What is the “IE Death March” movement?
Warning displayed to IE6 users (image by aius - CC-BY)
The IE Death March is a loose movement of web designers and software developers who are trying to hasten the demise of the Internet Explorer 6 browser, because its lack of support (or incorrect support) for various web standards makes life extremely difficult for people who want their website to support IE6.
Website iedeathmarch.org points out the IE6 came out before the Twin Towers fell. It’s older than Windows XP, older than the Nintendo GameCube, older than the very first iPod model, older than the Xbox, older than the country of East Timor, older than Google AdSense, older than Star Trek: Enterprise, and older than Friendster.
Last year that website wrote: It’s time to put a deadline on dropping IE6, and I say that time is now, and the deadline should be soon… say like, March 2009. It’s now March 2009, and IE6 still accounts for 18% of page views on the web. Quezi’s readers might be a little more tech-savvy, but IE6 still accounts for 16% of our page views.
At Quezi, we can’t realistically support IE6 anymore. We use the WordPress platform with a bunch of plugins, and many plugin authors no longer test against IE6. It’s no longer possible to ensure that Quezi’s pages look correct when viewed using IE6.
Free-the-web.com sums up the situation:
Internet Explorer 6 is holding back the future.
IE6 is the bane of every web developer’s life. Released in 2001, IE6 fails to even properly support the CSS 1.0 standard from 1996.
Supporting IE6 prevents us from using cool new features, standard with up to date browsers. This erodes user-experience for everyone. Additionally, the hacks and workarounds that web designers are forced to use degrades their code, and this limits progress in other areas. Above all it’s simply a waste of millions of hours of human potential.
They suggest to:
- make sure your browser is up to date
- help others to get up to date
- if you are a web designer, stop supporting IE6
- spread the word: Boycott IE6
Web designer Miquel Hudin takes a similar line at end6.org. He would like to forcibly coax people away from using IE6, and to further this goal he has developed a small piece of JavaScript that anyone can add to their website. If someone visits using IE6, they’ll see a dialog encouraging them to upgrade to a better browser.
So what are the alternatives? There’s Internet Explorer 7, and early adopters can try the beta of Internet Explorer 8. Google now has their own browser, Chrome. There’s Firefox, and its stablemate Mozilla. On the Mac there’s Safari. Opera is out there too. There are also many browsers using the same rendering engines as IE7, Firefox or Safari. The current versions of all these browsers have much better support for web standards than IE6.
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I’ve long been a fan of the Opera browser. There was a time when Opera didn’t work well with various sites, primarily because web developers were writing their pages in order to accommodate the bugs in Internet Explorer. Opera would render those pages the way they were written, but not the way IE would see them. Opera has long been a leader in writing to the standards, but for most users that was little consolation if their browser didn’t render the page the way it was meant to be seen.
Fortunately, the situation has improved considerably. With the exception of one site I’ve tried to visit that provides the desired information only by using Microsoft ActiveX controls, I don’t remember the last time that Opera had trouble displaying a page properly. The implementation of Internet Explorer 7, which does a reasonable job of following the standards, has improved things considerably for those of us who prefer an alternative browser.
I think trying to “forcibly” wean users from IE6 is going a bit too far. But I don’t see any need to continue to support its idiosyncrasies either.
That said, it is a good thing for web developers to make certain that their sites degrade nicely when someone is trying to access them with older technology. But that’s not the same thing as writing specifically for a bad browser.