Bring Down Internet Explorer

Recently we have been working on a few projects that have required some rather complicated CSS scripting. For those who don’t know (or don’t care to know) CSS is a file that changes the way a website displays, and tells the web browser how to render the content of the site. CSS has been around for many years and is now the basis of any website that is being created, it allows the site to be better designed and allows modern browsers to load the site much faster.

The operative word in this last sentence was ‘modern’. Over the years website design standards have changed for the better, creating standards for web design and site rendering has meant that sites can be created faster as they usually look the same on each browser on each operating system. Nine years ago this wasn’t the case, this is when Internet Explorer 6 came out, a massive upgrade from its predecessor, it quickly became the most used browser in the world. It rendered pages fast, was easy to use and looked pretty good (for a Microsoft program!). But the main problem with it was that the Internet was changing too fast, and it soon became outdated. This is now a massive problem, as people are still using IE 6, a 9 year out of data piece of software that has no place in our new modern Internet. Keeping all of our sites viewable in IE 6 is a massive job, and requires a lot of extra work that could be a lot better spent on other things.

For example, to get our Standards Compliant website to look correct on IE 6 we have to load a completely new CSS file, which has had to be written just so that IE 6 works. In other sites, we have had to do the same, and in some more advanced sites, javascript has to be used just to get pages looking nice. We have decided that this shouldn’t be the case any more and have pledged to the Bring Down IE6 Cause. IE 6 has massive security flaws, the government of Germany and France have both publicly warned against using IE6 as it has so many problems and can put you at risk of identity theft. Microsoft have said they will support Windows 2000 (which only allows IE6 and below to run) until this year, so maybe its time to update your OS is your running 2000 still. (or get a Mac!)

All it takes is for people who are using IE to go to Microsoft’s website and download a newer version, IE8 is currently the newest one. You might  even get an automatic update about upgrading quite a bit which you just choose to ignore, don’t ignore it this time. And as you are doing this, we actually recommend you use a different browser totally, Safari, Firefox and Opera are all a lot better and much faster.

This blog will have told you if you need to update your browser, so if you saw the message, follow the links and get yourself upgraded, it will take 10 minutes maximum!

We want to make it clear that we are NOT stopping developing and coding for IE6 at this time, unlike a few companies, but we hope that one day we can.

That’s all for now.

J