Why You Should Not Use Internet Explorer 6.0

Posted in Articles

Excuse me, what browser are you using right now?  If you don’t know, put in http://www.whatbrowser.org in your browser web address bar and the website there will detect your particular browser and tell you.

If you are still using Internet Explorer 6.0, you should considering upgrading.  I don’t care what, just upgrade to anything other than Internet Explorer 6.0.  I prefer to use Firefox and Chrome.  But if you like Internet Explorer, their latest version as of this writing in January 2011 is Internet Explorer 8.  Internet Explorer 9 is out on beta and is about to be released soon.

Internet Explorer 6.0 came out in 2001 and is almost 10 years old [reference: browser timeline].   Therefore, it can hardly be called an modern browser.

Many web designers and developers had stopped building websites that works on Internet Explorer 6.0 (IE6) long time ago.  “37 Signals” phased out support of IE6 in 2008.  And Ajaxian.com says “I won’t support IE 6 in 2009”.  There is even a website called IE6NoMore.com

Why this animosity against IE6 by web designers and developer?  That is because IE6 has a CSS rendering engine that is buggy and does not always render web pages according to the W3C specs, causing web designers apply CSS hacks to work around the problem of IE6.  You can read more about the decline and fall of internet explorer 6 and its implications for webmaster in article on thesitewizard.com.

But with most designer stop putting in these hacks to accommodate IE6, your webpages that you view in your IE6 may not render as the way the designer had intended it to look.

Even Microsoft, the maker of Internet Explorer 6, wants users to upgrade out of IE6 according to Sitepoint’s 2009 article which says “Microsoft receives some stick from the web development community for IE6. The bygone bug-ridden browser is the bane of our lives”.

Even if you don’t care that webpages are rendered poorly in IE6, you should care to know that IE6 is not secure as mentioned by PCWorld’s article It’s Time to Finally Drop Internet Explorer 6 which says …

“IE8 is more secure than its predecessors–especially IE6. Security aside, Web hosts and developers generally despise IE6 as well.”

Reference:

• [1] Decline and Fall of Internet Explorer 6
• [2] 37 signals phasing out support for IE 6 in 2008
• [3] Ajaxian won’t support IE 6 in 2009
• [4] IE6 on the way out
• [5] Browser marketshare chart
• [6] Browser statistics from pingdom
• [7] Do you support ie6 in new projects?
• [8] Browser timeline from Wikipedia

Date of Article: January 2011

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