IE6 drinks petrol for breakfast
Posted on November 20, 2008 at 5:11 pm
I’ve seen quite a lot of IE6-bashing on Twitter today, including calls for web designer to boycott the browser completely, and as I was thinking about it during this morning’s shower, I came up with the following analogy.
Say Internet Explorer 6 is your standard petrol-run car, and Firefox, Opera, Safari, etc, are shiny new LPG-run cars. Most people would agree that a LPG car is better for the environment and more economical, but imagine if every fuelling station in the world suddenly decided that they were only going to supply gas — and were no longer going to supply petrol.
You’d get a standstill. Sure, a lot of people could probably upgrade their car and get along just fine, but what about all the others who don’t have the time, money or simply aren’t able to get a LPG-powered vehicle?
Briefly ducking out of the analogy, take Thailand, for example. The times that I’ve visited, I’ve been to many internet cafés where the PCs were struggling to run IE6 on a barebones Windows XP install, and those often at resolutions still as small as 800×600. Without a costly upgrade to their hardware, it’s quite likely that a browser change would result in their business going from barely usable to something akin to running a marathon on broken legs.
Don’t get me wrong, I really wish the case would be that everyone drives economically-friendly cars (…or uses properly standards-compliant browsers) as they got released, so that the entire industry could make massive leaps forwards — but realisitically, it’s just not gonna happen. Do bear in mind though, that the horse and cart is no longer the civilised world’s primary mode of transport — we’ll eventually get rid of IE6, it’s just unfortunately going to take a whole lot of patience.
A final word to those boycotters… No. Feel free to do so on your own sites and projects — in a rich and informed market (read, tech savvie), you can afford to serve only LPG — but when your clients’ customers roll up into town in their Robin Reliants, they’re going to get stuck. Yes, it’s a pain, but it’s something that we have to live with for the time being, as much as we hate to.
Title photo by tonylanciabeta
Categories: Web Design .
