Brennan’s Blog

Back in 2004 I wrote A Great Example of CSS and Javascript in Action which explained how to use CSS and JavaScript carefully due to the varying browser experiences at the time. The situation has changed quite a bit since then. We no longer have to support Netscape 4 or Internet Explorer 5. Now there is a push spreading widely to end support for IE6. (Read The End of IE6) And this time there is a significant amount of resistance. IE6 seems entrenched and there has been push back on not supporting this old browser.

Consider if I were to loan you my laptop that I bought in 2001. It is very slow and cannot run many of the applications that you use today and has a 10GB hard drive. Most iPods have more storage space. You would not want to use that laptop. You may refuse to use it because it is just not worth your time to deal with the headaches of finding old ways to do what takes so much less effort with a computer purchased in the last 3 years.

Back in 2004 ESPN implemented some new features on their web site that they wanted to get to their users. In order to do so they were going to have to require users to use a current browser. To do this they did a check in JavaScript to see if their browser supported certain functions and if they did not they would send them to the Browser Upgrade Page which is still there. The browser check did not look for a certain version of a browser, but browser capabilities. Fortunately that was easy enough to do and they were successful in rolling out new features that their users appreciated. ESPN is one of the most innovative sites around.

Still there are a significant number of IE6 users roaming the public Internet. What can we do?

I think the attitude has to change. It is not acceptable that IE6 has not supported PNG images properly since it was released in 2001. Microsoft could have released an update to fully implement proper support, but they did not for several years. Now we have IE7 which fixed the PNG problem along with several other major bugs in IE6, but still problems remain. The expectation is that the browser should properly support modern HTML, CSS and JavaScript standards within a reasonable time frame. And in Internet terms a reasonable lag time to support new standards has been 2 to 3 years roughly. Lately with modern browsers, which completely excludes the Internet Explorer family of browsers, the lag time has been 6 months to a year. Safari 4 is now out as a beta with support for HTML 5 and CSS 3 and the new JavaScript engine is 30 times faster than IE7.

In contrast IE7 barely supports CSS 2.1 and has significant shortcomings with CSS. And support for HTML 5 is not even on the horizon much less a faster JavaScript engine. Apparently the architecture for this browser is extremely costly to maintain and upgrade so much that even Microsoft cannot maintain a reasonable upgrade time line.

Browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome all have an upgrade feature that makes it easy to stay current and updates are published regularly for big and small changes which move the browser towards improved standards compliance as well as greater stability and performance. You do not have to wait years for these updates, instead they come out every few weeks. If a bug is found it is corrected as soon as a fix can be pushed out in the next update. Users of version 3.0.5 are quickly updated to version 3.0.6 through the automatic update program that transparently downloads the update for you and installs it for you the next time you start the browser. Critical bugs do not last long with such an update system in place. The same does not exist for IE7 beyond Windows updates which are not nearly as effective as the Firefox update system. Users are unwilling and sometimes afraid to run Windows updates. Perhaps some users have a pirated version of Windows and cannot run the updates. Sometimes an improperly configured anti-virus program will also prevent Windows updates from running properly. Whatever the reason, they would be better off with using a browser that has an update system that keeps them current.

After my last post a friend sent me a link to this site, Stop Living in the Past. It is yet another site that is pushing for the end of IE6.