Save me from IE6

Question

I'm getting ready to start work on a new web project for a fairly large corporation.

For all their users, something like 17,000 people, they are all stuck with IE6. They plan to have everyone transitioned to IE7 by the end of the year, however the IT department is starting to push this promise back.

What I've been asked to do is to give the project sponsor some more ammo push back on this. However, my charismatic politician button seems to be broken. I've only been unable to come up with simple phrases, such as "IE6 is teh suck" or "it will take me a million more hours to make it work in IE6 too" and all of this may be true but it doesn't really feel like a very mature statement to be making.

I guess what I'm looking for, is some kind of laymen's way of explaining that yes we can support IE6 but I'm going to need some hazard pay, and support that fact with some kind of hard evidence it does indeed take many more hours to make something look right and work in both IE6 and IE7.

Answer 1

We often have the need to persuade non technical users that IE6 is a very bad idea for any company to be still running and so have a document we are working on to educate home and corporate users here is a summary if it helps:

Why is IE 6 a problem?

Much less secure than other browsers

The internet has changed a lot since IE 6 was released and there are more threats to data security than ever before including phishing scams, script injection attacks, key logging viruses, identity theft and bot-nets (machines which have been taken over for criminal activity).

It is well documented that IE6 is less secure than modern browsers when surfing the internet:

“..the most compelling reason to upgrade is the improved security. The Internet of today is not the Internet of five years ago. There are dangers that simply didn't exist back in 2001, when Internet Explorer 6 was released to the world.” Sandi Hardmeier, Microsoft MVP

“Older browsers are a swiss-cheese of security holes, allowing black-hats out there to take over computers, construct bot-nets, and even steal their victim’s identity, most of the time without their knowledge.” www.joelevi.com

IE 6 poses a security risk to any computer that it is used on for web browsing. Any responsible IT team will upgrade to IE7 or later on all machines within a corporate network. Many now install the Firefox browser in order to increase security further.

It is not standards compliant

IE 6 does not render web pages in the same way that most browsers do as it uses a proprietary engine which ignores many of the standards set by the W3C (the World Wide Web Consortium). This leads some web pages to be displayed incorrectly in IE 6 and some not to display at all.

This also means that while web developers have to support IE 6 much of their work is taken up by fixing pages rather than developing better content and features. In short IE 6 is holding back the web’s development for all users.

Slower

During the last 8 years of browser development as well as improved security browsers have been tuned for better performance on all fronts including download speed, rendering speed and JavaScript/AJAX performance which is a technology used on most major sites to give a better end user experience (sometimes know as Web 2.0 technology).

Memory Usage

Internet Explorer 7 actually uses less memory than IE6 and uses less overall resources on a machine. So upgrading can improve the performance of older computers.

Upgrading to Firefox or Chrome

Firefox

http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/firefox.html

Chrome

http://www.google.co.uk/chrome

Upgrading to IE 7 / 8

Home users

Internet Explorer 7 http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?displaylang=en&FamilyID=9ae91ebe-3385-447c-8a30-081805b2f90b

Internet Explorer 8

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=341C2AD5-8C3D-4347-8C03-08CDECD8852B&displaylang=en

Corporate Users

Internet Explorer 7 Resource Page

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/ie/bb381619.aspx

Internet Explorer 7 Deployment Guide

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=e41d8800-d134-4356-a2e7-c01bee790908&DisplayLang=en

Internet Explorer 8 Resource Page

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/ie/bb219517.aspx

Internet Explorer 8 Deployment Guide

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc985339.aspx

Answer 2

All the IE6 experts are out of work and enjoying their pension.

Answer 3

What I have gone with an been successful with is the following.

IE 6 is an application that is almost 8 years old, and as part of this doesn't support current technologies as easily as most others. Creating AJAX enabled rich UI's with IE6 is a very tedious task, and typically requires substantial, browser specific work to accomplish as it carries its own level of "Standards".

In addition to all of this there are security and performance implications.

Answer 4

On the whole topic of IE6, whenever you get to that point of moving IT out of the past, you could use this:

http://code.google.com/p/ie6-upgrade-warning/

Answer 5

Quite a difficult task to do, as there might be other reasons why they are using IE6 until this date (other, conflicting software which relies on IE6).

The first thing to do would be to identfy the problem that stops IT from doing the migration - if it's not lazyness.

• Maybe it is easier to ask them whether they would consider an "alternative browser" to be installed (which wouldn't affect the IE6 installs). But most administrators don't like that idea, because Firefox doesn't share data/configs with Windows Servers, but trade-offs might be made in favor of money.

• Should there be no real obstacle, you might show them a real-life example how an average day for an IE6 developer would look like.

  1. Choose an UI-feature (combine all merits of IE6 to create one) that will work to cause the required issues for the next few steps.
  2. Show them how everything looks fine in ALL Browsers.
  3. Show them how it doesn't look fine at all in IE6.
  4. Make it IE6 compatible.
  5. Show them how every other browser now produces a different/unwanted result.
  6. Fix it (with heavy workarounds) so that it now looks "ok" in most of the browsers.
  7. Tell them that you will have to put this effort into ALL of your components/features and that they will have much higer production costs.

  Make sure to point out, that this would even happen if you would just compare IE6 to IE7. They may not ever switch to Safari.

Answer 6

It's 8 years old and two versions behind the times. What are people afraid of?

Answer 7

http://www.stopie6.org/

make them read it

Answer 8

I do work for an unnamed company with 160000 employees where IE6 is the only company approved browser. For me, to suggest they "just switch browsers" is futile, since I realize they have millions of dollars worth of applications now working with IE6, and that to port these apps would cost tens of thousands of dollars and many thousands more in fixing the ported versions. I typically add 5-10% to web development just to address IE6 issues, depending on the interface.