On a daily basis I spend anywhere from five minutes to three hours cursing and wishing ill will upon Microsoft Internet Explorer 6. Sometimes I do this silently under my breath and sometimes, to the dismay of my coworkers, I do it quite vocally. The reason? Internet Explorer 6 is an: insecure, slow, outdated, and non-standards compliant browser.

Let me illustrate this a bit further. If browsers were cars — IE6 would be an El Camino truck that’s been sitting outside in the rain for 20 years. Underpowered, ugly, basically useless in every scenario, and ready to explode and kill you at any moment.

Development of a website that supports IE6 adds about 15 to 20% of additional time to a project. And further, IE6 doesn’t support the everyday commonplace technologies of all other modern browsers. Meaning websites simply don’t function or look as good as they do in today’s browsers.

So here’s the question.

If today’s modern browsers (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, IE7) are easy to get, run faster and safer than IE6, and are free. Why are some company IT departments still forcing users to browse on IE6? In general it seems to boil down to three big reasons.

1. The company has internal software that was built specifically to run on Internet Explorer.
2. The company manages a ton of machines and the workload/headache of upgrading them all to a newer version is too much.
3. The company and users feel comfortable on IE6 because they “know it”.

Here’s the problem. When we as an industry don’t embrace new enhancements in development it’s the client’s viewers and the client’s brand that suffers. We’re still building phenomenal web sites. But the straight truth of the matter is they’re not as good as they should be. The web has soooo much potential but it’s not being utilized. Why? Because we’re still supporting a legacy browser* that was released in 2001.

As I’ve said before. In order for things to get better sometimes you just have to make the jump. Other companies are already doing this. Apple, 37Signals, and Comedy Central just to name a few. Notice anything about those first two? They dramatically care about their user’s experience. So much so that they’re willing to sacrifice incompatibility for some users to benefit the rest of them**. Cheers to that, I hope we see it more.

^{* As long as companies ask us to support IE6 we will. We’re not afraid to share our thoughts on the browser landscape but we also recognize the need to compromise.
** I understand that some users don’t have control over what browser they use. For these poor souls I cry (really, I’m tearing up as write this).}