Admittedly Internet Explorer is a blight on the Web that many would love nothing better than to see disappear – instantly. It has, and continues to cause nothing but grief for designers and users alike but as much as we might like it to go away it is taking a very long time to die out.
Even Microsoft would like to see it go away but as much as they are trying to get users to upgrade to the new Internet Explorer 8 they also realize that when it comes to the enterprise it is going to be a tough battle. The problem is that IE6 has become entrenched as the business web browser with many of these businesses having custom in-house web apps that might not survive the upgrade in browsers.
As Amy Bazdukas, Microsoft’s general manager for Internet Explorer said in an Computerworld post
But while she agreed that consumers should ditch IE6, and understood the motivation behind the growing chorus of Web sites calling for an end to the browser, Bazdukas said Microsoft couldn’t give the same advice to businesses. “With our business customers, it’s more complex,” she argued. “For them, deploying a browser is very like much like deploying an operating system across multiple desktops. So it’s not a surprise that IE6 is still being used.”
Not that Microsoft’s entirely happy with that. “IE6 use is higher than we like,” Bazdukas admitted. “Most of that is from the business installations, that’s where we see most of the trailing installations of IE6.”
She even says in the post that “ Friends don’t let friends use IE6 “. This is echoed by Ray Valdes, and analyst at Gartner who regularly recommends to clients that they leave IE6 behind but he also states the same problem when it comes to the enterprise
“But the situation is, it’s surprisingly difficult to get enterprises to upgrade. Many companies have old software that depends on IE6, and that software is not upgradable because they have no budget or the developer is not around anymore, or the in-house developer left.”
It’s not a matter that Microsoft wants to keep supporting a legacy browser it’s that they don’t have much of a choice given that their bread and butter comes from those businesses that still have IE6 deployed throughout their operations.
