Arcane Palette Creative Design » artistic graphic design

I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that IE6 is a horrible browser.  Oh, it may look unassuming if all you’re doing is surfing the web — that is, until you find your computer slowing to a crawl as it is bombarded by pop-ups, adware, malware, and other nasty business that wasn’t invented when Internet Explorer 6 was unleashed in 2001.

Think about that for a second: 2001. Internet Explorer 6 is a browser that is 8 years old. Why are we even having this discussion?

In 2001, the web was a completely different place. CSS was an afterthought and non-essential to the design of web pages. Microsoft must’ve thought that CSS would just blow over or only be used by extreme geeks when they made the decision to not (or just forgot to) fully support CSS 2. Surely if you are still using Internet Explorer 6, you are beginning to see glitches, bugs, and design problems as more and more developers and designers stop supporting the browser.

As a designer, I work hard to make the best looking web site I can. I put hours into the CSS and design. Supporting IE6, literally, means spending twice as long designing a site. It means building the site, making it compatible in Google Chrome, Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox, and Internet Explorer (and, even though we say we only support the most recent versions of all the most common browsers, we still support 2 versions of Internet Explorer). After that is done, I have to start all over again with conditional statements, IE6-only stylesheets, and hacks to get it to work in an ancient (by tech standards) browser that Microsoft stopped supporting fully with the release of Internet Explorer 7.

How many pieces of software do you use in a day that are 8 years old? Let’s put it into perspective. In 2001, if you were using Microsoft Office, you wer using either Office 97 (probably bundled with your computer that came installed with Windows 95, or Windows 98) or, if you were particularly savvy, Office 2000. Most likely not the latter, however, since the latest version of Office was most commonly used only in corporate workplaces in 2001, not at home. Your computer was most likely running Windows 98. Windows ME was a market failure, and most home users, for one reason or another, couldn’t get used to Windows 2000 — which was also marketed as being more of a business workplace Operating System. If you were a mac user, you were thrilled by the announcement of the latest release of OSX, but were most likely still using Mac OS 8 or 9.  Back then, most people didn’t know that Google existed, we were still using Yahoo! or possibly Altavista for searching the web.  Ask.com was still AskJeeves.com, and not widely used, still being fairly early in the company’s history.

In 2001, Microsoft was in the midst of a large-scale antitrust case against them for, unsurprisingly, bundling their browser with their operating system. If you are still using Internet Explorer 6, it is likely because it came installed on your computer (cause for the antitrust lawsuit), and haven’t updated your browser, despite the fact that if you are doing regular Windows Updates, Internet Explorer will automatically update to the latest version, something you should be doing for the security of your system anyway. Internet Explorer 6 is superseded by not one, but two versions, and they’re all free.

Again, let’s take a moment to ponder that: there have been not one, but 2 full, updated versions to Internet Explorer since IE6. If you do a google search for “internet explorer 6″ there is a sponsored link with the text “Internet Explorer 6″ but the link points to IE8 (a clever bit of subterfuge)! Why are we having this discussion?

Not only that, but if you had a problem with Internet Explorer, and called Microsoft or your ISP for support, the first thing they would say is “upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 or — better yet! — Internet Explorer 8.” (I know this, because I used to do tech support for MSN. If I was still working there, a call in which the user was still on IE6 would be something we looked forward to, because we could tell them to upgrade and move on. Try it, if you want, and see if they tell you otherwise.) For the sake of the health of your computer, you should be using at least IE7 which is leaps and bounds better than IE6 and introduces tabbed browsing, something other browsers (Opera, Firefox, Safari) had been doing for years.

IE6 is a dinosaur. Can’t we just agree that it’s best to see other browsers and live in a safer, happier, more secure web?

Here’s some resources for alternatives to Internet Explorer 6:

Opera
Apple Safari
Mozilla Firefox
Google Chrome
Internet Explorer 8

Don’t take my word for it, here are some other articles on IE6:

Wikipedia: Internet Explorer 6
YouTube Will Be Next to Kiss IE6 Goodbye
Phasing out support for IE 6 across all 37signals products on August 15, 2008
IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On
Much Ado About IE6
ABC News: Kill IE6, for the sake of the web
I Dropped IE6
Apple’s MobileMe drops support for IE 6
Dig a hole and shovel IE6 into it
Vulnerability Report: Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.x
Wikipedia: United States v. Microsoft