Internet Explorer 6 – not long now – I hope!

Internet Explorer 6 (IE6) has been the web browser that refuses to die. For years this browser has been the bane of many web developers' lives. It has lots of bugs and quirks that make building web sites that bit more difficult.

IE6 was launched in 2001. In more recent years, competition from the likes of Mozilla's Firefox, Google Chrome and Safari has eroded Microsoft's dominance of the web browser market. And Microsoft have themselves launched IE7, IE8 and now IE9.

There's even a web site now dedicated to watching Internet Explorer 6 usage drop to less than 1% worldwide - see www.theie6countdown.com/.

But IE6 hasn't quite died. Data from StatCounter suggests that IE6 share in Europe has now dropped as low as about 2% - see http://gs.statcounter.com/ (data to Mar 2011). Global IE6 market share remains higher than this (about 4% according to StatCounter) and this is often ascribed to high usage of IE6 in China.

I recently checked Google Analytics for three of my higher traffic clients – and IE6 still had about a 5% share of visits to each of these (data covering Mar/Apr 2011).

Some web developers may have stopped testing on IE6 some time ago. But I feel that while IE6 may still represent 5% of my clients' typical user base, I'll have to continue testing in IE6 for a little while longer. Hopefully, it won't be too long now before I can consign IE6 to the scrapheap!

Example of IE6 issue

A recent web design project illustrates the sort of problem IE6 can produce.

I'm approaching the end of a web design project. As the project has progressed, I've been testing everything in Firefox, because it's fairly standards-compliant, and IE7, because that still throws up a few issues. The target launch date is approaching. Finally, the site is finished, and I go into a bout of browser testing. IE6 is included in the testing, but usually only at this late stage – it's difficult to justify doing it much earlier because it is now an obsolete browser and has a minor market share.

Problem! IE6 throws up some obscure printing error. I've never seen this one before! It is duplicating about a line or so of text near the bottom of the main content container. Is it my eyes? I close the Print Preview window and check the screen version of the page again. No, everything is alright on screen. Let's check the Print Preview again. The duplicate characters are still there. Let's try printing in case it's some bug in Print Preview. Damn – the duplicated text is actually printing out. Is it my eyes? This leads to an hour or two of testing, searching the internet for solutions, implementing them, re-testing. The bug is finally defeated by delivering some extra style rules just to IE6. But it's another example of time spent to serve a small portion of the market who happen to be using this old browser.

I think all web developers will raise a glass when IE6 finally bites the dust.