Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroen | Hacker News Reader

IE6 users will only be motivated to upgrade when a significant part of the web no longer supports IE6. Unfortunately, most of the web will only consider dropping support for IE6 when its market share is considerably lower.

View on HN

You also need to take into consideration, that a lot of users just don't have a skill to upgrade any application. For example, my parents: I installed FF3 of their computer, set Google as homepage and told them that when they want to go to the internet, they need to click the orange icon, and write to the google box where they want to go.

I wanted to go further, but then I realised that they don't even have a clear concept of what is the difference between Internet, Google and Web browser...and you want them to upgrade browser? ;) I think out of those 25% IE6 users, there is a large portion of users like this.

I work in an environment where most enterprises still cling to IE6. These enterprises do so, because they've built up an internal expertise in keeping IE6 secure (kinda) and stable (kinda). At some point in the future, it seems like that internal expertise will be too expensive or will fail to maintain that secure and stable (kinda) environment. At that point, it seems, there will be a fairly quick migration to newer technologies. I don't think it'll be the killer app that draws the enterprise market... it'll be the bottom line.

Completely agree here. I think that a good portion of IE6 use is tied to corporate environments that prevents users from running anything other than IE6.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com