Pinderkent

For several years now, those of us involved even in the slightest degree with Web development will no doubt have run into the numerous problems associated with supporting Internet Explorer 6. Although it has survived longer than much other software, and even today still has a significant number of users, many Web developers are finding that it's just not worth supporting IE6.

So while many Web developers and sites are beginning to phase out support for IE6, apparently even including heavyweights like YouTube, others aren't ready to do so yet. Toby Joe Boudreaux, for instance, suggests that we shouldn't stop supporting IE6.

All in all, this is a situation that those of us who have been in the industry for years have faced time and time again. There ends up being a platform of some sort that was heavily used at some point, but has clearly become obsolete. And there's always some resistance towards moving away from it, or no longer supporting it. Yet we typically find that once we've moved on to newer versions or newer platforms, we're much better off that we were in the past.

A good example of this is the JS2E 1.3 and J2SE 1.4 releases of the Java platform. A huge number of businesses standardized on it a few years back. Large systems were build upon it, and it became quite entrenched. Eventually, we had Java 5 available to us, and then Java 6. Yet there was a huge amount of resistance within these enterprise operations when it came to moving forward from 1.3 or 1.4.

I work with a number of different clients who have each standardized on different versions of Java. If there's one trend that is quite clear, it's that those who have transitioned to newer versions of the Java platform are much better off. For instance, one of those clients uses Java 1.3, even today. While it is generally suitable for their needs, they've been finding it more and more difficult to find good Java developers willing to work on such an old version of the platform. They also find it difficult to make use of the numerous class libraries and frameworks that don't support Java 1.3.

On the other hand, some of those clients are on Java 6. One of them is even actively developing some upcoming projects targeting Java 7. And what we see with them is a development team that is on the cutting edge, eager to use the new language features and third-party code or frameworks to develop more effective software in a more efficient manner. Whatever effort is spent on transitioning to newer versions of the Java platform ends up being dwarfed by the benefits the newer versions have brought to the developers, and then the users of the software systems themselves.

So one main lesson we can take away from this is that we shouldn't be afraid to discard old software, especially when we know there is much better out there, even if it means ruffling the feathers of some entrenched users. This is exactly where we are with IE6 today. Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome are clearly superior browsers, in just about every way. There are significant benefits, for both developers and users, to moving away from IE6. It's just one of those things that we should do, and the sooner the better. We shouldn't be afraid.