@ Luke Maciak:
Actually I said it jokingly because I used Netscape 4.77 on Mac OS 9. But yes it irritating when people that I know _still_ use IE 6 and won’t let me install such things as Service Pack or newer version of IE or even antivirus because it slows their 9 year old computers down. And after that they have guts to call me to fix their computer again. Ugh.

@ JuEeHa:

Ah, this post was aimed more at people who run IE6 because they don’t know any better. I can see you are actually security conscious individual who takes steps to run up to date software alternatives on an older OS like – TenFourFox and etc. I don’t have a problem with that. :)

In fact, some time ago someone gave me an eMac that was running 10.4 and I opted not to upgrade it, mostly because it would heavily degrade performance.

I am sorry. But really I don’t have a problem when someone uses an old OS if (s|)he has a good reason for it and it still has some sort of security and understand that it is old (I run OS X 10.4 on my iBook because:
*It is faster than leopard.
*I use old mac software (some originaly designed for System 6) and OS X 10.5 dropped support for Classic mode.
*I can still use up to date browser(TenFourFox).
*I have antivirus that still works on it.
*I understand that it is bit old and I don’t think that it should be supported.
), but if they fail to do any of these then I will have a problem with them.(Especially if they want me to fix their computer)
By the way if I surf on Mac OS 9 I usually use Classilla instead of this Netscape Communicator that came with the system.

That’s a beautiful rant … preach it, brother! I delivered a similar rant to our small office a few weeks ago, but advocated ditching IE completely. I’m in a Flock phase at the moment but deep down I’m an Opera guy. I still have to fire up IE at work to order music from one particular website, and, as much as that pains me, I do it for the 20% discount they offer.

I suppose I could have gone to the local library but then it would’ve been IE5 on Win2k, didn’t think I wanted to look that outdated. I love living out here, but the only thing resembling modern technology is the wifi hotspot in the A&W over in town. Of course, it gives me a leg up in the zombie apocalypse :)

@Morghan: LOL! That’s what I call dedication. Doing all the extra work, just to post a smart-ass comment. :)

@TheGeek: Yeah, I still need to support it in some places too so I installed IE6 using the Multiple IE thing. This way I have both IE8 and IE6 running on the same machine – and IE8 is the “official” browser that the OS acknowledges.

Firefox is my dafault browser though.

Great article. I wish this is true though

“IE7 is now the default browser on all Windows Vista machines and it is a mandatory Upgrade for windows XP.”

So far I managed to keep IE6 (to support all those $%*#*&!@ people still using it)

Yeah, I do not do any kind of surfing with old browsers. Sometimes I don’t want to load a newer browser just to view a web management page or to download a quick package. I have many old Sun boxes with Netscape 4.x installed by default. It works well enough to access an HP Web JetAdmin server or even download patches.

Every post reply so far has been from Epiphany, Iceweasel or Firefox when I’m on the wife’s computer. IE6 took some doing, especially since I don’t even own a Windows box.

@Steve: Yeah, I know. And the refresh button is on the wrong side of the address bar. I always get confused and end up hitting F5 instead.

@Morghan: Evil! Here is a question though – do you use IE6 for all your browsing, or did you pull it out of the corner of your system and dust it off just to post this?

@Milos: Yep, you can’t really do much if your work laptop is locked down, and your IT is behind on updates. I mean, other than calling the IT an telling them web pages on the interwebs say you are driving an antique browser.

@Matt Schinckel: 5.x? Wow! You know, I think that a lot of major web sites out there actually stopped supporting IE5 some time in the last 4 years. Stuff like Google Maps fore example – I would take a wild guess and say it probably won’t work flawlessly (then again Google is pretty good about that stuff, so maybe it works).

@Craig A. Betts: Well, when you use Mosaic you sort of know that the interwebs will look mostly broken. IE6 users do not have that expectation yet.

@Steve: True, you can’t really help it if the IT wing is adamant about keeping IE6 in place. Still, it will be end-of-lifed at some point. If these companies are still running it at that point, they must keep in mind that the rest of the world has moved on.

They need to make decision – either bite the bullet and upgrade, or deal with the fact parts of the web will look broken for their employees.

For example – if someone complains my website doesn’t work well in IE5 right now, I really won’t bother fixing it. Especially if the issue is not with my code but with a 3rd party library – like jQuery which does not support IE5 anymore.

This is not an issue for IE6 yet, but it will be pretty soon.

@Rob: Yeah, for work I’d still support IE6. But see above – I don’t care about IE5. Give it a year or two, IE9 will roll out and most major frameworks and libraries will stop dropping support for IE6. At that point, I think we will be able to forget about it for good – even for commercial sites.