This has always confused me.
Everyone says that IE6 dies slowly. But what is preventing Microsoft to update all IE6 to IE8?
When a user open the IE6, if it says "Update to a newer version" then I guess 9/10 users will just click on it.
What are the obstacles from updating all IE6 so it can just die?
In some firms, some applications have been build with IE6. IE6 supports VERY DIRTY HTML (for instance it closes tags for you), while IE7 does not. This makes the migration cost to IE7+ very high for firms like these. So they block it, and I guess their employees must have several browsers. Or not.
The main problem is years old intranet applications that make use of IE6 specific functions and hacks that just won't work in any more modern IE (and compatibility mode is far too unreliable for business critical applications).
I agree that for many companies that primarily use IE6 for web browsing or cloud applications it wouldn't make much of a difference, even improve usability, compatibility with web standards and security. But for quite some businesses the IE6 is irreplaceable.
Thus, a forced update to IE8 would break many many intranet applications and that would be devastating - both for Microsoft and for many companies.
well to begin with its not the average user anymore that keeps holding onto ie6 its company's that has diffrent softwares(mostly used in a intranet) based on some activex plugin or something alike which makes them not so much intrested to switch to anything else for quite some time, since they probably invested quite some money at getting it to work
A slightly different response to most, but I believe piracy plays a significant role in IE6 not dying. You might find this interesting: Aye, pirates be the reason IE6 just won’t die
I work in UK central government. Upgrading from ie6 to anything breaks our payroll system. Service providers claim its due to an old version of Jinitiator being used.
Upgrading to ie7/8/firefox/anything means upgrading the payroll system, just to get people to look at the problem costs absurd amounts.
We are stuck with ie6 for the forseeable future. :o(
There's a lot of people out there who simply never upgrade anything. You'll be lucky if they even install patches. It may be laziness, stubbornness, lack of knowledge, or any of a whole load of other possible reasons.
I was at a hotel a few weeks ago, and they had a "free internet booth". It consisted of an old and very dirty PC running Win98 and IE6. I doubt the staff had even looked at it in years, beyond rebooting it every now and then. It worked, and it was good enough for a service they were offering for free, and they didn't really care beyond that. That machine will still be running IE6 until it breaks down permanently.
My parents' use Firefox, but only because I installed it for them. Their XP machine came with IE6, and they certainly wouldn't have upgraded the browser without my assistance (they wouldn't even have known that it could be upgraded). Many others don't have someone to hand with technical knowledge. Again, they'll all probably be running IE6 until their machines need to be replaced.
But the really big holdouts are corporates. There are companies out there which spent a lot of money developing custom browser based internal systems ten years ago or so, when it started becoming a fashionable way to write software. Sadly, virtually all the browser-based apps written back then were written for IE only. Many of them used custom ActiveX controls to make up for the lack of UI functionality in the browser. A lot of these systems will not work in anything other an IE6, and most of the developers who wrote them have long since moved on. A lot of companies that invested in them are very reluctant to give them up.
But the good news is that despite all this, IE6 usage is dropping off quickly now.
Many developers (ourselves included) have officially dropped support for IE6 from our sites. Many others are happy to support it enough for their site to work, but not trying to make it look good in IE6.
Where I work, a government service, IE6 is the main browser for our intranet and many other complex web applications. So they are scared to upgraded due to time and finance. But we are just about to finish a new project, a re-development of an old application, that uses new technology, such as ajax, flex, etc.
We have told many departments that they should use Firefox or IE7 and higher if they want to have a better user experience with the new and improved application. That message is in the application itself. I didn't hear anyone who were against it. They might in future improve all the old applications, but it will take time, which means IE6 will be here for a little longer. Especially in the UK, where the government has cut public sector funding.
Yep, IE6 is like one of those monsters in horror films, when you think its dead, it comes back just before the film's credits.
Simple, it has no way of doing that. Sure, there's windows update, but not everybody uses that. And if they push it through windows update, they'll upset hundreds of business that are running 'webapps' that only run on IE6.
And there's your issue. Not a lot of people are using IE6 in the home anymore, but they do at work. And they don't mind.
Reading your post did remind me of this though : http://ie6update.com/ it's a piece of javascript that displays a yellow bar on IE6, not unlike the one that tells you about security issues. It tells the user that the IE needs to download an upgrade. When it's clicked, it goes to the IE8 download site.
Very very neat.