It warms the cockles to see the heart-warming groundswell of support recently for discontinuing support for the fabled, flaky and flawed web browser Internet Explorer 6 with movements like IE6 No More and Hey I.T as well as daily stories from the tech press upping the pressure on web masters and corporate I.T departments to finally put a nail in IE6’s coffin. Now even the mighty Google’s You Tube is putting an end to IE6.

IE 6 is a notoriously unsecure, non-standards compliant internet browser that makes grown-up designers and developers cry into their pillows at night. And worse than the emotional trauma, IE6 often adds extra time (and lines of code) to a development project’s user interface development and testing cycle thereby increasing project cost and degrading end deliverable performance. Clients should hate IE6 too.

We nevertheless must exercise caution in our struggle as despite the technical cognoscenti baying for IE6’s blood, there are still users out there (still above 25% worldwide reported by Net Market Share this month) that prefer the sub-standard experience IE6 brings to surfing the web.

But that’s not quite fair because it is my belief that the vast majority of this body of IE6 users are either those who surf the web for celebrity news only or are locked into doing so by their I.T department.

But let’s not demonize slow I.T departments and throw them to the dogs just yet. There is some truth to the difficulty in these large scale upgrades. In corporate environments there is usually a default set web browser and over time other systems such as the intranet, CRM and so on are developed that take only that browser into account. Thus the web browser becomes entrenched and the job of upgrading becomes a bigger one where all systems must be retested with a newer version. I would probably balk at managing that task too. Perhaps however this difficulty is a promotion in disguise! The hero who dispatches with IE6 in a corporate environment does surely show a certain ballsiness that must end in promotion!

Nevertheless I.T departments must act to protect themselves and their users who will surf the public internet. The continuing decline of IE6 is encouraging however and one day we can all look forward to the panacea of an IE6-less world and we can all start complaining about IE7

Unite behind IE6 No More

As designers and developers we must now unite to finish off IE6. The IE6 No More initiative provides a very useful snippet of code (implemented on this site) that will detect an IE6 victim and alert them immediately and provide links to newer browsers. Let us unite to finish off IE6.