A Stay of Execution for Internet Explorer 6
This past summer, websites all over the Internet banded together to defeat a terrible scourge that was "stifling innovation," "awful," and "restricting." This scourge was not the work of hackers, anti-competitive behavior, or hardware failure. This scourge was Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), one of the most downloaded web browsers in the history of the Internet.
The ‘Kill IE6' movement received so much notoriety that it made the front page of CNN. In tech circles, blogs like Mashable led the charge with the article IE6 Must Die for the Web to Move On. Within that article, author Ben Parr states that "15 to 25 percent of the world's browsing [is] done in a browser created in the digital Stone Age (aka 2001)."
Ben has a point. Since the launch of IE6 in 2001, the Internet has dramatically changed. From a technical standpoint, a great deal of commonplace technologies have been developed since then, which IE6 does not support, such as Cascading Style Sheets Version 2 and PNG Transparency. Another problem IE6 has struggled with since its release is a slew of security-related issues which not only potentially compromised user security, but forced users to sit through repeated patch installs to repair. Even more to the point of showing how outdated IE6 is, people simply use web browsers differently today. You can pretty much do everything in your browser these days, from checking mail and managing spreadsheets to seeing what your friends are up to and everything in between. People aren't using dozens of applications anymore. The browser isn't just something we use to look up HTML pages anymore.
This isn't a knock against IE6, which was a vast improvement over IE5.5. In fact, IE6 was packaged with Windows XP and found itself on tens, if not hundreds of millions of computers. Of course, since then, a lot has changed in the web browser world. Internet Explorer has had not one but two incarnations since, IE7, and also the brand new IE8. Firefox has become a very competitive browser, and even Google Chrome now has a good chunk of the web, for something that is a simple "rounding error."
Wondering what the browser version breakdown was of IntraLinks visitors as compared to the 15%-25% in the Mashable post, I dived into Google Analytics and ran a report for the full year for Internet Explorer users.
Oh dear. Three-fifths of our Internet Explorer users this year have been using IE6. Why the huge discrepancy? After digging through all the data a bit, I started to figure out why.
More than "Early Adopters"
First of all, we are measuring different user groups as compared to Mashable. Our users are not exclusively tech-savvy users like the staff at Mashable or TechCrunch, who easily use customized open-source software in everything they do. Most people log into IntraLinks virtual datarooms from their offices, and that's where corporate IT policies become a big deal. Sure, we see a lot of people using IE8, Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, and even fun things, like people coming to us from their PlayStation 3, in addition to the more exotic products like Seamonkey and Camino. This doesn't even take into account the vast array of mobile devices that are real web browsers, like the iPhone, BlackBerry, Pre, and G1, which is why you see products like IntraLinks Mobile Access.
Perhaps the question is better framed as follows: Why are corporate IT departments not upgrading their browsers?
Upgrading Is Hard
Corporate IT departments often find themselves supporting thousands, if not tens, or even hundreds of thousands of machines. Deploying an upgrade is a painful process (you can't just let people upgrade themselves, after all, especially when bad scams like this one are on the loose). There's really no point for these folks to just to go ahead and upgrade a browser. Over time, as computers are replaced, serviced, upgraded, you'll see newer and newer software out there. Our data bears this out: As you can see in the graph below, IE6 use is steadily dropping.
Upgrading is Not Always a Good Thing
Windows Vista, anyone? Just because something is new does not mean it is better, and more importantly, more stable. It is much better for newly released software to have a "shakedown period" where bugs get sorted out before installing it on a corporate-wide level. The last thing you want is some executive on a business trip somewhere with a bricked laptop because some new program has a really bad bug.
Using the Web at Work
This is another big point. For most corporations, the critical business functions happen in installed applications, from Microsoft Office to QuickBooks to Adobe's Suite. As long as work is happening there, using the web browser is for "surfing", and therefore frowned upon. Things are changing, however, with the advent of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) products. Nowadays, business people are going into the cloud with products like SalesForce, and web browsers need to be a critical part of the business process.
Windows 7
Obviously one of the biggest changes to the Browser landscape happened today, with the brand new release of Microsoft Windows 7. Individual users will now have the latest Microsoft technologies on their computers.
However, corporations aren't switching to Windows 7 today. They might not even switch until 2010. Microsoft will no doubt be patching various bugs, making improvements, and reacting to the normal security, functionality and feature issues that any software development company has to. Corporate Information Technology managers are going to wait until things are fully stable before they even consider rolling out Windows 7, Internet Explorer 8 and Microsoft Office 2007. They might not even do a corporate rollout, choosing instead to change operating systems only when new hardware is introduced. Remember that the OS is not the only critical thing that makes a computer work, as drivers need to be developed to make hardware run, and software needs to be upgraded as well. This is going to take some time to happen.
What to Do?
IE6 will certainly die at some point in the near future, but let's allow that to happen of natural causes. The solution isn't banning the browsers from the sites, as very often the users themselves don't have the ability, or permissions to make that change themselves. Sure, it's an inconvenience, but like billing, the best score for web access is zero. If 100% of the people who want to get to your site do, you pass. This isn't school. Even 99% is a failing grade.
What is a better solution? More features. Take advantage of those brand new technologies. Embrace HTML 5, and design some fantastic tools that leverage it. Make the corporations need to take advantage of these new features in a SaaS environment and deploy upgrades that better not only the business and the user, but the websites as well. Make the focus on all these new browsers, both PC and Mobile. After all, every browser dies, not every browser truly lives.