I asked why the entire department doesn’t upgrade their browsers to a more recent version of IE – I didn’t want to push my luck and suggest Firefox or Chrome. After my client made a short phone call to their IT support company the request was met with this response: “This is not a good idea. IE7 is not a secure browser and some of the your programs will not run in it”. What??!! It was that very day that the German government themselves announced the vulnerabilities of IE6[2]. So that was that. They are still using IE6 as far as I’m aware. I had my laptop with me so all was not lost.
Since then I’ve heard that several large corporations are still using IE6. In fact, one of my friends who works for a large bank told me that their entire building use IE6 and that their IT support will not upgrade them. I really struggle to understand the logic behind this failure to provide companies with up-to-date software, which will enhance user-experience, increase efficiency and ultimately be much more secure.
I reckon in about 1 year we can stop worrying if companies are using IE6 and forget about writing alternative code. W3 Schools stats[3] show there were 19.6% of IE6 users in December 2008. This was down to 10.9% in December 2009. Quite a reduction. OK, don’t flame me for this, I know that these are global stats and statistics can be misleading etc., and each site can attract very different audiences. However, I’m just using these as a benchmark to compare the stats from our own dedicated servers, which show an average of 8.17% IE6 usage.
So we’ll wait and see. Hopefully by December this year the percentage of IE6 users will be under 1%. I can’t wait.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Explorer#Internet_Explorer_6
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8465038.stm
[3] https://www.w3schools.com/browsers/default.asp
It is amazing that these companies who claim to be at the cutting edge use old browers!