First of all, I am a web developer and I had my share of problems with IE6. Recently I was involved in an interesting discussion with one of our clients regarding their plans to upgrade from IE6 to IE7/8. So I wanted to share my experience on some of the problems faced by enterprises in this blog post.
As you might know, most web developers and web2.0 companies hate IE. Google has started phasing out support for some of it’s services like Google Docs and YouTube. Even Microsoft (the company behind Internet Explorer), started encouraging users to upgrade from IE6 for a while now.
So why is IE6 bad?
- Lack of support for standards
- Doesn’t support PNG images
- Bugs
- Security issues
- Slow
- CSS3 support
- No tabs
among several other issues.
Of course it’s a browser designed for the browsing needs of the 90s and it has served more than it’s due share. Modern browsers such as Chrome, Firefox and IE8 offer all the above features. Based on the discussion I had, here is what I found:
- Enterprises do want to upgrade. They want better security, speed and improved user experience.
- Enterprise software and organization complexities are a big problem.
Maintaining IT infrastructure for big organizations is a tough task. So system administration teams typically try to solve this problem by having a consistent software stack and hardware. So if a core piece of software like the IE6 has to be upgraded, they prefer to do it for the whole organization.
Some of the enterprise software works only on IE6 and may not work if upgraded. For small organizations this could be the intranet and for large organization there could be several pieces of software which works only on IE6.
- Lack of knowledge
This is the most problematic of all and it takes efforts from the technology companies like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, Developers, IT teams and several others to increase awareness on the problems with IE6.
Regardless of what the obstacle is, IE6 has slowed down the growth of internet and the adaption of new technology. Enterprises should have an IE upgrade strategy in place. We should see a lot of progress within the next 5 years.
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Ah Yes. IE6 woes. They run deep in hospitals and healthcare. We are beginning to see adoption of IE8 in the works as more and more Electronic Health Record Programs are launched nation wide. Healthcare is long known as being slow to move on issues like this. While IE8 may resolve a short-term problem, we’ll probably be talking bad about IE8 in 3 years when the industry is still locked into it while the world has moved on to IE12.
I agree with you. It could be never ending problem. Simply put, enterprises(especially healthcare) don’t see a reason in upgrading their browser unless the need arises.
This could change in a couple of ways:
- When they migrate from Win XP to Windows 7 or Vista, which is happening at a decent pace.
- With automatic updates of browsers (currently available like Chrome) it could change. Hopefully this will be implemented in IE9.