endorsing such efforts itself. If Microsoft itself is not doing it, then why should they and how possibly could they? If Microsoft IE Team employees themselves do not even use the IE dev. tools for their own personal blogs (debugging, cleaning, validation, etc), then how and why others are supposed to do this for their own websites?
Gérard Talbot
@Ryan
Exactly, which is why IE6 isn't going anywhere. It doesn't matter if one company's site doesn't work with IE6; users will just go to another company which has taken the time to provide that compatibility. What I'm talking about is a wishful thinking scenario--if every large company would simultaneously abandon IE6 (something that could not and will not happen), that would be a very good thing.
is it possible to secretly upgrade IE6's trident engine while leaving the UI intact?
that way, users won't notice any difference, besides the browser being suddenly capable of rendering sites previously thought not possible.
@Dan: yeah, I don't do wishful thinking. I don't really understand the point of your post. If we all spoke Chinese we wouldn't need any translators?
Microsoft never used Front-Page to edit the webpages on microsoft.com (or even webpages presenting Front-Page) or on any websites controlled by microsoft. But real people have in/with millions of websites, during the last 10 years. So, does Microsoft have all of the necessary/useful/helpful tools, documentation, tutorials and assisting softwares to help those people to upgrade their created-with-Front-Page websites?
Same thing, same questions for MS-Word created webpages.
Microsoft webpages and microsoft-controlled websites all have dozens or hundreds of validation markup errors and dozens of CSS parsing errors, including this IE Blog. If Microsoft still has not upgraded yet its own websites - whatever the reasons/excuses are -, then how can you possibly expect others to easily do so and why should you expect others to easily succeed?
Hey Gérard, I think you're asking for more material (tools etc.) to help developers upgrade their websites. Reading a mix of developers' blogs, I haven't seen anything that indicates that information is what's stopping them.
Microsoft IE team members use a lot of different tools (both IE and other) to understand the web devloper experience today, what's good and what can get better.
@Gérard: nope, you just got silly. Who said that site validation matters? See http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/001234.html. FrontPage was The Wrong Tool for a site as big as Microsoft.com. You are a Fail.
@Ryan,
A webpage without validation markup errors has many proven advantages and benefits over one that has many. Such advantages are furthermore important and impactful when triggering web standards compliant rendering mode in recent stable released browser versions (IE 8, Firefox 3.5.2, Opera 9.64, Safari 4.0.2, Konqueror 4.3). No one can seriously argue with this.
Creating webpages on microsoft.com and other microsoft-controlled websites full (dozens, hundreds) of validation markup errors, CSS parsing errors is never going to promote efforts in others to upgrade websites.
> FrontPage was The Wrong Tool for a site as big as Microsoft.com.
Of course, FrontPage was not a proper tool for a website like Microsoft.com but the thing is that
1- Microsoft didn't even use FrontPage to edit pages presenting FrontPage
2- Microsoft does not propose any tools, any assisting softwares to upgrade webpages built with FrontPage or with MS-Word: that's a real issue affecting a lot of webpages on the web.
Gérard: Lots of people seriously argue with validation. See link to codinghorror or do a web search. Microsoft is So. Not. Alone. in having a site that doesn't validate.
FrontPage and Word "affecting a lot of webpages on the web"? Ha. Any numbers? This is so less than 1% it's not funny.
Microsoft :it's up to users to Upgrade from IE6 http://computersservicing.blogspot.com/2009/08/microsoft-its-up-to-users-to-upgrade.html