Posted by Tim Hilliard (Developer)
If you're a developer like me, you most likely hate Internet Explorer 6 (with the exception of my colleague Sam, who gets a deep satisfaction from seeing his code work in IE6). For several years now, the development community has been trying to get big businesses and governments to drop support for IE6 and upgrade to a modern browser. Here are 10 reasons why you shouldn't use IE6.
1. Security. Or lack thereof. Security research firm SecurityFocus says IE6 currently has 396 unpatched vulnerabilities. I don't know about you, but I wouldn't want to use a product with that many known flaws. To me, IE6 is now just a leaking ship waiting to be sunk.
2. Standards support. It's well known that Internet Explorer has never followed web standards very well. Although IE has become better in recent years and is now working with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) to develop web standards, IE6 is the worst known offender of implementing its own standards. There is no support for transparent PNGs without JavaScript, CSS rules don't work as expected and JavaScript breaks where other browsers don't - to name a few.
3. It's slow. Compare IE6 with newer browsers - in particular Google Chrome, which uses its own developed V8 JavaScript Engine - and it's left for dead.
4. Lack of extensibility. Firefox and Chrome allow developers to create browser plugins that provide the users with valuable tools at their disposal. An example of this would be a translate plugin that allows the user to instantly translate a page into a language they can read.
5. Lack of development tools. Although IE does have the developer tools, this must be installed and can be best described as buggy when used with IE6. Both Safari and Chrome have development tools built in, including a DOM inspector. Firefox has the Firebug extension, which is probably the most popular development tool used by developers.
6. It’s evil. If you open the browser three times you get the Devil's browser.
7. Tabbed browsing. This one is pretty self-explanatory: IE6 can't do it and other browsers can.
8. It's old. This may seem irrelevant, but consider that IE6 was created in 2001, nearly 10 years ago. Since then programming practices and technologies have advanced quite a bit. IE6 doesn't get the benefits of these advancements, due to obsolete coding practices, poor performance and shoddy browsing in general, as well as forcing developers to develop code and then add in hacks to make it work in IE6.
9. It doesn't look or feel right. IE6 renders things differently to other browsers and interaction can be different as well. Why would you want to use a browser that doesn't show pages the way they are meant to be?
10. It soon won’t work anyway. HTML5 and CSS3 are coming and it's time for IE6 to go. These new standards should hopefully become mainstream in the next couple of years and IE6 will not be able to support them.
So as you can see, IE6 really isn't a good option if you care about security and your browsing experience. For those of you still using IE6, make the move - upgrade to a newer browser.