Most web designers and developers who target all sorts of browsers will ask the same question: Why do people still use Internet Explorer 6? I mean there is nothing obvious in using Internet Explorer 6 in 2009. I hardly observe myself checking for updates of software products I use on my computer, I’m doing it subconsciously.

I’m an exception, you may say here because I’m a web developer and I’m using this stuff daily. Well … NO!!! Everyone should update their software because time is passing by quickly, everything evolves around us, so does computer technology, so does software and so do the standards.

Internet Explorer 6 was released in August 2001, and it was respectable back then. If was far away from very good, because it didn’t fully support a CSS standards that appeared 5 years before it was launched. Cascading Style Sheets, level 1 was published as a recommendation in Dec 1996 and according to Wikipedia IE6 contained “partially support for CSS level 1”.

I should not even mention that the CSS level 2 W3C recommendation was out in May 1998. We should not only blame IE6 (maybe other Internet Explorer versions) here because other browsers have their own problems with CSS 1 and 2, but somehow I can see Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome trying much harder to respect these.

Back in 2009 I’m still thinking about how on earth, after 8 years have passed, after 2 other Internet Explorer versions have made their way into the world of WWW, there is still 15% share left for IE6. This is funny because according to W3C statistics IE6 still holds 15.4% in browser usage, but this is sadly the same for my website. And if the impact of this still isn’t visible and jumping into the eye, imagine that 150 out of 1000 visitors of this site still use Internet Explorer 6.

Now, considering I have almost 100% developer audience, I'd expect  99.99999% of my visitors to use anything other than IE6, but it’s far cry away from that. But generally speaking I don’t understand the reasons why people still use it, consider the following: security!!!

I personally use Firefox and Google Chrome, but if anybody likes Microsoft products that is not a problem: NEWER VERSIONS ARE ALLOT BETTER. Go ahead and update/upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer.

As a conclusion only one thing remains for me to say:  IE6 still isn’t dead yet, web developers and designers will still need to support it as the market share is still to high, and this only means much more sleepless nights fighting with IE6.

I’d like to ask a question to which you can answer in a comment, but I’d like to except cases where an old system configuration won’t allow something newer to run, or run decently fast.

Why do you still use Internet Explorer 6?