Microsoft buries IE6
Is what your web experience tastes like if your still using Internet Explorer 6, according to a new marketing campaign by Microsoft in Australia. In terms of web standards, IE6 is thoroughly obsolete and has long been the bane of web developers and designers world-wide, so much so that complaining about it has almost become cliche in web-design circles. Google was the last big player to put a nail in the IE6 coffin when it officially dropped support for the browser in January.
What this latest campaign made me wonder was this:
What has taken so long for IE6 to die? Certainly its adoption in the enterprise sector is a huge factor. The fact that many companies operate on 3-5 year upgrade cycle makes them adopt new technology at a snails pace, and this is the usually the main reason given for the resilience of the fossil browser. The transition to Windows 7 by many corporations is the main reason behind the drop in IE6 usage in recent months. However, I feel there is another factor in the IE6 scenario that is being overlooked.
The fact is that for most of the last decade, most people used the internet to view "web-pages", and the role of the web-browser was to
browse through them. The task for which IE6 was originally created. This humble task has taken a backseat to the new generation of web innovations (or webnovations) which we describe today as: web-apps. With the coming of HTML5 et al, the internet is rapidly turning into something more and more resembling an application platform then a collection of interlinked pages. Microsoft itself is set to release a web-app version of Microsoft Office, Google's operation system Chrome is designed almost entirely around web-apps and Google Docs turns your browser into your word-processor. These new web entities demand so much more from your browser than to browse pages that the term 'web-browser' seems quaint. Maybe its time not only to bury IE6, but the term 'browser ' as well.
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