Statistics show that there is still around 15%-20% of Internet users still using the eight year old browser. Which causes many problems for designer and developers as vast amounts of time has to be spent debugging and fixing sites so that the user who refuse to upgrade can still view a site.
There ara many people in the web development industry who have very strong feeling about this, so much so that around 70 developers have banded together to create project: “ie6nomore”.
The project is dedicated to encouraging people to upgrade their browser to a modern standard compliant browser, such as Firefox, Safari, Opera or even IE8. As their website states:
“Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in late 2001. For its time, it was a decent browser, but in 2009, it is still in use by a significant portion of the web population, and its time is now up.”
“We are passionate because we run a website and something like 10% of our users use IE6, but our web designers and developers have to spend a lot of time debugging for the platform.
The project openly encourages developers to place their banners on their sites, to educate IE6 users to the fact they are using outdated browsers.
Many believe that if large social media website such as eBay, Facebook and Twitter dropped support for IE6, then many users will be forced to upgrade their browser. It would be interesting to see some statistics about social media sites and IE6?
However, you will find that the majority of IE6 users are in fact large corporate companies, who are reluctant to move away from the browser which is now been around nearly a decade. Even Microsoft’s employees are frustrated with the fact that IE6 is still around:
“Friends do not let friends use IE6″ Amy Barzdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer
So how do you think we can encourage these large corporate companies to upgrade their browsers?