By Brigitte Simard on 4 February 2010
The debate has been going on over the last year or so about the continual support for Internet Explorer 6 – Should it stop or shouldn’t it. Finally this weekend, Google announced that it will begin to phase out support for IE6 as it identified the browser as vulnerable in the recent cyber attacks on Google in China. So it seems we have these attacks to thank for this.
Let me explain – As a developer, IE6 can cause all manner of issues and extra work, and when Microsoft announced last year that it would support it for at least another 5 years, I’m sure I wasn’t the only developer whose heart sank! To support IE6 when developing websites means a lot of extra effort, not to mention the fact that we can’t implement more up-to-date techniques without providing an alternative version for IE6 users.
Aside from this, IE6 has security flaws which haven’t gone unnoticed and it seems hackers made the most of these and were confident enough to attack Google.
So, this announcement from Google is welcomed by me and the rest if the developer community I’m sure, and it seems that now pressure is mounting for the browser to be phased out completely. Can we finally hope that that IE6 will be a thing of the past?
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By Trenton Moss on 23 April 2009
Microsoft has recently announced that they’ll be pushing Internet Explorer 8 on to users of earlier IE versions through an automatic rollout. As IE8 launched, much of the talk was about increased security and new features for users. Though the new features are welcome and will maybe help IE8 stay up there in an increasingly competitive browser market place, has Microsoft thought enough about usability?
Features are all well and good, but usability of the browser is also crucial. The IE7 interface doesn’t score particularly high in the usability stakes and IE8 uses a very similar interface. In fact Microsoft seems to have made the usability of the interface worse by placing the compatibility view button (which makes the website render as it would in IE7) right next to the refresh button, making it easy to press this by accident and unwittingly causing the website layout to break.
Hardly anyone outside of the web development world is going to understand what this compatibility button actually means or does.
When other online markets have reached a stalemate on price or functionality, then usability can become a key differentiator (if it wasn’t already) and Microsoft really needs to consider this in the browser market. The growing strength of Firefox and the entry of Google Chrome have seen the browser market really hotting up, so maybe Microsoft should look at what will really make consumers want a browser, rather than trying to push it on them automatically!
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