Articles: What does the death of IE6 mean for web design?
Date Added: 05/01/2012 @ 1:15pm
Internet Explorer 6, initially bundled with Windows XP, is now used by less than 1% of Americans, has been celebrated by the folks at Microsoft with the baking of a cake.
If you have no idea why this is such a big deal to web developers, you're probably not the only one - but it has to do with compatibility and website standards.
Browsers
As you are probably aware, browsers are used to "browse" the World Wide Web. Whether you are using a mobile phone, a laptop or your Nintendo Wii, you are using one right now.
In the early days of the Internet, Microsoft decided to include their browser with the Windows Operating System. This meant that when users set up their computer, they had IE ready to use. This made a lot of people quite unhappy - well, a select group of programmers anyway.
The vast majority of people used IE without ever considering that others might be available and that these others might work faster or more efficiently, and why would they? IE was convenient, but gave Microsoft an effective monopoly over the browser market to anyone except die hard fans of Mozilla or Opera.
More recently, the 'powers that be' forced Microsoft to make the general public aware of the alternatives, which combined with campaigns by Apple with their Safari browser, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox have changed the way we browse the internet.
This led to increased issues with browser compatibility, especially since calls for website standards by the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) have only been implemented partially across the browsers.
Compatibility
For most people, a browser is a browser and so long as they can use it to browse the Internet, they don't really care which one they are using.
To a web developer, on the other hand, browser compatibility is probably one of the most complex parts of the web design process.
Each browser does things in a slightly different way, so websites can appear differently from browser to browser. So, although a website may look fine in one browser, it may be broken in another one. All good web developers will check a variety of different browsers as a part of the set up process.
Generally speaking, browsers are now moving towards supporting all the relevant website standards, but this is a slow process.
So, what was so bad about IE6?
At the time of release it was adequate, but as time has gone by the technology has changed. A lot of commonly used features used on websites today are simply not compatible with it.
Until now, a select minority have been still using IE6. As a result, websites have been designed to make sure that everyone can use them - although this became increasingly difficult with anything but the simplest of designs. Probably the worst attribute of IE6 was that it didn't adhere to an increasing number of the website standards.
Even Microsoft now admit that websites no longer need to make websites compatible with IE6 which will make things a lot easier for web designers in the future.
Well, if it wasn't for the array of new browsers available on mobile phones and games consoles.
Source: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16408850
Download Firefox: http://www.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/new/ (recommended)
Download Safari: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
Download Chrome: https://www.google.com/chrome/
Download IE9: http://windows.microsoft.com/en-GB/internet-explorer/products/ie/home