More Questions Than Answers » internet http://www.faq-it.co.uk Dan Atrill's blog site Thu, 05 Aug 2010 13:46:55 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=abc Petition to phase out IE6 http://www.faq-it.co.uk/2010/02/02/petition-to-phase-out-ie6/ http://www.faq-it.co.uk/2010/02/02/petition-to-phase-out-ie6/#comments Tue, 02 Feb 2010 12:05:28 +0000 Dan http://www.faq-it.co.uk/?p=186 According to BBC news ( http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8492862.stm ), there’s a petition been launched calling for the phasing out of Internet Explorer 6 as a web browser. This has been a raging debate for some time, and as the petition reportedly states, the browser which was launched in 2001, “… IE6 has security flaws and uses outdated technology, creating a burden for developers…”

With Microsoft Updates the issue of updating to IE8 has been pushed for sometime. There’s also pressure for users of other browsers to upgrade to newer versions where bugs and security issues have been dealt with such as PushUpTheWeb.com who are encouraging the use of code in the websites to identify users of older browsers whether it’s IE, Firefox, Safari or Opera and IE6NoMore in the US

But in addition to security, there is also the strain on developers to test across more browsers. Developing for one then testing on the others is a useful approach. I know that if I create something for Firefox and Safari it’ll work the same in both browsers, on Mac or PC, then there’s the issue of non-standards web browsers (IE) which have quirks which have to be dealt with. Removing IE6 from the equation.

Out of interest, looking at the stats for this site, 52% of users visited with Firefox, 25% with Safari and only 13% with IE (of which the majority used IE8).

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