Version 7 of Internet Explorer has now been around for a few months, but many users still use older versions. Here are a few reasons why I think drastic measures are necessary to force users to upgrade.
- IE 6 has been released in 2001, in other words 6 years ago. This is in terms of technological advance an eternity.
- In contrast to IE 7, IE 6 does not have support for RSS feeds, PNG transparency as well as a myriad of other recent developments.
- IE 7 has improved CSS support as well as improved security.
- Web developers will have more time to develop visually and technically advanced websites withouth worrying about compatibility for old browsers. If less hacks are necessary, developers can start to adhere to standards again. This will result in improved cross-browser compatibility and theoretically also in improved usability.
Obviously, Internet Explorer 7 has made an enormous progress, but too many people are still using IE 6. Making web pages not compatible with Internet Explorer 6 is the only possibility to force people to either upgrade or change browsers.
Basically my idea would be to not pay too much attention to Internet Explorer 6 and instead show an unobtrusive upgrade notice at the top of the window. Something like “This page might not work or look as expected because you are using an outdated browser.” If users see those messages on enough pages, I am positively sure that this can make a difference. I have prepared a demo page on how I imagine this to look like.
Some of my dear readers will of course ascertain that there are always some reasons why an upgrade is not recommendable, which is why I give you my top 5 not-so-serious reasons why you should not upgrade to IE 7:
- IE 6 already brought along enough bugs for both versions 6 and 7.
- Netscape 4 still does its job.
- “7″ is a prime number and prime numbers are evil.
- Your system administrator (or son, or both) has already installed Firefox.
- You have caught a virus that makes Windows crash every 5 minutes.
Aren’t there Windows versions where the IE7 is not available? And I think for the rest of it, IE7 is already automatically installed by windows update and should therefore be available on many computers.
In general I think that you have to explain to users where the advantage in upgrading to IE7 (which has a new look and feel and maybe other compatibility issues) lies, instead of showing some annoying messages, which remind me of the “This page is optimized for Internet Explorer 5.0 and a resolution of bla”-notes in good old web 1.0 days.
And as a last point: In recent years there has been made much effort in making the web accessible and usable by as many users as possible. Isn’t now your idea of abolishing IE6 contradicting this approach?
Websites that depend on their users (e.g. web shops, or private websites that depend on their advertisments) have still no choice but supporting IE6.
P.S: I find a current statistic that shows how many people are still using IE6 on Windows XP/Vista/2000(?) (and thus have a chance to upgrade) missing in your post.
Internet Explorer 7 is not available for versions older than Windows XP. In this case, a cross-upgrade to any of the various browser alternatives will be necessary.
As to the automatic deployment of IE7, there still seems to be some issues. According to recent statistics IE 6 is still more widely used than IE 7. This might be due to Windows Update being disabled or because some system administrators specifically block the Internet Explorer upgrade.
If you have a close look at my demo page, you can see that this is exactely what I intend to show to the user as soon as he clicks on the “Details” button.
I don’t think so. If web developers have to worry less about browser hacks, they can adhere more easily to standards. And standards will improve accessibility.
That’s true. I wanted to write the article a little provocative, so I didn’t want to include those “special” cases.
This statistic could also be influenced by other browsers forging as IE6. But as I don’t know how much this impacts the statistic, I dont want to emphasize this.
Ah there was a link. So much for usability
I don’t like the text “This page may not look…” because it focuses on the technical limitations that a normal user is not concerned with. As a normal user I simply do not bother if my browser adheres to standards or how much hacking-effort is required to support it. All I want is to use the webpage and thus such a message could at least be annoying or even offending to some users.
Maybe the text could focus more on the things that is gain by upgrading to IE7, e.g. RSS-feed, security, tabs. This is still not an optimal solution, but at the moment I dont have anything better in mind.
But the common browser-hacks for IE6 are well-known and documented since a long time. So it should not be that much effort to support it.
But these special cases are the sites that attract the majority of the users. If somebody at http://frickel.gnu.org/~whatever puts this on his webpage, he wouldnt achieve anything, because he has few users, most of them do not even use IE and/or do already know about the problems with it. You have to reach the big sites, which can thus influence many users. And these sites depend heavily on their users either directly or indirectly.
Most Webdesigners work for clients and it’s in the interest of these clients that websites are made IE6 compatible.
Personally, I don’t see much space for an anti-ie6-revolution here…