I rather doubt that, though. If you look at the Business 2 Business world, yes, IE6 support remains a virtual invariant request.
However, in the B2C world, IE6 is being abandoned _IN DROVES_. In the end it's pure business after all: You've got your IE6 user, you've got your IE-upgrading user (note how IE7 is already dipping well below IE6 in users, simply because once someone begins upgrading their browser they don't usually stop after 1 upgrade), and you've got your firefox / webkit users, and especially with IE9 you can serve all of those except IE6 users with fantastic features that are far easier to develop for. Developing something that works in IE6 is more and more becoming a proposal of: (A) increase budget by 20% and have a crappy site, or (B) increase budget by 100% and have 1 good site that looks more or less workable on IE6. You can see this with Youtube and also with many new startup websites. They simply don't work very well on IE6 and the authors just don't care anymore. With IE9 this is going to accelerate (the effort to go from IE8 support to IE6 support is smaller because half the distance is covered by going from webkit/FF to IE8, but the distance from webkit/FF to IE9 is much smaller, hence IE9->IE6 is larger), and as we're already seeing IE6 is no longer a browser capable of rendering the full web anymore. As IE6's percentage of "full-web" ness keeps dropping, the number of people at businesses willing to suffer this condition will drop, and migrate plans away from IE6 increase. Windows 7 is also finally slashing serious dents in the Windows XP base, with many IT infrastructure managers planning to upgrade once Win7 hits a Service Pack or 2. When you upgrade away from XP, IE6 ceases to even be an option, so reductions in the XP user base directly translate to reductions in IE6's share of the browser market. With all forces combining to increase the pressure to move away from IE6, and browser adoption in general being an exponential function (the more you lose users, the fewer sites work well on it, strengthening the cycle), I wouldn't be surprised if IE6 is going to drop off and cobolize itself in a matter of months. On May 19, 12:58 pm, Peter Becker <[email protected]> wrote: > On 19/05/10 18:28, Vince O'Sullivan wrote: > > > > > On May 19, 7:40 am, Robert Casto<[email protected]> wrote: > > >> Laying this at the feet of other developers is a bit too harsh. > > >> I would put the blame squarely on management as they are the decision > >> makers. > > > If we, as developers, simply brush off responsibility for our work and > > blame everyone else for the state of the code that we're putting out > > then we're in no position to complain (or even comment) about the > > current state of affairs. > > > Two well known pertinent quotes come to mind: > > > "We must be the change we wish to see in the world." (attrib. Ghandi > > 2001 (unproven)) > > > “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one > > persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all > > progress depends on the unreasonable man.” (Shaw 1903) > > I believe many web developers have fought the fight. I certainly have, > but in the end it is our role to provide a client with a service. If > that service is writing a web application that supports IE6, then that > is what we should do. And I still see IE6 support as an explicit > requirement in intranet projects. > > My theory about the dominance of IE6 that it is mostly not about > deciding for that browser (or against others), it is about not deciding > at all. IE6 comes with Windows XP, so if you deploy XP and then do > nothing, IE6 is what you get. I believe this is a common scenario in > many large organizations, with people just not being able to make a > business case for the upgrade. Add to that that there are a lot of > enterprisy intranet applications that are still IE6 only (and here I > blame developers), then you get a whole world of being stuck with that > old browser no one really wants. > > A corollary of this is that we will have a wave of IE8 upgrades soon > (when people finally move to Windows 7), which will be our problem in > the not too far future. A lot of large organizations will just declare > that to be good enough and since it is bundled with the SOE they can't > be bothered to change it. And to some extent that makes sense, since > removing IE is too hard and installing a second browser means supporting > two browsers where one should be enough. > > MS played the game of cornering the browser market well, and while they > are losing on some fronts, IE will stay with us for much, much longer. > > Peter > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "The Java Posse" group. > To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > [email protected]. > For more options, visit this group > athttp://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "The Java Posse" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/javaposse?hl=en.
