Microsoft Blog Post on Supporting IE6 Forever…
Here’s an interesting blog post from Microsoft that addresses the question “How long will we continue to support Internet Explorer 6?”
To me, the highlight of the post is this:
“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…”
This is not an easy problem for Microsoft to deal with. Supporting a legacy browser means adding legacy code to each new OS release. Interesting stance on the part of Microsoft, interesting comments on the blog page, too. I wonder if Microsoft’s statement truly reflects reality or, instead, if they are simply putting a better face on the concept of not forcing an upgrade as part of accepting a new service pack.
– Dave
Dave:
As you know, supporting legacy code is expensive. Microsoft’s latest financial report shows that revenue, profit, and sales all decreased for their last fiscal quarter and last fiscal year. I suspect that they will find some loophole in their “promise” to support IE6 and IE7. They are already dropping support for many other marginal products.
Personally, I’ve given up on the IE product and have switched to Firefox. Main reason is that Firefox gives me the ability (via the Greasemonkey ad-on) to run java scripts that can dynamically alter the HTML of any site’s pages. Being an open browser, there are also a ton of other ad-ons for Firefox that improve its usefulness.
I know Stu uses FireFox. I use it occasionally, mostly when Safari fails me…
– Dave