adayinthelifeofanintmkter: Companies Are Dropping IE6; Vendors Follow Accordingly

Friday, February 12, 2010

Companies Are Dropping IE6; Vendors Follow Accordingly

Companies are dropping Internet Explorer 6 in droves and vendors are quickly following the lead by sunsetting support.

It's a pretty safe move on the vendor's part. Data collected by the exo.performance.network shows how quickly companies are dropping the IE6, which was first introduced in 2001.

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While Internet Explorer 6 collapses in the enterprise, Internet Explorer 8 is picking up fast:

"Current data from the exo.repository shows a dramatic spike in IE 8.0 adoption, with over 70% of Windows XP systems - sampled from the exo.performance.network's IT-centric community of nearly 23,000 registered sites - now running Microsoft's latest web browser. This compares to the less than 10% of XP systems that are still running the aging IE 6.0, and the roughly 20% who are stuck on the in-between version, IE 7.0.

And now Google Apps, Salesforce.com and Atlassian have all dropped support.

The Atlassian news appeared on its forums:

"Hi guys,

We are announcing our end of life of Atlassian support for Internet Explorer 6 on JIRA.

This will be effective from the launch date of JIRA 4.2 (target Q3, 2010). This means that JIRA 4.1 will be the last version of JIRA to support IE6. (From JIRA 4.0 to JIRA 4.1, all of the main functionality will work in IE 6; however, some of the visual effects will be missing)."

Socialtext is still providing support for IE6. Co-founder Ross Mayfield told us that, "as much as we would like to move beyond IE 6, we have enterprise-wide security-conscious customers that still require supporting it for their users. These are valuable forward looking customers for whom we must be backwards compatible."

Microsoft does not seem to be fighting the effort. They will continue to support the product. Here's what the Microsoft IE blog states:

"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."

Every product sees a twilight. IE6 has reached that point in the enterprise.

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