Simon Battersby

Find myself in an interesting situation at the moment – enforced usage of IE6 at work. Good reasons for this of course, one application used in this organisation will only work with IE6. Quite a common situation.

What’s interesting is what doesn’t work in IE6 – including two websites for web design agencies I was looking at last week. One of these actually said that their site didn’t work in IE6 and told me to upgrade my browser (I can’t), and the other one just broke (badly) in IE6. Another different site I viewed on the same day used transparent pngs, which aren’t natively supported by IE6. Update: Found another two web design agencies whose pages break in IE6 this week – and these were New Media Age Top 100 agencies as well.

Although I use IE6 at home, I use it exclusively for testing websites I’ve built to make sure they’re OK, so don’t normally come across so many issues.

Personally, at the moment, much as I’d like to ignore IE6, I don’t think it’s acceptable to do so. Excluding people using IE6 from using your website is equivalent to saying, in UK terms, that it’s unavailable in Scotland and Northern Ireland. Or, in US terms, unavailable to most of the people in California.

Read an interesting article this morning about the use of Internet Explorer. Specifically, the article suggests that now that IE8 is launched, users will migrate from IE7, but many who are still using IE6 will remain, to the point that IE6 will become more popular than IE7. Sound mad? Not really, because many corporate web applications were designed for IE6 when it was effectively the only browser available, and they won’t work with IE7. Larger companies tend to be intrinsically risk-averse anyway, upgrading a browser is low priority – my own experience certainly supports the argument.

A couple of sets of web stats highlight the issue. Looking at some stats from a large public sector website, 80% of visitors are using IE, of which 40% use IE6. This website will be frequently accessed by people at work. By contrast, one of the sites I run, which tends towards consumer usage, has only 60% IE users, of which only 15% use IE6.

So the bad news is IE6 may live a lot longer than we might like…