Why don't people upgrade from IE6 ?

[Digmen1]

Hi Guys,

As a newbie to CSS and HTML I am working on three websites. I code using FireFox and check my work on IE7.
I struggle enough to get my site to look the same on IE7 let alone IE6.
I note from my Stats packages that IE6 useage is going down, but why do people / companies not upgrade to IE7 ?
There is no charge to do this.
Is it that Microsoft are doing a bad job of converting them or is there some technical reason that I have missed ?
I note that not very many people still use Firefox 2.00

Regards
Digby

[janharders]

there might not be a direct charge, but there sure are indirect costs in many companies: intranet applications that have been developed to run on iex6 and need heavy fixing (=money) to run on modern browsers, third party websites that require iex6 and cannot be done without (actually new a company whose service portal wasn't working correctly with any browser / version but iex6 up until a year ago .. which made life for a client of mine hard).
plus, some people just don't know about newer versions or why they should upgrade.

[tangor]

Bear in mind some older versions of Windows will not run IE7, much less IE8. Until those computers die and their users get a new system with more up to date operating systems, you'll see IE6 (and 5 and 4 and Netscape 4.x) for a while longer.

[swa66]

On one hand there is no incentive from the web at large to upgrade: we all do our best to make our sites work on IE6 cause they still have a too large share on our sites.
Without incentive from us, why would they ? To make our life easier ? How would they even know, why would they care if they knew ?

On the other hand there are scaremongers at work that try to have people not upgrade. E.g vendors of 3rd party software stating only old stuff is officially supported. Even if they stated that years ago and by now support it, there are people who at a time had the reason not to upgrade and will stay with that forever. I count the announcements by Microsoft back when they were promoting IE7 and those they are doing now to promote IE8 in that category too: they tell their customers X times they will "force" an upgrade -which they actually don't- and they offer tools to prevent upgrades in a corporate setting forever.

It's easier not to upgrade:
If you're a home user and get burned once updating your software, you learn the lesson of broken software: don't fix if it still seems to works, it's just too costly to do the right thing.

If you're an IT dude in a corporation it's easier not to upgrade than to stick out your neck, upgrade it and they get their head chopped off due to there being something tiny that was IE6 only after all.

Corporate settings have learned these lessons are are scared into paralysis in many cases: it's easier, it's a guaranteed win to not upgrade at all. And if you upgrade you run a heavy test program to make sure you cannot get blamed.

The way out of it is simple: there are an ever increasing number of webmasters out there who refuse to test their sites on IE6 anymore. And that means that IE6 begins to show cracks left and right, giving them incentive to finally upgrade.

There are easy ways to start to warn IE6 users we're stopping to cater for them: conditional comments warning them they are using a legacy browser that gives inferior results. Optionally even pointing them to a better browser.

[swa66]

The old OS argument is -for my sites at least- not a valid one:

Of all windows users, I have less than 3% of users on a version that does not support IE8, yet more than 80% of IE users (virtually all on windows) have not upgraded to IE8 yet.

I'm ready to ignore 3% of the windows users (2% of all visitors) not to have to deal with IE6 and IE7.
I can't however ignore 80% of IE users (54% of all visitors) ...

So if those who can would upgrade ...

And those who can't upgrade have other options: e.g. firefox, chrome, safari, ... one of them will work for them (and it'll be safer too).

Figures of visitors over the last month from google analytics.

[rocknbil]

intranet applications that have been developed to run on iex6 and need heavy fixing (=money) to run on modern browsers

Add some banks to this; although it's been a year or two I specifically remember some people with a particular bank who would show them a blank page with a warning if their browser was anything but IE6.

Another caveat, there are some bugs in IE 6 that can be interpreted as "features." One such "feature:" in a file uploading screen, we used to have JS that on change of the file upload field would display the image below the form. It was very handy. But of course, this presents security issues, allowing a browser to read the file upload field and consequently the user's file system.

[tangor]

The way out of it is simple: there are an ever increasing number of webmasters out there who refuse to test their sites on IE6 anymore. And that means that IE6 begins to show cracks left and right, giving them incentive to finally upgrade.

I stopped coding for IE6 two years ago. Life is too short. Then again, My sites are not bleeding edge and mostly display the way I wish regardless of browser... I'm awful easy to please. :)

[rocknbil]

^ ^ ^ This leads to a very simple solution/philosophy I try to follow.

It doesn't matter whether it's IE 7/8/6, Netscape 5, or whatever - when testing if I encounter serious rendering issues that break in browser X, rather than force it to work with hacks and long evenings peppered with fists full of hair thrown about, I'd rather go back to square one and alter the design so it doesn't create those conflicts. The "design," at least in my case, is not so important that it can't accept a little comprise to insure compatibility.