Is IE6 really the Devil’s own creation, or a maligned browser?

Filed in Discussion on Feb.02, 2010 By Keith Lunt

Internet Explorer 6, IE6 for short, is hot in the news at the moment. First introduced in 2001, it is now approaching 8½ years old. This is quite old for a piece of software, far older than many of the machines that it is probably running on.

IE6 was not replaced by IE7 until October 2007, by which time IE6 was over 6 years off the shelf. IE7 was relatively quickly replaced by IE8 less than 18 months later, in March 2009. All three versions remain supported my Microsoft, for the moment.

So just what is wrong with IE6? Well, Google are reported to be blaming security issues in the browser for the recently well publicised attacks targetting Google Mail accounts. It also works differently to other browsers when rendering the basic website code. What looks good on IE6 might not even work on Firefox, Chrome and other more modern browsers. I’ve had many upsetting hours when I’ve written a site and tested on Firefox, only to view the site in IE6 to find that it is all over the place.

And that is why many designers are behind the campaigns to get it removed from the list of supported browsers. The extra testing needed loses many hours of unnecessary work, whilst we find and put in tweaks aimed just at IE6.

So why is it still about? Well many big users have applications that depend on IE6 that would need rewriting to move to a more modern browser. There are enough of them about to put weight behind keeping the maintenance of the outdated browser going, at least for now.

But with the recent highlights of the security issues and the French and German governments advising their citizens to move to a newer browser could just prompt the move away from the old, maybe not so reliable, IE6.

Is security an issue? I’m no browser security expert, but I look on security like an onion – many layers to peel through. My router has a firewall, my computer has a firewall and I run spyware and anti-virus software. I take care what I open and so security on my browser is another layer. I like to see warnings when an email sends a phishing link or I try to open a dangerous site. This isn’t available on IE6

So how many people use IE6? Taking a snapshot of recent visitors to comparemortgagerates.co.uk, out of 1,305 people that have visited the site recently, 953 were using a version of IE. Of these, 174 were still on IE6 – over 13%.

This is still quite a lot and I picked this site as it is not attracting just highly technical visitors, it should be general people. So I would expect this to be fairly indicative of general internet users. The only way to get these people off IE6 is to not support it. Even then, a lot probably aren’t downloading latest patches, so lack of support isn’t going to matter.

For now then, I have to maintain a test machine with IE6 installed to ensure websites will work for the majority of visitors. After all, with 13% of my visitors on IE6, that is more than all of the non IE and non Firefox visitors put together. In fact, IE6 on that site is almost as popular as Firefox is.

So, for the final word, what browser do I prefer? Well I have IE6 and IE8 on different machines. But the majority of the time, whether I’m working or browsing, I prefer Firefox!

Keith Lunt