Internet Explorer 6 has caused a few issues in the office over the past couple of weeks, it really has become a mill stone around many a developer's neck with its incomplete standards support. Many a new browser has replaced what many to consider to be now old, redundant internet technology - but how did it come to be the standard bearer in the browser world, and why is it still very much a dominant force in the corporate market? I thought I would put an article together just looking into the background of the browser.

A potted history...

Internet browsers have changed the way in which the modern day computer has been used, spring back 15 years and I would hazard a guess that most desktops were used for the now ubiquitous Word or Excel, or indeed three lost weeks trying to finish Monkey Island II: LeChuck's Revenge, or banging your head against the monitor stuck on the volcano level in Lemmings. There was no real need or interest to take a computer online, who wants to listen to buzz-bing-buzz-bing of a dial-up modem only to be connected to a bulletin board?

In todays world it would seem extremely strange to turn a computer on, be it at home or at the office, and not use the online world as a reference point, a social catch-up or just a way to breeze away a couple of minutes browsing around the web aimlessly. We all do it, and it's mainly thanks to the genius of Internet Browsers providing us with a simple, intuitive and simplistic way of searching the world wide web for the information required.

The majority of computer users are based on Windows machines, which until recently came with Microsoft Internet Explorer as standard. The majority of users therefore, and probably rightly so, load up their machines click the Internet Explorer button in their Start menu and begin surfing.

So what's wrong with this I hear you shout?

I could probably repeat the rants and raves that I hear from the Explosive Designs developers on a daily basis, but I would need to stick an 18 badge on this post; in short, Microsoft have not always followed the W3C standards that were developed to ensure that all web developers had guidelines to follow. Now, some may argue that this was an intentional ploy by Microsoft to ambush and control the web browser market through the concept of "embrace, extend, extinguish" (EEE) - a philosophy originally coined by the US Dept of Justice to describe Microsoft's strategy of entering products into the market using existing standards, extending them with proprietary standards and then exploiting those differences to disadvantage the competition.

Perhaps the worst example of this EEE approach was with Internet Explorer 6, it did in-fact have the best CSS support of any browser when it was first released, and doffing my cap, I must admit that it massively helped developers and designers to produce websites that were far more aesthetically pleasing. It truly was a breakthrough piece of software that allowed developers to begin to replace table-based layouts with more fluid and flexible CSS layouts, - a massive jump forward! However Microsoft did not intend to follow the standards and guidelines set out by the W3C (a basic bible for developers to follow ensuring that HTML/CSS standards were consistent and any new features were aggregately implemented - designing with web standards should not exclude any browser or device).

So out came Internet Explorer 6 with all its new whizz-bang feature list, developers jumped at the chance of creating websites that were far more functional and aesthetic than anything previously seen on the extremely popular Netscape 4 ... and the snowball began to roll for Microsoft. It completely crushed the competition leading to just over 96% market share across the globe, a phenomenal growth rate that impacted on how we all used the internet for the next few years.

Dragging it's heels...

Microsoft never actually replaced IE6 for another five years (with the exception of security patches) so one can only presume that with their global dominance they never thought they needed to.

By the time its successor, Internet Explorer 7, was launched the competition and market had evolved and reformed around the W3C standards - all this while IE6 just aged gracefully.

More modern browsers such as Mozilla's Firefox or Apple's Safari were introduced that for marketing and development reasons abided extremely closely to the W3C recommendation's for the HTML 4 standard and were now light years ahead of tired old IE6; both users and developers began to migrate to these new browsers.

Perhaps Internet Explorer 6 should have been retired immediately at this point, allowing it's successor to gain a more prominent role in the new browser wars taking place, but Microsoft had a problem. Because IE6 was tied in with the Operating System it was a de facto choice for many users who may not even heard of other browser alternatives, it has taken a long while for the alternatives to make their voices heard (even as recently as last month with Microsoft forced to allow other browsers to be adopted by users on Windows).

But could Microsoft just retire the software, perhaps not... Many people who are currently using IE6 simply cannot afford to upgrade their computers. The same reasoning would also apply for corporates but on a much larger scale. Many of these have created web applications which are developed on IE6’s different standards, they would therefore not operate on a standards-based browser such as Apple’s Safari 4 or Mozilla’s Firefox. The cost implications of updating the web-based software is one things, then comes the logistical nightmare of upgrading machines for every employee - however, they will have to do this at some point, it is quite amazing that the biggest businesses are advocating IE6 as the browser of choice. In many cases their employees really cannot enjoy the full advantages that today’s modern web 2.0 sites now offer.

Banging your head against a brick wall

I want to talk in more detail in my next post about how Internet Explorer 6 affects a web agency such as ourselves. But as a quick overview, we at Explosive Designs build all of our websites to the latest agreed standards and methodologies to try and ensure that the website being built can be seen by the as many users as possible. However, we do then have to go and retro-test for Internet Explorer 6 - and boy does this hurt us. In some cases the actual time spent fixing for IE6 can be up to 4 hours eating into valuable development time on other projects in the pipeline. It is unfair for us to charge the client for this part of the final testing procedure, and we do not, however the sooner we can disregard this browser the better.

Should or shouldn’t we?!!

The question now being thrown around the office is should we put up a sign on Internet Explorer 6 browsers asking them to upgrade or not - not sure it is our position to do this.

In the next post we will discuss the problems involved with IE6 retro-testing and some common pitfalls you can overcome during the initial development to save time later on.