The slow death of Internet Explorer 6
Developing cutting-edge web sites and custom applications requires many levels of skill from tech-savvy know-how to creativity and a solid understanding of the quickly changing patterns of end users. Analytics tools help provide insight into web trends, site paths, and user behavior. As technology professionals, we all would like to see our customers, managers, and organizations following a path of forward technological progress.
Although …
Comical in a sense but frustrating to the industry, at this point approximately 11% of the world is suspected of using and supporting Internet Explorer 6. The Internet Explorer 6 Countdown website is “dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide, so more websites can choose to drop support for Internet Explorer 6, saving hours of work for web developers.” A web browser we all know should have long since been retired, IE6 is still lingering on with a slow death.
Why?
There are many reasons IE6 is still in use:
- Corporate intranets need upgrades, often costing more than corporations are able to easily budget for.
- End users get comfortable and don’t understand change.
- Smaller businesses that contract out all of their technology simply don’t understand what they need or the quality of service they are receiving.
- Convincing budget committees to upgrade software that seems to be “working” can often be a challenge.
On a similar topic, in our Twitter Shorts, we pointed to Google’s recent article discussing their discontinued support of other browsers: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3. Sometimes a little tough-love is needed to force a change.
How tech-forward are your customers?
We always assume technology moves at a fast pace and as technology professionals, we would like to follow the current. But, perhaps IE6 is here to remind us that while we understand the need to move swiftly with emerging technologies, our customers and organizations will not always move as fast as we’d like. How do we all bridge the divide, ensuring our customers make the right technological decisions and stay up to speed?
