In the classic movie Monty Python and the Holy Grail, there’s a famously funny (albeit disturbing) scene where the dead are being loaded on a cart and one older gentleman is trying to convince the dead collectors that he’s “not dead yet”.
It seems that IE6 is in the same predicament. Microsoft has made some noise about killing off IE6 (or at least they’re effectively tracking its slow death) and web developers everywhere are more than ready to toss it on the cart. In fact, many have already made the decision to not support IE6 at all on new sites and barely maintain support for it on existing ones. But like it or not, IE6 is alive and well in enterprise (okay, that’s a stretch, it has a pulse) and being used by thousands of large organizations to access hundreds of thousands of applications from millions of desktops and laptops. These users also use the web, but they’re far less likely to be frequenting the public sites that drive the bulk of browser share statistics reports that we see each month. Instead they’re hitting their internal legacy Siebel, Hyperion, or SAP applications or some homegrown application implemented by their IT department a decade ago. Because of this, the IE6 share numbers that get published each month are likely to underrepresent IE6 usage overall – by a substantial amount.
As it is, IE6 share is still dangerously close to 10% worldwide and it’s estimated to be running on 50-100 million PCs in the enterprise – in both public and private sector organizations. If you’re a web developer for a consumer-facing site, is it safe to ignore IE6? Probably. These users are not hitting your sites much from work, and are likely using a modern browser when they surf the web at home. But if you’re an IT pro, you can’t ignore IE6 any longer. You must take action to upgrade your users to a modern browser. IE6 is blocking your migration to Windows 7 and blocking new applications you need to deploy that won’t work with IE6. Fortunately there’s an easy way out of this and it’s called UniBrows. Try it out for free today, or contact us about a UniBrows JumpStart where we come onsite and get a few of your mission-critical applications working in IE8 or IE9 in just a few short days.
