At last! Microsoft is killing the last vestiges of that dreadful, obsolete program known as Internet Explorer 6. They are going to force the upgrade and that’s a good thing — the web needs to get rid of this crap.
Right now its usage is at 8.3 per cent, which means that millions of users out there are using obsolete technology. Microsoft has decided to kill it fast: starting next month, they will upgrade Windows users automatically to the latest version of Internet Explorer supported by the computers. This, Microsoft says, will put the usage down to less than 1 per cent.
“10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern Web standards, it’s time to say goodbye,” said Microsoft. About bloody time, I say. [MSNBC]
Antonia
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 8:01 AMHa, good luck to them. I know some major Aussie corporations that cannot upgrade due to incompatibilities between newer versions of IE and the custom built software they depend on.
TSH
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 10:55 AMSo, IE6 has specific bugs that are actually *dependencies* for some programs?? O_o
Lachlan
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 6:35 PMIt’s not a bug, it’s a feature!
http://macnugget.org/albums/cars/feature.jpeg
Rhys
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 11:16 AMMost companies that rely on ie6 have their own WSUS servers so they can pick and choose what updates they want to deploy to their pc’s. This should let them stop the ie7 rollout.
Cameron
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 8:30 AMI suspect that 1.8% sitting in Australia about 2/3′s of that would be from corporate users, who’ll get no automagic upgrade. The rest are probably still on dial-up and couldn’t download IE8 even if they wanted to……
Kyle
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 9:07 AMYeah I work for a very large Australian company. We are all forced to use WindowsXP and IE6.
Jackson Bison
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 9:09 AMI wonder if you and I work for the same company…
It’s also great to know the number of security flaws in IE6, which makes it a great entry point into a ton of the world’s major corporations!
Chris
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 10:25 AMyes windows xp and ie 6 for a major insurance company here ,,, although u will find a couple of computers with ie8 randomly throughout our corporation with no explination haha
villainsoft
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 11:44 AMhaha! I think I work in IT support for this company. Believe me, we’d change if we could, but for some reason “they” believe its too expensive.
Ridiculous that this happens in 2011!
Peter
Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 2:54 AMBrowngoods chain here, Win2k and IE6, though they recently installed an old version of Firefox for some of the more compliant websites we access now.
Todd
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 9:09 AMSome of the major Aussie corporations referred to should have invested some of their fabulous wealth (particularly banks) in getting off IE6 a long time ago. And because they are banks, I have zero sympathy for them.
Jen
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 10:36 AMIt’s probably time we start to name and shame these companies.
JT....
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 3:06 PM+1…Hell yeah.
Chris
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 10:37 AMAs Todd said.. It’s about time that these corps get with the times and spend some of thier wealth on new developement which will also bring more jobs and innovation back to the industry.
Chris
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 10:48 AMYes, yes, OH DEAR GOD YES!
jeremy
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 11:24 AMTotally agree, this will do squat, and I have the server logs to prove it – we get up to 8% IE6 during working hours only, night time and weekends are closer to 1%. BZZZZRT. XP End of life for corporates is April 9, 2014, so end 2013 is when the IE6 bugbear will mostly disappear. We will be testing releases for IE6 until weekday usage drops to about 2%. Professionals code sites for traffic to make money from customers, not for philisophical reasons :-) BTW we still get firefox 3.6 at significant rates too, which is less bad but still an issue.
Trevor
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 12:29 PMQld government – we use xp and ie6 and it’s very slow.
Trevor
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 12:30 PMQld gov – we use xp and ie6 and it’s very slow.
Trevor
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 12:30 PMQld gov – we use xp and ie 6 and it’s very slow.
Craig
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 12:38 PM@jeremy.. Corporates like NAB, Commbank, St George .. should be forced by law to upgrade purely from a security perspective considering they have our cash. My Company lost 10k to NABs “mysterious” outage last year… they were hacked and tried to blame external contractors… Im now with another bank but we dont trust any of them really..
meg
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 2:22 PMI work at nab- we use ie6 and XP.
meg
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 2:22 PMand its awful
luigi
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 2:37 PMI work for optus as a sales. by god if the bugs in its system isn’t enough to kill you, when you sign a contract it can run into an error and you have to start again…
coelmay
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 4:26 PMTo Quote:
“10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern Web standards, it’s time to say goodbye,” said Microsoft. About bloody time, I say. [MSNBC]
Approximately 20 years ago a brower was born. Its name was Lynx. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern Web standards, it still works fine.
I’ve tested my site in it and it is clearly readable partially because I don’t use endles ul’s for navigation. And yes, my site has html5 tags like article. No issues. Can’t say the same for IE7/8 though.
steve
Friday, December 16, 2011 at 5:04 PMI don’t understand the point of this post? why would the average user want to use something that is text based? are you suggesting it’s a viable alternative to IE?
Tony
Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 12:24 AMI am working in an online company in Sydney, some old dev guy still using IE6, and never allow anyone to upgrade his computer, “AS LONG AS IT WORKS”, that why IE6 is out there forever!
Simon pointer
Saturday, December 17, 2011 at 7:04 PMAs a web designer and commercial web trainer this can’t happen soon enough, but I have a few concerns and wonder what other experiences are so far?
I fear that for home users running xp os there maybe issues installing ie8 if their os is out of date, I have had problems installing ie8 on vista machines without some updates and patches to the os first and I’m not too sure your average home user can handle this.
More of a concern is the corporate world that continues to be at the mercy of IT departments who a) don’t have the money for os upgrades especially if hardware updates are required too, and b) for some bizarre reason will not support anything else or work with any other browser. I am sure these folks will block the upgrade and I’m pretty sure Microsoft will not be able force the update into these corporate networks.
Given the need for us web folks to ensure sites work across all browsers and markets we still need to please these browsers to some extent and of course many of our clients are the ones running these old versions.
Will this realistically kill of IE6?