Note: This article originally appeared in the April, 2010 edition of TEQ Magazine.
My grandfather enjoyed a simple lifestyle in upstate New York, so when he passed away last year there were only a few accounts in his name that needed to be closed. One was with his telephone provider. Usually when people talk about their “telephone provider” they mean “telephone service provider”, but not so with Papa. My grandfather leased a rotary phone for $1.75 per month rather than buying his own for $10. The phone he was given in 1967 served him well until the end. Over the years my family tried to convince him to join the modern world of touchtone telephone ownership, and along with it the ability to express your language preference with the press of a button. But my grandfather, bless his soul, sometimes preferred consistency over common sense.
If Papa were here today, and if he owned a computer (ha!), and if he had an Internet connection (double ha!), there’s no doubt in my mind which web browser he’d be using: Internet Explorer 6.
IE6 is to web browsing what a rotary phone is to calling. It’s ancient (IE6 was released in August, 2001), it’s slow (today’s browsers can render pages in half the time), it’s full of security holes (as of February 9, 2010, Secunia.com lists 24 unpatched vulnerabilities in IE6), and it simply can’t do all the whiz-bang things that modern browsers can.
I used to have a handsome head of hair, but it’s been replaced by a – some would say more handsome – bald dome. The cause? Genetics, and more than eight stressful years of crafting web sites to display correctly in IE6. Ask any web developer what the hardest part of their job is, and they’ll probably tell you it’s devising tricks to get IE6 to properly display pages. For nearly a decade, web developers have wasted countless hours struggling to fix IE6-specific problems. Their time could have been better spent creating new features, learning new techniques, or grooming the hair they’d otherwise still have.
Last month my company got bit by an IE6 bug in software we built for a customer. Our application turns form letters into PDFs, and it displays a list of the most recent documents on a page that we call the Print Queue. The page features a checkbox next to each document, and two buttons at the bottom: Print and Delete. Depending on which button is pressed, our software either prints or deletes the chosen PDFs. Unless you’re using IE6. In that case it always deletes the documents, even if you hit print. Yikes!
When you submit a web form, your browser is supposed to tell the server which button you clicked. But when IE6 sees a form that contains multiple <button> tags, instead of telling the server which one was clicked, it recklessly submits the name of every button on the form! Imagine if our nuclear missiles were controlled by a web page with two buttons: Disarm and Launch. Let’s just hope the Russians are using Firefox.
Last month was my tipping point. Instead of wasting an hour tweaking things for IE6, with my customer’s consent we completely blocked access to Internet Explorer 6 and lower. Time and hair are just too precious to be wasted on such problems, and fortunately I’m not alone in this belief. Google recently announced they will begin phasing out support for IE6 this year, and they are part of a larger movement to do the same. Although IE6 still accounts for 20% of web traffic, campaigns such as BringDownIE6.com are working to change that. Despite what you might think, these efforts aren’t anti-Microsoft. Although I prefer Chrome and Firefox, IE8 is a decent browser too.
If you’re reading this article I suspect you already stopped using IE6 years ago. But if you’re still developing web sites for it, I hope you’ll join the movement and abandon this hideous browser. Should you disagree, there’s this phone company in upstate New York I can highly recommend.