The end of the world is coming at the end of 2012, but before that, good news for developers…
…the end of Internet Explorer 6.
Microsoft are taking the demise of IE6 in to their own hands by forcing users to upgrade the outdated web browser to the latest version that the users’ version in Windows can take.
Right now, about 8.3% of users have this obsolete software as their browser of choice and due to security loopholes MS want to make people move to either IE8 or IE9. “10 years ago a browser was born. Its name was Internet Explorer 6. Now that we’re in 2011, in an era of modern Web standards, it’s time to say goodbye,” said Microsoft on its IE 6 countdown site.
Starting from January 2012 Microsoft will start to upgrade Windows customers automatically to the latest version of IE available for their computer.
“This is an important step in helping to move the Web forward,” wrote Ryan Gavin, Microsoft’s general manager of Internet Explorer business and marketing, on a company blog. “We will start in January for customers in Australia and Brazil who have turned on automatic updating via Windows Update. Similar to our release of IE 9 earlier this year, we will take a measured approach, scaling up over time.”
During this upgrade, of course MS won’t be able to completely eradicate IE6. Customers “who have declined previous installations of IE 8 or IE 9 through Windows Update will not be automatically updated,” he wrote. “Customers have the ability to uninstall updates and continue to receive support for the version of IE that came with their copy of Windows. And similar to organizations, consumers can block the update all together and upgrade on their own. Finally, future versions of IE will provide an option in the product for consumers to opt out of automatic upgrading.”
What this means for you?
Jerram’s take on this is that it can only be good news – as well as protecting PCs from malware there are significant design implications associated with Internet Explorer 6. Quite often CSS and JavaScript will run perfectly on all browsers except IE6 and we either has to reassess the code or add in browser specific styles to patch over it’s shortcomings. The ending of IE6 will also mean greater use of the .png image format which has an amazing property which allows truly transparent images which can be added to any background colour pattern without any degradation (currently we have to ‘fix’ IE6 to do this).
If you are concerned about how your website will be affected by this news or have a 10 year old website built before modern web standards contact us to discuss your project now.
