Last Friday Eric Hebenstreit a lead programmer at Microsoft announced that starting from end of April MS will start offering IE8 as an update for users who are still on IE6 or IE7.
IE6 was a huge pain in back for all of us who ever tried to put a website together. It increased the time and effort required to build a website at least two fold, by requiring web designers to come up with bug fixes and tricks to find a way around IE6’s poor HTML and CSS rendering capabilities.
This resulted in higher costs for clients and sometimes poor user experience for the visitors. Indirectly IE6 wasted a lot of money for end users and companies by increasing the bandwidth required to load websites and thus increasing internet subscription fees. IE6 also managed to hold back the industry several years by not allowing website builders use advanced technologies and forcing them to rely on technology that IE6 supported.
But, all is forgiven, because Microsoft finally turned things around and released IE7 and IE8 in a relative quick succession bringing IE up to speed with modern browsers.
Today IE6’s browser market-share is between 10-20% depending on the statistics you look at and it’s still large enough for companies to require compatibility. This number was dropping by about 1% in the last 6 month. And hopefully with the update to be released in the coming weeks IE6 will drop below 5% within 2-3 month. At that point we can disregard IE6 altogether finally putting an end to the misery.
This is a time for a celebration! Everybody order something, it’s on me! 🙂
