Brennan’s Blog

Internet Explorer 6 was released in August of 2001. Since then Microsoft delayed any new releases after achieving dominance in the browser market which effectively ended the browser wars of the late 90's. In a previous post I suggested the dominance of IE6 and lack of releases over several years was bad, but also good because it offered a "stable" base that we could build on. In the late 90's there were frequent releases of Netscape and Internet Explorer with amazing new features and it was hard to keep up. At least with no releases for the browser with 90% of the market share you could stick with what you had. But now it is time to move forward.

Starting with Google Mail everything changed. Suddenly you could build rich applications than run on web sites. And thanks to the rising popularity of AJAX many more sites jumped forward into what became known at Web 2.0. Now it is common for a site like Facebook to act more like an application than a collection of pages. You have a task bar at the bottom to show notifications and keep active chats going with friends even as you browse to different areas to look at photos and post comments on your friend's walls. In order to run as an application a web site requires more resources, and Internet Explorer 6 is just not capable of providing the experience that people want.

The Mozilla organization has made gradual strides in coming back as a viable competitor to Internet Explorer and Apple's Safari has had a different impact. The Firefox browser is popular, especially among more technically savvy users, because of the rich add-on library. It is easy to make the argument that without the Firebug add-on the refined modern interfaces that are more common today would not be as common.

Safari has taken a different route. Instead of eating into Internet Explorer market share it has mostly taken away Firefox users. Safari is based on Apple's WebKit engine which is easily re-purposed for other uses like the mobile web interfaces on the iPhone and Google's phone. The WebKit engine is also what runs Adobe AIR, a rich internet application platform. Apple's impact on web technologies, due to the wide use of the WebKit engine, has helped increase the value of web standards and move the web forward as a platform.

Another major browser, which happens to be based on WebKit, is Google Chrome. While this browser makes use of the WebKit engine, it is quite different than Safari. A major difference is the JavaScript runtime engine which is capable of much faster performance than conventional JavaScript runtime engines. The coming Firefox and Safari releases promise to outpace the initial release of Chrome, which brings us back to Internet Explorer. There is no projected release of a modern JavaScript engine for Internet Explorer that will provide the experience that user's want and web site developers really, really want to deliver.

A major effort is currently underway to get users off of Internet Explorer 6. Version 7 has been available since October of 2006 yet by some statistics up to 20% of Internet users are still using version 6. In Norway there is currently a war on IE6 which is spreading well beyond Norway via Twitter and other social networks like a group on Facebook called IE6 Warning Campaign.

The largest group of users that are dragging their feet, even though IE7 has been out so long, is corporate users where applications were built for IE6. Since IE6 has so many nuances and bugs the applications built specifically for it years ago for it just do not work on Firefox or Chrome, much less IE7. To make matters worse, you cannot install IE7 alongside IE6 which would at least give these corporate users the option to use their internal applications (like time entry and accounting) with IE6 while they can use IE7 for the public Internet.

For over a year the IE6 Death March web site has highlighted products which are younger than IE6. The first iPod was released AFTER IE6. It is hard to believe that users are still using a pre-iPod browser. What kind of world is this?

The IE6 Death March site also promotes the March 2009 deadline for IE6 where web site designers and developers will simply stop testing their work in IE6 from that point forward and put all of that effort instead into getting their clients and users to use modern browsers.

I built my own warning mechanism for IE6 users. Another warning mechanism called Pushup covers several older browsers, not just IE6, and provides a much nicer design than what I put together. I strongly suggest putting one of these warning mechanisms on your public sites starting in March to help users stay current.

And staying current could not be easier in the modern browsers. Firefox, Safari and Chrome all have a feature that helps users stay current by automatically checking for new versions and upgrading with little effort. I have seen that Firefox users are often upgraded to the very last minor release within weeks, not months or years like we have typically seen with browsers. Annoying problems, like incomplete support for PNG graphics in IE6, could be fixed within weeks if IE8 introduces an update system similar to Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Instead we have to comprise the user experience for 80% of the users because 20% are lingering behind with IE6.

The problem with legacy internet web applications is very real. When you have 3 months to build an internal web application and then your budget is gone you cannot simply go back and update it each time a new browser comes out, so corporations decided that IE6 was all they ever needed. And upgrading the browser is not just a matter of a 5 minute installation, it requires budgeting work to upgrade all of those internal applications. And those budgets can be prohibitive.

But it is possible to build web applications that are what I like to call "future proof." Last year I wrote Internet Explorer 8 and Future Proofing your Website. I explain how you can write standards compliant HTML and CSS that you can validate with W3C tools so that you are protected from unknowns problems that creep into your work. You may have some syntax errors in your HTML or CSS which are not causing trouble today but will cause strange behavior in a future version of your favorite browser.

You can also future proof your work by leveraging one of the popular JavaScript libraries available today. The DOM API which is a part of JavaScript is used to manipulate the web page, which gives us all of those great Web 2.0 features that we love. But the DOM API is pretty hard to use and it does not work consistently across all of the browsers. I have been using jQuery which does all of the page manipulation that the DOM API does, but it has a much more intuitive interface and the library is heavily tested across all of the major browsers, including IE6. And once IE8 comes out, and Firefox 4, and Chrome 2 we can try out our applications to see if anything is broken in these new browsers. If they are, we may just have to get the latest versions of our chosen JavaScript library which adapts to these new browsers for us and leaves us to go back to our normal daily routine without having to redo all of our work to get that application to work in the newest browsers.

Starting in March I will be joining the March. Every one of my personal web sites will be making use of either my IE6 warning mechanism or Pushup. I will try to get my clients on board with Pushup as well. Once these IE6 users are warned enough they may finally decide to upgrade. I am confident the majority of them will. And then once IE6 usage drops below 5% you will start to see sites with features you never thought were possible. I am sure the next Google Mail is just around the corner, and it will be possible because the web took a huge step forward.