There was a discussion going on the FreelanceSwitch forum about the news that YouTube and Digg are dropping support for Internet Explorer 6. I made an observation there that I decided should become a blog post, and my reasons for supporting IE6.

For a long time IE6 has been the bain of web designers due to it’s lack of standards compliance, meaning lots of extra consideration, work-arounds and fixes to make sure your websites work in it. The browser is almost 8 years old now, and despite the proliferation of better browsers like Firefox, Safari, Opera, Google Chrome and even two whole new versions of Internet Explorer, it still shows up on log files an esitmated 7% - 30% depending on the site. The reason? Corporations running Windows XP on their systems that never upgraded to Vista, and also usually don’t go through the process of upgrading the web browers either. It’s viewed as unnecessary cost (even though the software is free).

I’d say about a year or so from now you might be able to look at dropping IE6 support, but it will depend again on the usage. The big sites like Digg and YouTube are starting the trend now, which may trigger IT departments into upgrading browsers down the road - or not. Quite frankly alot of ceo’s would rather that their office’s browsers not work on YouTube anyway. I don’t think Windows 7 will present any dramatic shift, companies aren’t going to automatically upgrade to W7 when it comes out either.

There’s been a shift in thinking in the past few years, where companies realize they’re getting the job done now on what they have for the most part. There’s not a big ROI in investing in new hardware for typical company functions, not like there used to be. Ten years ago PCs were advancing by leaps and bounds and basically they all sucked so people would upgrade because a 2 year difference was huge (like going from a 300MHz Celeron to a Pentium 4). Now, it’s not much of a big deal. There’s not that much of a difference in opening Word on a 2 year old PC versus a brand new one. This is also one of the reasons for the proliferation of netbook PCs - they’re fast enough for the intended use. Office computers last longer than they used to, because they’re now good enough. More advances are going towards mobile / smart phone technology than PCs because of this.

Having said that, Microsoft is under siege from a few fronts now, namely Apple and Google. They are fully aware that they have to come up with some pretty compelling reasons for corporations to upgrade computers, I’m not so sure Office 2010 is it. Windows 7 is nice and all, but really, for office environments there’s not that much advantage over XP which corps have by now gotten quite used to. I don’t know what the future holds for Microsoft behemoth that is slow to change it’s core business, but a good possibility is they end up as the General Motors of software and may end up a very different company in a few short years.

So, in the end, IE6 will be around for a while yet (I believe) at least for corporate environments. It will have to be Microsoft themselves that drive the need for upgrading - unless Google’s Chrome OS takes on a life we’ve yet to predict.