IE6 Retiring
April 16, 2009 Leave a Comment
After 8 long years the browser that everybody loves to hate is being automatically retired by Microsoft. Although there is a way to avoid the upgrade if your business has the problems later in this post.
To be fair to it, IE6 helped make the web what it is today. Its quirks mode rendering enabled anybody to code a web page with little regard to well-formed HTML or standards. This caused many a developer to hate it because it renders things differently to other browsers and often caused a lot of extra work because it takes so long to get it working in both.
Most of the anger directed at IE6 has to do with the differences with the W3 Consortium’s standards. However, when it was released these standards were not concrete and it was unclear if they would even be adopted ubiquitously.
Many companies have ignored Firefox and stuck with IE6 because of the huge costs involved in deploying and testing all their internal applications on their networks.
RSinteract is Internet Explorer only and will continue to support IE6 and IE7 for the foreseeable future because of this very reason. The web is changing and more and more people are becoming aware of other browsers such as Google Chrome. Perhaps in future we will move towards cross browser support but for now we are very much tied to Internet Explorer.
