Browser Versions

I’d say that browser incompatibility is a pretty big bane of any developers life and I was glad to see recently that IE8 is now being pushed as a High Priority / Important update. My current project is plagued by users that continue to use IE5/IE6 even though IE5 has come end of life and IE6 will not get any further updates from December 2009.

http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2009/04/10/prepare-for-automatic-update-distribution-of-ie8.aspx

Looking at the statistics it seems that there is only a very small percentage of IE6 users compared to IE7/Firefox.

http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp

The statistics if taken on face value suggest the IE6 is going to disappear in the near future and as developers we can hope to be rid of it soon. However, this is not the whole story. Many of our users are using systems in Primary and Secondary schools who have little or no Systems Administration and rely on a teacher who may have owned a computer once and made the mistake of mentioning it and so have the enviable task of managing the school network with next to no experience.

For these users, we hope that the Automatic Updates get run and everything is upgraded. But the reality may be that they continue to use Windows 95 and IE5 for years to come and that this for this small percentage of IE6 users turns out to be 50% of our client base.