Microsoft finally admit IE6 is a pile of ****

Was catching up with “planet internet” today, and reading the Google News pages relating to anything web related – and stumbled upon a news article about next years IE9 and what Microsoft had to say about it.

Now, despite the IE market share dropping to 60% (from 90%!) the IE development team, and Microsoft themselves are still very passionate about it, and still to this day – believe its the best web browser, and claim its the fastest growing browser (in terms of usage) available today!

From a development point of view, internet explorer really gets in the way! Having to style a website for a multitude of different browsers is to be expected, but having to develop a different stylesheet for 3 different versions of IE is just silly!

In a recent interview, Ryan Gavin – Microsoft’s Senior IE Director expressed his interest in seeing the back of nine year old Internet Explorer. “IE6 was built for a very different web at a very different time,” says Gavin. “A modern web does require a modern browser. My aim is to get IE6’s market share to zero as fast as humanly possible. That’s good for the web, good for developers, and good for us”

The problem we all face isn’t with the public getting wiser in regards their choice of home browser – the problem lies with large companies and organisations (Such as councils etc) who still have IE6 as the standard web browser on all their office PC’s. The people who hold the purse strings obviously don’t understand how the web has evolved, and that the software used to view and use this new internet needs to evolve also.

I agree with this article on the Guardian when it says the biggest problem with eradicating IE6 completely, is that XP comes bundled with IUE6, and XP is still such a massively popular operating system. When confronted with this fact, Ryan stated “IE9 has a strong focus on security – it blocks far more malware than either Firefox or Google Chrome – but you need security all the way through the operating system” – and this is where XP fails.

Maybe a joint XP security update, and a nice IE9 installer for people instead then, eh?

Ive tested the IE9 Test Drive and some of the HTML5 stuff was pretty bitchin’ – i guess time will tell if its gonna end up taking back the browser crown, or if firefox will just keep getting better and better and keep its feet firmly planted under the table.

What browser do you use – and why?