Technofriends

While most of the internet giants have started out with “Kill IE6″ program, Microsoft seems to have different opinion. The software giant has promised to continue its support for Internet Explorer 6 upto 2014.

As per Evan Solomon of Justin.tv, one of the backers of the campaign aimed at killing IE6,

Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 was released in late 2001. For its time, it was a decent browser, but in 2009, it is still in use by a significant portion of the web population, and its time is now up. Web developers hate IE6. We are passionate because we run a website and something like 10% of our users use IE6, but our web designers and developers have to spend a lot of time debugging for the platform. The other issue for us is that we have launched an API to let people build applications and while our goal is to make it as easy as possible for people to do this, IE6 is a barrier.

In response to the campaign, Microsoft said,

For technology enthusiasts, this topic seems simple. Enthusiasts install new (often unfinished or “beta”) software all the time. Scores of posts on this site and others describe specific benefits of upgrading. As a browser supplier, we want people to switch to the latest version of IE for security, performance, interoperability, and more. So, if all of the “individual enthusiasts” want Windows XP machines upgraded from IE6, and the supplier of IE6 wants them upgraded, what’s the issue?

The choice to upgrade software on a PC belongs to the person responsible for the PC.

Many PCs don’t belong to individual enthusiasts, but to organizations. The people in these organizations responsible for these machines decide what to do with them. These people are professionally responsible for keeping tens or hundreds or thousands of PCs working on budget. The backdrop might be a factory floor or hospital ward or school lab or government organization, each with its own business applications. For these folks, the cost of the software isn’t just the purchase price, but the cost of deploying, maintaining, and making sure it works with their IT infrastructure. (Look for “nothing is free” here.) They balance their personal enthusiasm for upgrading PCs with their accountability to many other priorities their organizations have. As much as they (or site developers, or Microsoft or anyone else) want them to move to IE8 now, they see the PC software image as one part of a larger IT picture with its own cadence.

As a developer, i certainly understand that IE6 is a pain in the neck, but Microsoft does have a point in supporting IE6. I hope they do make it a slightly better browser ( which they wont).

Personally, i recommend everyone to use Firefox or Google Chrome. They are definitely far better browsers as compared to IE. ( I havent tested IE 8 yet).

You can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/vaibhav1981

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