Death to IE6

Posted on Wednesday 17th September 2008 at 10.04 am . Filed under Web Browsers 2 comments . Leave a trackback from your own site.

The anti-IE6 squad seems to have been gathering some momentum lately; 37Signals announced that they are phasing out support of the aged web browser, as well as Facebook and MobileMe. Even a website has been constructed, IE Death March, to revolt against the web browser and highlight websites that no longer support it.

Internet Explorer 6 logo

Whilst I think it is a good thing that people are trying to push the adoption of the new web browsers, I don’t think that they have looked into the possible consequences further down the line. At MyKnowledgeMap we use Basecamp for a large amount of internal and external communication, including with clients. We know that many of our clients use IE6 and if Basecamp is to phase out support for the web browser, this will no doubt cause problems when trying to relay information back and forth.

The solution would be to ask the client to upgrade their web browser to the latest version, but unfortunately this isn’t always feasible. Due to the market that we operate; large educational and corporate institutions, it can be quite difficult to get the latest software installed on all computers. This can be either due to resource, internal politics and security implications.

I think the best solution to the issue would be to ask the end-users of the products. Would they like to upgrade to the latest version of their web browser and experience the latest features, or would they rather stick with their current web browser and miss out on the added functionality? Let the users make the decision as no-one likes to be backed into a corner.