That is of course, on everything except Internet Explorer 6.

Now, there will be those who will argue that this statement is not exactly true. HTML 5 and CSS3 are being structured to degrade gracefully to older browsers and Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) will, for the most part, do its bit to show new technologies in the way that they are intended and if it can’t, it will deal with them. But it will deal with them because we, the developers, are expected to provide for the fact that it has to deal with them. If you ask any web developer (designers not so much. Designs can be implemented. Making them do what the designer expects is where the problems occur and this is down to the development) worth their salt what the biggest hurdle in current web development is, they will say IE6. There are online campaigns to eliminate it. There are hacks you can add to your web page to encourage users of IE6 to upgrade. And, with great glee, we awaited Microsofts expected “ceasation of service” to IE6 which was expected next year, 2010.

Then this morning they announced that they would continue to support IE6 until 2014.

There are a number of things that bother me about this. Personally, I find IE6 cumbersome, boring and unfair. I find it unfair because, why can’t I do the things I want to do!? Why do I have to support this “piece of junk” (solely my opinion) browser? It’s been around since 2001, it’s outdated and it doesn’t support much of the new technologies that are available properly (even AJAX has to compensate depending on the mode of the browser and javascript libraries like jQuery and Mootools would be lighter if they didn’t have to accommodate IE6). It won’t be able to handle HTML5 and CSS3 and as newer techniques and technologies emerge, IE6 will continue to lag further and further behind. I also don’t understand how, with all the updates that Microsoft makes, there is not yet an IE6 update (that does not involve upgrading the browser) which will help IE6 accommodate the more recent changes and, with a little foresight, enable it to cater for HTML5 and CSS3. Surely there is something that can be done…?

And on another point why are there so many IE6 users!? Well, as any business who hasn’t upgraded from Windows XP to Vista will tell you, in large corporations (the likes of 500 – 1000 employees plus) it is not always as easy to roll out a browser update, just to enhance the web user experience. Many large corporations actually find the lack of support for web technologies in IE6 of benefit as it means lower maintenance requirements (a quick Google search fails to reveal exactly how many security updates there have been for IE7 since release, but safe to say it’s alot!) and also decreases the amount of time employees will waste browsing the web while in the office. They adopt an “IE6 standard” and IT support refuses to upgrade beyond this stance.

So what, as a web developer (and more importantly, as a web design agency) do we do? Well, for the moment it’s put up or shut up. The reality is that the statistics do not lie (W3 Schools and  MarketShare) and regardless of personal opinion or mob mentality, IE6 is here to stay, at least until 2014. It would be remiss and arrogant of us (or any developer/designer) to dismiss IE6 as “past it’s sell by date.” Even taking W3 Schools lower estimate of users of 14.4% in July 2009, with an estimated 1.6 billion internet users worldwide, that’s… (carry the 2… denomenator… Start > Run > Calc!) 230 million users. Try alienating that many customers and surviving to tell the tale. I admire the staunch advocacy of the IE6 resistant groups out there, but the reality is that for the next 5 years at least, we will need to consider and cater to our IE6 users. It’s a painful admission, but one we should embrace as a test of our abilities. Our skills as developers and designers should be such that our sites should work uniformly across all browsers and we should inherently be aware of the issues and resolutions to these problems we will encounter with IE6. We will continue to garner respect, not for our exclusion of IE6 but for our open-armed embracement of it.

What doesn’t kill you, makes you stronger.