Internet Explorer 6 continues to be a real pain for web developers, regardless of CMS or development platform. The antiquated browser creates problems because of it's lacking support for advanced CSS and XHTML and many bugs.Time to Say Goodbye?
As Joomla takes a new and bold step forward with version 1.6 (due this year), I feel it's about time to skip support for IE6 in the Joomla Administrator back-end. By supporting Internet Explorer 6, we cling to the past and prevent forward movement. IE 6 is dead to me - and it should be buried for good. And we don't need the ghost hanging around either...
Large Corporations and Proprietary Systems
Some of my customers in Norway insist on their website supporting IE6. The reason for this being that many large corporations in my country (and I guess abroad as well) have systems that are made for IE6. For instance, one of the larger banks in Norway run Windows 2000 on their terminal server and thus all of the users do as well. This means that because IE7/8 not available for Windows 2000, IE6 accounts for up to 20% of web usage, primarily via business users.
Clients pressure designers to ‘force’ sites to work in IE6, and designers, not wanting to lose business, comply, using hacks and workarounds. This wastes time and money. Microsoft needs to fix this, designers need to unite, and we all need to move on.
Other large corporations have back-end systems that are made for IE6 and won't work in newer versions without rebuilding the system. Personally, I find this incredible, but then again there have been many strange decisions made in the IT management world in the past.
Template Designers are Stepping Up
Joomla template and extension designers are also fed up with IE6 and the problems it's giving them. For instance, they are working hard to develop good templates, but spend a lot of time hacking for IE6, supporting users with IE6 related issues etc. This has to end.
RocketTheme has already announced their IE6 End of Life strategy.
Take as Stand Against IE6 now!
However, for Joomla we have the opportunity to take a stand against IE6. Just as Netscape 4 was abolished by developers around the year 2000, we should do our best to get rid of it's 2009 counterpart. Even though the support for IE6 is not much of a problem now, it may be in the future when improving and expanding the functionality of the Joomla administrator.
Here in Norway, the web developer community has made a lot of noise to get users to upgrade to newer versions of IE or to alternative browsers.
- Read about the campaign and results so far here.
- And about major Norwegian sites battling IE6 here
- Read more about another international campaign to bring down IE6.
Are you with me on this one? What arguments do you have to keep support for IE6 in the Joomla backend?
