Anyone logging in to the application section with Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) will now be asked to update their browser. Here are a few thoughts on this from me:
The logo from "IE6 must die!"
Oh, how we would love to shout: “IE6 must die!”. (Did you hear about the twitter movement? Or about this action from more than 70 websites?) Oh, how we would like to make our platform available in black and white to all Internet Explorer users (for the small proportion of the online world who remember the changeover from black and white TV to color…). But alas this is a helpless battle of the honorable Web Don Quixotes against the electronic windmills of the great multinationals of this world.
Why all this fluster you may ask? Here’s the reason:
Over the past few weeks we have been monitoring which browsers our members use to surf our site. I had to laugh a little when I read recently in a Web gazette that 11.7% of Germans still used IE6. I didn’t realize the figure could be pinpointed so precisely!
So here’s our precise data for the last seven days:
Overview of browsers used for XING.
This graph shows usage of the different major browsers against time shown on the horizontal axis. The green area at the bottom – representing usage of IE6 – is particularly interesting here. Its structure reveals three things immediately:
- IE6 is not used very much at the weekend.
- Chinese users, a high proportion of which use IE6, surf the platform during the European night.
- During working hours on weekdays, members using IE6 exceeds the 20% mark.
So why is this? Well, because IE6 is so prevalent still in so many large corporations. I know from previous companies I have worked in how reluctant firms can be to switch browsers when the current one is connected up to anything from 50 to several hundred Internet applications, all of which have to work every single day. At tens of thousands of work stations throughout an organization.
It isn’t worth pestering users to switch either, as they very often don’t have administrative access to their work computer. And the administrators in large companies often don’t have the remit or the budget to carry out a changeover on all computers in a company. And if I was CEO of a large firm I think I’d probably be hesitant about initiating such an infrastructural project with uncertain risks in a completely heterogeneous environment.
To sum up: It seems that Internet Explorer 6 is (regrettably) here to stay, for as long as it still operates on current Windows operating systems at least.
… Come to think of it, XING in black & white might well have a certain retro, futuristic charm about it.
Link to this article:
http://blog.xing.com/2009/08/new-tip-please-change-to-a-new-browser/trackback/
XING´s official twitter account
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Maybe we need to change the perception of IE6 in corporate IT departments. IE6 is not a web browser anymore – its just a legacy client for running intranet applications. For web browsing, a more modern (and hopefully standard compliant) browser like FF, IE8, Chrome, Opera or Safari could be installes parallel (ok, parallel installation probably rules out IE8, but there are alternatives)
Yeah, I like this idea of installing for example firefox as a second browser in corporate IT departments. But then, I remember, there seems to be quite a bit of reluctance towards open source products. Also the invest of installing > 10.000 clients with new software is high. I remember from my past, that producing and rolling out a new “fast starter package” could easily cost 10-20k€ or more when giving the order to the corporates own IT subsidiary. THis is a steep price for an overburdened budget … So, really what I mean is: kudos to all the corporate IT department who have already overcome these impediments and have succeeded in replacing ie6
For companies whose payroll and other essential systems need to run on IE6, can’t they just install multiple browsers? We have Firefox for normal web browsing and certain other browsers to do things like input hours, etc.