MS — Dropping IE6 Support "Not an Option"

An anonymous reader writes "Microsoft wants to see IE6 gone as much as anyone else, but the company isn't going to make the decision for its users anytime soon. The software giant has been pushing IE6 and IE7 users to move to IE8 ever since it arrived in March 2009, but it's still up to the user to make the final decision to upgrade: 'The engineering point of view on IE6 starts as an operating systems supplier. Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product. We keep our commitments. Many people expect what they originally got with their operating system to keep working whatever release cadence particular subsystems have. As engineers, we want people to upgrade to the latest version. We make it as easy as possible for them to upgrade. Ultimately, the choice to upgrade belongs to the person responsible for the PC.'" Of course some big Web sites aren't waiting for Microsoft. Reader Yamir writes, "Google's Orkut, a social networking service popular in Brazil and India, has started warning IE6 users that the browser will no longer be supported. Just last month, YouTube started showing a similar message."

Comments

95/Me/2000

[f1vlad]

Of course not, what about Windows 95/Me/2000 users? One of those systems cannot run IE7 if I recall correctly.

Re:Hardly

[ILuvRamen]

actually they did "support" it...they dumped it and released IE7 hehehe. Was there really any other option? I usually consider "not supporting" like a product line that was completely discontinued like...umm...is Netscape still around? IE7 is sort of an update to IE6 in the same way that XP was an update to ME. You can literally buy an upgrade version of XP for windows ME that will alter it into XP so you could consider that the final fix-all support for ME. So saying they "discontinued support" for ME isn't exactly true. If they just made ME and then stopped and had no upgraded version of the product line, then it'd be discontinued support.

If MS REALLY wanted this,

[WindBourne]

they would simply stop accepting the browser at ALL OF THEIR SITES. If they did that, nearly all of the rest of the world would follow suite. NOBODY in the development world wants this demoniacal abortion. BUT, while MS continues to accept, then everybody else is forced to accept it.

Re:Hardly

[JonShuler]

Maybe if it was not part of the "OS", they would not have this problem...

Small, flaming rings

[NeverTheMachine]

I find it sad that a decision by a single company can create small, flaming hoops for the Internet to jump through. I'm happy that the browser (r)evolution we're experiencing is helping this, though. With all this sudden competition, it's not only forcing the browsers to whip up into Interwebs standards but also get rid of the monopoly that Microsoft has over the browser market. Hopefully, we'll never be at this strange crossroads again. Gogo capitalism!

Hell, I'm amazed Microsoft doesn't just annoy the IE6'ers into submission. That doesn't seem out of their league.

Re:Hardly

[natehoy]

Fortunately, at my current company, it's "only" the Intranet. Most of the important stuff happens on mainframe and midrange machines, and the greenscreen telnet apps really don't care what OS they run on. (grin)

But I did work for a large multinational when they were implementing Siebel, and the Siebel guys all had to get their brand-new laptops reloaded with Windows 2000 because Siebel "broke" in XP, even on XP running IE6. This was 4 years ago, in 2005.

I don't know if Siebel got their issues with XP and/or more current browsers worked out, but a lot of businesses probably don't want to pay for an upgrade on that scale even if it is an in-place upgrade.