The boat anchor known as IE6

March 24th, 2008

IE8 is looming on the horizon for release into the wild later this year. It looks promising. According to what I’ve seen so far, it’ll be largely compliant with HTML 5 and the latest and/or greatest CSS specs from W3C. Awesome!

And yet… 30-40% of the installed Windows base out there seem to still have IE6, one of the buggiest browsers in existence (motto: “IE6: now powered by more interns than ever!”).

IE7 has been out for, well, a long time now. It’s not too bad, and offers the casual surfer a good browser experience. So what’s the holdup? Why was user adoption so pitifully slow?

Are we going to see a similar adoption curve with IE8? Because I’m really not looking forward to supporting three different IE browsers at once.

Posted in Internet Explorer, Web Development

One Response to “The boat anchor known as IE6”

  1. 1 Estelle
    May 27th, 2008 at 3:55 pm

    The issue may reside in the massive failure of Vista. Windows XP new installations have IE6 instead of IE7 installed, and there is no nudge to upgrade. Vista, to be polite, sucks. So, noone is installing a windows operating system with a newer browser version. Instead, people are installing an older OS with an included older browser.

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