Drop IE6 Support — Give People a Reason to Upgrade

Well, the same argument applies with regard to work computers. If enough sites are broken in IE6 -- especially work-related sites and web apps, not just time-wasting sites -- then corporate IT departments will have to upgrade.

That said, the strategy outlined in the article runs into the collective action problem: if every web developer in the world stopped supporting IE6 at the same time, all web developers would benefit. But individual web developers have an incentive to keep supporting IE6, keep their user base happy, and free-ride on the sacrifices of other sites that drop IE6 support. So it's hard for an initiative like this one to gain much ground.

I agree that most workplaces have no control over it. For example, we have IE6 where I work and I don't see it changing anytime soon.

However, by dropping IE6 support, its not to say everything on the site will be broken if you drop support. It'll just mean that from here on out, its possible things don't look or work quite as advertised, and it is suggested you upgrade your browser. It won't happen overnight, but it'll be better than having 25% market share for a browser thats a decade old in a couple years.

For me, I'd much prefer the web to slowly move forward than not at all.

This is very true - I've been in and out corporates for years and most environments are locked down.

I mildly disagree with one assertion in the article: -Another reason is many internal IT systems were built to use IE6 specific features-

This is somewhat true. However, the real reason that corporates don't upgrade is the cost of rollout.

In a big corporate you'll have literally 1,000s or 10,000s of desktops. This is compounded by the fact that a browser isn't a single application - it could be hundreds of applications.

Something like a bank is generally going to be very conservative, so they'll only attempt that if it's properly regressed and tested... The cost and risk of this (let alone if something does break) is generally not enough.

Only a couple of years ago I was at large bank that was still on Windows NT. They only migrated when the risk of being out of support outweighed the migration risk.

Even then, corporates have a fair bit of muscle and very often arrange extended support. A lot is of made of when products come out of support, but the reality is they are supported on these kinds of specific deals well beyond those timelines (and generally for a very tidy profit for the vendors).

I like your game theory interpretation, but I think that there are subtle differences that rule out using the prisoner's dilemma as a model. A really good strategy in the prisoner's dilemma is Tit-for-Tat. So the logic goes that if your competitor drops IE6 support then you should too. But here's the trick. Since you may have multiple competitors and (I think I'm right about this) only one iteration of play, there's no really good strategy to follow; so it's not really quite the prisoner's dilemma.

Most importantly, unlike the prisoners' dilemma, you can communicate with your competitors. Perhaps what you can do is collude with them to drop the support simultaneously since it would save you both money and aggravation. You might want to keep a backup site that does have support enabled in case they don't all hold up to their promise so that you don't get burned. I don't imagine that anyone would agree to a contract on something like this, so plan B is essential.

I've heard the office division at Microsoft is likely to drop IE6 support for the next version of SharePoint as well, which would be a big deal here.

From the home page: "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"

All aboard the fail-boat! March 2009-ish should be a specific date, with some sort of counter to give people a sense of finality and impending doom.