Microsoft Backs Long Life For Ie6

[webfact]

Microsoft backs long life for IE6

By Maggie Shiels

Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley

IE6 is still used by nearly 20% of users

Microsoft has underlined support for its Internet Explorer 6 web browser, despite acknowledging its flaws.

The software giant said it would support IE6 until 2014 - four years beyond the original deadline.

Critics - some of which have started an online campaign - want the eight-year-old browser mothballed because they claim it slows the online experience.

"Friends do not let friends use IE6," said Amy Barzdukas, Microsoft's general manager for Internet Explorer.

"If you are in my social set and I have been to your house for dinner, you are not using IE6," she said. "But it is much more complicated when you move into a business setting."

"It's hard to be cavalier in this economy and say 'oh it's been around for so long they need to upgrade,'" Ms Barzdukas told journalists in San Francisco..

Web monitoring firms estimate that 15-20% of people still use IE6 to browse the web.

Story continues: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8196242.stm

-- BBC 2009/08/17

[Crushdepth]

Well that should make every web developer on the planet hate microsoft even more. However, some of the big social networking and ecommerce sites have been talking about scrapping IE6 support.

People using IE6 will change when they discover important parts of the internet no longer work for them.

[Veazer]

Well that should make every web developer on the planet hate microsoft even more. However, some of the big social networking and ecommerce sites have been talking about scrapping IE6 support.

People using IE6 will change when they discover important parts of the internet no longer work for them.

This has saved me a whole lot of agony for designing IE5.5/IE6 sites: http://www.twinhelix.com/css/iepngfix/ Far easier and functional than other solutions.

I agree though, it's time to scrap IE6. I think some of the major reasons corp users are still on IE6 are problems & issues are problems caused by microsoft. OWA (Outlook Web Access) is a prime example of that. IE7 and Vista users get to watch their browser crash if using the enhanced mode of OWA. So how did MS patch it? By making it an Exchange server patch only! It requires the admin to patch the server so that the server starts offering the newer control plugin, but this only helps users who first accessed after the server was patched or digs through the control settings and forces the plugin the be re-installed. The office i work for in NY refuses to apply the patch because they plan to migrate to a newer version of Exchange in the future and don't want to mess with the servers. I downloaded the server patch myself and extracted the IE update and now it works fine. Why doesn't MS just let end users update their browser instead of this absurd path of forcing the patch to be distributed from the server?

The poor performance of IE7 didn't help things either.

[/rant]

[webfact]

Well, I wonder when a bank (a major bank...) in Thailand will upgrade their online banking to be compatible with other browsers but IE6...?

That is the reason why I still have that old cra_p on my computers.