Agile Business Change Blog Thoughts on Agile Strategic Business Change and Agile Delivery

10

MAR

IE6 Refuses to Die

10 MAR 2011 | Posted in internet, website | Author Alex McLachlan | 2 Comments

Internet Explorer 6 is still used by 12% of users worldwide and refuses to die, despite Microsoft's attempts to kill it off.

IE6 causes real business problems as the lack of up to date style support means that IE6 styling has to be coped with as a separate task and there are acknowledged security and speed issues.

Microsoft want to get IE6 use down to 1% and are encouraging internet users to educate IE6 users to upgrade by:

• displaying a banner to anyone viewing a site in IE6
• encouraging your friends to upgrade - "friends don't let friends use IE6"

In the UK some of the problem is with large organisations with central IT operations (in many cases large companies, government departments, local government and health authorities). Part of the problem for large organisations is the scale of investment and change programme needed for a move to a different browser - the browser might be free, but systems displayed using the browser need to be tested and roll out needs to be managed.

Internationally there is a very varied picture with 34.5% of internet users in China using IE6 for example, whilst only 0.7% of users in Norway use IE6 (the figure for the UK is 3.5%). There is a suspicion that some users don't upgrade for fear of exposing themselves to Microsoft's licence tracking systems.

The decision for website owners of whether to invest in support for IE6 comes down to the business issues - what proportion of your users use IE6 (this is available from Google Analytics) and are these users sufficiently important to warrant the cost? In our case, last month 10.7% of visitors to our website were using IE6 and a reasonable proportion of our Agile Project Management clients and potential clients are IE6 users, so we needed to make the investment. I look forward to the time when this isn't necessary any more.