Pinderkent

Today I was forwarded a link to an article about how Internet Explorer 6's market share appears to finally be declining. Most people, and especially Web developers, would agree that this is a very good development. It is not known as a secure product by any means, and is woefully inadequate compared to other browsers today. Unfortunately, it still has a significant presence within the business community, even almost eight years after its initial release.

The problem in this case isn't really with larger businesses and organizations. Many of them with dedicated IT departments have moved over to Mozilla Firefox, with others moving towards IE7. In many cases, the move away from IE6 was done to improve security, while in other cases it was done because users demanded the better functionality offered by Firefox, like tabbed browsing and ad-blocking support.

But we don't really see this with many smaller businesses and organizations. I'm talking about medical offices, small shops, car dealerships, private schools, and so forth. Most of these places do not have a dedicated IT person, let alone a team. They'll get a small computer network installed, and they'll use it for over a decade. Many don't have a choice; they can't afford a better or more up-to-date IT infrastructure. For many others, computers are an "evil" necessity, which the business owner manages to tolerate.

I work with businesses like this relatively frequently. And many of them still are using IE6, unfortunately, with no plans to upgrade. In some cases, it's relatively easy to talk the owner or manager into switching to Firefox. Even if they don't understand the technical and security-related problems with IE6, they've heard about Firefox, Opera and/or Safari from their children, friends and relatives, and are willing to give them a try.

There are others, however, who refuse to switch. In some cases it took these individuals years to get accustomed to IE6, and they're just not willing to put forth the time and effort to learn how to use another Web browser. Those of us who work in IT and software development might find this laughable, but it's a very real attitude. I've actually worked with one business in the past year where they were still using Windows 95, with IE3 as their Web browser. Even though their browsing experience was terrible, the owner refused to upgrade from Windows 95. To some extent, this actually benefited them. Their staff were unable to use the Web to check their email, use Facebook, or visit other sites that might distract them from their work.

Those who I feel worst for are the businesses who want to switch, but they're unable to due to some part of their application suite only really being supported well by IE6. One company I worked with recently had an intranet app that used a proprietary ActiveX control. They had lost contact with the developers who had originally put together their software, and unfortunately did not have source access to this critical and specialized control. They'd tried upgrading one of their systems to IE7 on their own, but their app wouldn't work with IE7 for some reason. So for the time being they have decided to remain with IE6.

Although IE6's market share is declining, it will still be with us for some time. Hopefully we get to the point fairly soon where its use is marginal, and the vast majority of Web sites can ignore Internet Explorer 6 compatibility for the most part. This will make life easier for many people from the Web developers who have to put in extra effort to make a site work well with IE6, to the system administrators who have to worry about the security flaws it presents, to the users who have come to realize the benefit of ad blocking and tabbed browsing.