I have a feeling that the majority of IE6 use takes place from work computers where employees don't have control over which browser is used. Therefore........ this won't work.
Well, the same argument applies with regard to work computers. If enough sites are broken in IE6 -- especially work-related sites and web apps, not just time-wasting sites -- then corporate IT departments will have to upgrade.
That said, the strategy outlined in the article runs into the collective action problem: if every web developer in the world stopped supporting IE6 at the same time, all web developers would benefit. But individual web developers have an incentive to keep supporting IE6, keep their user base happy, and free-ride on the sacrifices of other sites that drop IE6 support. So it's hard for an initiative like this one to gain much ground.
This is very true - I've been in and out corporates for years and most environments are locked down.
I mildly disagree with one assertion in the article:
-Another reason is many internal IT systems were built to use IE6 specific features-
This is somewhat true. However, the real reason that corporates don't upgrade is the cost of rollout.
In a big corporate you'll have literally 1,000s or 10,000s of desktops. This is compounded by the fact that a browser isn't a single application - it could be hundreds of applications.
Something like a bank is generally going to be very conservative, so they'll only attempt that if it's properly regressed and tested... The cost and risk of this (let alone if something does break) is generally not enough.
Only a couple of years ago I was at large bank that was still on Windows NT. They only migrated when the risk of being out of support outweighed the migration risk.
Even then, corporates have a fair bit of muscle and very often arrange extended support. A lot is of made of when products come out of support, but the reality is they are supported on these kinds of specific deals well beyond those timelines (and generally for a very tidy profit for the vendors).
I agree that most workplaces have no control over it. For example, we have IE6 where I work and I don't see it changing anytime soon.
However, by dropping IE6 support, its not to say everything on the site will be broken if you drop support. It'll just mean that from here on out, its possible things don't look or work quite as advertised, and it is suggested you upgrade your browser. It won't happen overnight, but it'll be better than having 25% market share for a browser thats a decade old in a couple years.
For me, I'd much prefer the web to slowly move forward than not at all.
For me, IE6 being the "corporate standard" is just more evidence of corporate IT departments slowly slipping into irrelevancy.
The last two contracts I've done have been what I (tongue-in-cheek) call guerilla contracts, where I've been building fairly big IT systems for parts of organisations that aren't IT.
I think as the younger generations get more senior in business, they won't have any time at all for corporate IT managers holding them back, or for arbitrary IT policy.
My colleagues and I have discussed this at length. One aspect of dropping IE support that "piques our intellectual curiosity" is thinking of it as game theory. It mightily resembles one of the four games centered on Prisoner's Dilemma (along with Moose Hunt, Chicken, and one other that eludes my recollection).
If some critical mass of vendors/web sites/providers drops IE support, we all win. But if we don't get critical mass, those that drop it lose business to those that maintain support for it.
I like your game theory interpretation, but I think that there are subtle differences that rule out using the prisoner's dilemma as a model. A really good strategy in the prisoner's dilemma is Tit-for-Tat. So the logic goes that if your competitor drops IE6 support then you should too. But here's the trick. Since you may have multiple competitors and (I think I'm right about this) only one iteration of play, there's no really good strategy to follow; so it's not really quite the prisoner's dilemma.
Most importantly, unlike the prisoners' dilemma, you can communicate with your competitors. Perhaps what you can do is collude with them to drop the support simultaneously since it would save you both money and aggravation. You might want to keep a backup site that does have support enabled in case they don't all hold up to their promise so that you don't get burned. I don't imagine that anyone would agree to a contract on something like this, so plan B is essential.
PD is not the only game in the family, there are four games that differ in the relationship between the payoffs. Which game it might resemble depends on how you evaluate the payoff matrix.
For example, in "Chicken," coöperating means turning aside and defecting means driving straight. The payoff is very big for the person who defects while the other player coöperates, but there is a big penalty if both players defect simultaneously. Same game mechanics, different payoff table.
But all of the games have the property of having two basic choices: coöperate and defect. In this case, coöperating is dropping IE support and defecting is maintaining IE support.
Of course, these are n-player games and the matrixes are more complex because the payoffs depend on how many "players" defect.
I don't think communication matters for these games. It's always explained that you can't communicate, but teh really essential deal here is that you have to make your decisions simultaneously, no player sees the other player's decisions before making their own decision.
In that respect, real life is different: there can be early stage players like 37 signals that get "opinionated" and laggards can watch what they do before deciding.
Thanks. Most diacritics in English are on loanwords, but I like using the diacresis to disambiguate long vowels. A particularly esoteric one is Oölogy, the study of eggs :-)
"A subtle upgrade link is shown when people visit your website using an outdated browser. They can click this link to visit the upgrade website for that browser, or choose to be reminded after a time you specify."
I have this installed on several personal sites and a few business sites. It's classy and unobtrusive. Highly recommended.
I don't support IE 6 in any project I do and don't plan on it. If anything I do gets big enough that it makes business sense to support it, I'll just outsource the work. IE6 is a monster that is not worth my time.
Idea: a widget that loads only when IE6 is detected, going to a page where you can upgrade. Sites that want to support this movement can add it to the bottom of the page.
Why don't we just get more people to join a movement giving a cut-off date, like http://iedeathmarch.org/ ? If enough people get behind it, it could get the media attention needed to make it a realizable movement.
The PHP community did this with PHP4 -> PHP5. Giving notice of a future date also allows companies to plan ahead, creating more credibility in the movement as well.
But there are a lot of inexperienced computer users, who just don't know how to upgrade any software. I think most of them use IE6. If those people will see your site is broken, they will just not visit it - they will not even know the reason is their browser.
